‘Nobody’s Children’: The Racial History of Parental Rights Law in Foster Care

• In Event: 50212 - Legitimacy, Punishment, and Language Dynamics in the Law

Abstract

This article traces the emergence of laws terminating parental rights as way to understand the shift in foster care from a welfare service to an authoritative service. Using archival data collected from social workers and city officials in New York City, I find that racial integration created a crisis in child welfare during the 1940s. To understand the changing population, state authorities drew on gendered scientific research about the developmental harms of maternal deprivation, specifically attaching this to the new Black and Puerto Rican foster population. At a time when many struggling parents willingly chose to foster their children, I show that welfare authorities became concerned with “uninterested mothers” who abandoned their gender obligations and prompted efforts to enforce maternal responsibility. Reformers crafted laws terminating parental rights in the late-1950s to discourage long-term foster care use, and in doing so, reframed this service as temporary, punitive, and involuntary. The “uninterested mother” is an important racial myth about gender dependency in child welfare, and highlights how the tension between social responsibility and maternal obligation acts as an undercurrent in child welfare development.

Author

• Michaela Christy Simmons, University of Wisconsin-Madison