Children's Bureau, Inc. History, Introduction

Introduction

For 150 years, the Children's Bureau, Inc. has proven to be a remarkable institution. Its longevity is due in no small part to the commitment and adaptability of the people who have been associated with it. This is more, however, than a history of the women and men who have led the Children's Bureau; it is also a history of the children and adults whose lives the organization has touched. In looking at the Bureau's past, we can learn about the institution and its community and about changes in the way that society has viewed family and parental rights, valued its children, and cared for its most "vulnerable" members.

The children from the Indianapolis Orphans' Asylum enjoyed an outing
sponsored by the B.P.O. Elks at Fairfield Park in 1903.

In 1822, shortly after Indianapolis was established, two men were appointed by the Marion County Commissioners to act as overseers of the poor and dispense limited amounts of relief. In addition, the city's leaders personally supplied "outdoor" relief-food, clothing, and sometimes cash-to those in need. This group of city fathers. set up the Indianapolis Benevolent Society in 1835 to help the poor.

During this period, reform movements were sweeping through society. Temperance, abolition, and women's rights drew the interest of many. Middle and upper-class women gained entry into the public sphere of life through voluntary associations. Helping impoverished women and children was compatible with the. notion that it was a woman's job to nurture her family and protect it from a cruel and competitive world. This view, as well as the obvious needs of the poor, led the men involved in the Indianapolis Benevolent Society to enlist the help of their wives in forming an organization focused on needy women and children. .

The future Children's Bureau of Indianapolis began operations in 1851 as the Indianapolis Widows and Orphans Friends' Society, a designation that reflected its main intent. Both women and children were at risk when the man of the family, the main breadwinner, died, abandoned' them, or lost his job. Alone, poor women had few means to provide for their children. In times of depression or economic panic, the plight of these women became even worse. While widows and children were the main focus of the Society at first, concern was soon concentrated on the children, leading the Society to establish an orphanage. The Indiana General Assembly changed the name of the association to the Indianapolis Orphans' Asylum in 1875 to reflect this focus.

Through the years, children stayed in the orphanage for varying lengths of time. Full orphans could be adopted. Half-orphans, those with one surviving parent, could not be adopted unless that parent relinquished to the orphanage his or her rights over the child. The orphanage often provided children a place of refuge as they waited for their remaining parent to find the resources to care for them. For some, that time' never came. These children eventually were bound out or placed in homes.

In Indianapolis, as elsewhere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people wrestled with theories of childhood development and the causes of poverty. Reformers attempted to differentiate between the worthyand the unworthy poor. Ideas about the value of family life and institutional care were evolving. Increasing

Chubby babies posed at the orphanage in the 1920s.

value was placed on the role that the family, especially the mother, played in a child's development. Children came tobe valued less for. their ability to work and more for the love and joy they brought to a family.

The economic realities of the 1930s spelled the end of the asylum as an institution. As the Great Depression settled on the United States, people turned to public relief when private efforts failed. In 1935 the United States Congress passed the Aid to Dependent Children provision, which provided some money for poor women to help them keep their children at home. This further validated the idea that children needed to live in a family unit; the time of the orphanage had passed.

After the orphanage closed in 1941, the mission of the Children's Bureau expanded. While foster care and adoptive services remained a mainstay, the Bureau sought other ways to provide safe havens for children and adolescents, such as group homes and transitional living experiences. The Bureau aggressively looked for homes for minority youths through the Homes for Black Children program. Today the Children's Bureau continues to extend its services as funding has become available for other program.

For the Children's Sake focuses on the evolution of an organization. It also reveals how social circumstances and the ideological underpinnings of caring for children have changed over the past 150 years. The story of the Children's Bureau of Indianapolis is a story worth telling, for it provides perspective on the role of "vulnerable" children in society. Within the larger context of political change, it is a story of small successes and sometimes failures: The Children's Bureau has touched the lives of individuals and influenced its community in ways both too small to be clearly seen and too large to be accurately measured.