Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia.

Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. By Sherri Broder (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, vii plus 259 pp.).

Sherri Broder analyzes how the tropes of waifs, tramps, fallen women, and dangerous mothers were used by working people, the labor movement, and reformers to negotiate respectability and family. To show the power of these cultural symbols in shaping the lives of the poor, Broder reads reform tracts, newspapers, and popular literature against samples of case histories from the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty (SPCC) and the pseudonymous "Haven for Unwed Mothers and Infants." Thus her cultural reading is placed firmly in the context of social history, and the result is a richly nuanced study of the politics of family life in late nineteenth-century Philadelphia.

Broder argues that notions of respectability were not imposed upon the poor. The "respectable" working class was every bit as proper as the Victorian middle class, but their respectability was not a middle-class one even when cultural symbols were shared. The labor movement used the dominant culture's gendered representations of fallen women, tramps and street waifs to assert their demands for a living (family) wage and an eight hour day. Using this cultural discourse allowed labor reformers to challenge economic inequalities and to proclaim labor's moral equality with the middle class, but it also reinforced cleavages between rough and respectable within the working class.

These distinctions are seen most clearly in the response to the SPCC in working class neighborhoods. The SPCC was the means for the grand bourgeois project of reforming the child rearing practices of everyone else. As a result, the "Cruelty" and its agents met with deep hostility in many working class wards and suspect families would be warned of an agent's investigation. But as Broder shows, distinct working-class conceptions of appropriate child rearing also meant that neighbors called in the SPCC to police practices that they found abusive. The SPCC relied on neighborhood informants to sustain its complaints and therefore served as an enforcement mechanism for community standards as much as for middle-class ones.

Broder follows the now familiar path of examining the use of SPCC to alter power dynamics within the family. Charges of unfit motherhood or of paternal abuse resulted from disputes between spouses and sparked many investigations. Here disputants wielded cultural symbols to gain leverage over an opponent: wives demanded that husbands be good providers, rather than drunks or wandering vagabonds, while husbands insisted on mothering and housekeeping. Disputes between parents and adolescent children were also fodder for the SPCC. Agents intervened both on behalf of children struggling for control over their own wages or seeking escape from sexual abuse and of parents trying to control the social lives of their children, especially girls. The SPCC became a mechanism for adolescent independence as well as a reinforcement for parental authority. Broder's contribution here is in her analysis of the use of cultural symbols in the appeals for intervention. As Broder concludes, "An analysis of SPCC records reveals neither the simple manipulation of reformers' categories nor the internalization of the dominant culture--but rather people working through culture to express their own agency" (123).

If working-class parents and reformers agreed on the need to control adolescents girls' sexuality, it was because of the stigmatization of unwed motherhood. Broder discusses both formal and informal means of dealing with unwed mothers and their children: homes for mothers and infants and the infamous baby farms. The Haven for Unwed Mothers and Infants expressed an evangelical desire to redeem its charges and to return them to a modicum of respectability. A narrative of seduction and betrayal gained a sympathetic hearing at the Haven, which retained an antebellum concern for cross class relationships among women and defined redemption through domesticity--or at least, domestic labor. Since redemption required that mother and infant reside in the home together, the Haven refused to board children or provide child care for Philadelphia's working women. It tried to distinguish between unwed mothers and fallen women, leaving the latter to the almshouse or their own devices, which placed a premium on women mastering the appropriate cultural narrative to gain admission.

Mothers, both unwed and simply overwhelmed, desperately sought child care and baby farmers often provided it. Broder reviews possible cases of infanticide and the image of baby farmers as the sly accomplices of working-class women wishing to be rid of an unwanted burden. But baby farmers were also legitimate neighborhood providers of child care for working women, including wet nurses employed by middle class families and forced into surrendering their own infants to the care of another. They acted as agents in a market for babies, accepting payments from midwives and potential adoptive parents in an underground baby-trading economy. The SPCC forced the regulation of this economy by investigating baby farmers and lobbying for licenses for child care providers. As Broder notes, attention to sensational accounts of baby farming obscured a more difficult reality in which mothers had limited choices because of poverty and the stigma of illegitimacy enforced by the respectable working class.

Broder's book possesses significant strengths but it is also problematic. The use of literary tropes in each chapter provides an overarching method of analysis, but it does not substitute for the lack of an overall argument. Her conclusion about welfare reform and the resilience of cultural stereotypes is too sketchy to be more than suggestive and does not provide a clear thematic coherence to the book. The focus on the last quarter of the nineteenth century means that there is very little change over time here: the co-existence of evangelical, "sisterly" saviors of prostitutes with scientific charity organizers tells little about how charity changed and became bureaucratized and how those changes intersected with the cultural narratives Broder discusses. At the same time, Broder's argument that debates over family politics were integral to the labor movement, her careful reading of cultural symbols, and her imaginative integration of cultural texts with records of social welfare agencies will make this book rewarding for social and cultural historians alike.

Eric Schneider

University of Pennsylvania