Reply to What was it like in American Orphanages?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Horrible 
Particularly ones that are religious 
In the 1970 s catholic ones all over the country were shut down.
 Same with unwed mother’s homes. The Catholic ones were horrific 
Guess who plans on restarting these? Don and Betsey  Devos  and Youngkin [/quote]

I do think there was a major shift in the second half of the twentieth century.  I read the entire report on the Irish orphanages plus I’ve done some reading on American orphanages.  I think in the 19th and early 20th century, there was actually a lot more sympathy for the idea that any girl/woman could end up in a bad situation with a baby.  People were very poor, lots of men died in industrial accidents or with contagious diseases, women got raped or coerced into sex with no real repercussions for the men.  Yes, there was some stigma to unwed pregnancy but it was so common, especially among the very poor, to end up in that situation or widowed with young children.  There was a communal appreciation for the work that orphanages did.

Then around WW2, it seems like something sort of broke and the whole system became much more punitive and shame based and there just wasn’t wide spread social support for it so donations went down, etc.  I think also that the decline in people entering the convent might also have had an effect — there just weren’t as many nuns overall so maybe it was harder to find nuns that really had a calling for working with young children?  Or maybe part of it was the comparison with middle class home life, as standards of living rose for non-orphanage lfkfe.  So whereas an orphaned was maybe better than an unsanitary urban hovel of the 19th century, it wasn’t better than a nice Levitt suburban house of the 1950s.

I’d actually like to do more reading about it, if anyone has good book references.

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