Second home : orphan asylums and poor families in America

As Timothy Hacsi shows, most children in nineteenth-century orphan asylums were "half-orphans," children with one living parent who was unable to provide for them. The asylums spread widely and endured because different groups - churches, ethnic communities, charitable organizations, fraternal societies, and local and state governments - could adapt them to their own purposes. In the 1890s, critics began to argue that asylums were overcrowded and impersonal. By 1909, advocates called for aid to destitute mothers, and argued that asylums should be a last resort, for short-term care only. Yet orphanages continued to care for most dependent children until the Depression strained asylum budgets and federally funded home care became more widely available. Yet some, Catholic asylums in particular, cared for poor children into the 1950s and 1960s.