ACADEMIA Letters

“The Sacred Idea of the Home”: Domestic Ideology and

Nineteenth-Century American Child Reform Practices
William McGovern

During the nineteenth century, domestic ideology made up the foundation of juvenile care and
reform. Although much has been written about the motivations and efforts of social activists to
remove juvenile delinquents and socially marginalized children from their families in favor of
often grim institutions, far less is understood about the role that the idealized family played in
shaping actual practices of child reform. Child reformers appealed to a sentimentalized vision
of the family which seemingly had the power to reclaim wayward children and reformulate
their individual characters. Child savers appealed to an ideology rooted in middle-class ideals
that sacralized the domestic sphere, celebrated emotional intensity between family members,
and elevated the home itself as a means for instilling middle-class virtues. Reformers con-
trasted this ideal with bleak portrayals of home life within poor and working-class families.
“Child savers” argued that juvenile institutions removed children from the negative influences
of working-class neighborhoods, immoral families, and incompetent parents, enabling the re-
form of individual character. However, reformers’ appeals to domestic ideology went much
further. Child savers elevated the sacralized home as a model to be replicated within juve-
nile institutions, transforming the idealized middle-class family into an institutional method
of reform itself.
The justification for placing children into reform institutions rested upon the idealization
of the middle-class home and denigration of poor and working-class families. Among the
urban middle class, a domestic ideology emerged which emphasized more intensive forms
of motherhood and cast the home as a moralizing space insulated from the competitive and
individualistic public sphere.[1] Parental advice literature celebrated the efforts of families to
shelter their children from potentially negative influences and encouraged children to spend
more time under the careful guidance of their mothers and in school.[2] For child reformers,

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: William McGovern, mcgovern@aiu.ac.jp

Citation: McGovern, W. (2021). “The Sacred Idea of the Home”: Domestic Ideology and Nineteenth-Century
American Child Reform Practices. Academia Letters, Article 1932. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1932.

1
this sentimentalized understanding of childhood and sacralized vision of the domestic sphere
contrasted sharply with middle-class interpretations of poor and working-class families. For
example, the founders of the first American juvenile reformatory, the New York House of
Refuge, noted that such parents “are, in all probability, too poor, or too degenerate, to provide
[their children] with clothing fit for them to be seen in at school; and know not where to place
them in order that they may find employment” and that their children have been [a]ccustomed
. . . to witness at home nothing in the way of example, but what is degrading; early taught
to observe intemperance, and to hear obscene and profane language without disgust; obliged
to beg, and even encouraged to acts of dishonesty, to satisfy the wants induced by indolence
of their parents . . .”[3] Child reformers routinely appealed to the perceived shortcomings
of poor and working-class families to remove children from their homes in favor of juvenile
institutions.
Reform administrators argued that institutions served the dual purposes of separating chil-
dren from incompetent and immoral families and placing them within institutions that stressed
the virtues of discipline, hard work, piety, basic education, and morality. Beginning in the
1820s, efforts to achieve these aims were carried out in massive institutions, which often
housed hundreds of children and placed heavy emphasis on discipline, labor, and regimenta-
tion. Despite their large numbers of children, such institutions claimed to establish familial
bonds between administrators and inmates. For example, the superintendent of the New York
House of Refuge asserted that its “children are considered and treated by him as one great
family” and “that youths . . . who have never experienced the fostering care of a parent . . .
feel towards him, gratitude and filial affection . . .”[4] However, within several decades, such
institutions came under withering criticism for their harsh discipline, impersonal treatment,
and strict regulations that more closely resembled adult prisons than families.[5]
By the middle of the nineteenth century, child reformers developed a number of strate-
gies shaped by domestic ideology which reformulated the methods employed in a variety of
child-focused institutions ranging from orphanages to juvenile reformatories. One of the more
influential methods was the family system. This approach to reform was modeled on the Rauhe
Haus, a German institution for delinquent children, and imported to the United States at mid-
century.[6] This approached involved placing inmates together in “families” of twelve children
to live in cottages under the care and guidance of institutional administrators. In 1856, the
Massachusetts State Industrial School for Girls became the first state institution in the United
States to employ the family system.[7] At the institution’s dedication ceremony, George S.
Boutwell argued that “the idea of home involves the necessity of reproducing the family re-
lation . . . Warm personal attachments will grow up in the family, and these attachments
are likely to become safeguards of virtue.”[8] Within a matter of decades a range of state and

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: William McGovern, mcgovern@aiu.ac.jp

Citation: McGovern, W. (2021). “The Sacred Idea of the Home”: Domestic Ideology and Nineteenth-Century
American Child Reform Practices. Academia Letters, Article 1932. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1932.

2
private institutions throughout the country incorporated versions the method.
Other strategies married the construction of familial bonds within institutions with the
practice of placing children within surrogate families. Beginning in the middle of the century,
a number of organizations launched sustained campaigns to integrate homeless, orphaned, or
socially marginalized children into new families, usually in rural areas throughout the West.
By the end of the century, vast numbers of children—more than 90,000 alone by the Children’s
Aid Society alone—were relocated to families throughout the country.[9] One such organi-
zation, the New England Home for Little Wanderers, declared that it took “boys who were
running wild in the streets of the city, whose parents could not control them and placed them
in homes in the West,” arguing that each child was incorporated “in a Christian home, not as
a servant, but as a member of the family, to be cared for and trained for usefulness.”[10] Even
before children were placed out, they found temporary shelter in institutions which claimed to
construct family relationships as a method to ease the transition. For example, the Children’s
Mission Home first gathered children together at its Boston charity. Administrators referred
to the children and its staff as a “family” and declared that “There is no way of preparing chil-
dren to live faithfully in a home relationship, save by putting them into such a relationship.
The first need of a Mission like ours . . is a home department, in which children taken from
low and corrupting family life may be domesticated, and prepared to enter other homes . . .
This is the very pivot on which our enterprise rests; and around this home . . . all our labors
should turn. . . . [E]verything should be done to cherish the sacred idea of the home.”[11]
Child reformers’ faith in the rehabilitative powers of the family profoundly influenced ap-
proaches to caring for and reforming children within nineteenth-century institutions. This
belief, emanating from middle-class domestic ideology, elevated family relationships and
structures above biological ones. While advocates of such methods likely prized the natu-
ral bonds within their own families, they championed, because of their suspicions of poor
and working class parents and faith in the restorative powers of the family, the impermanent
synthetic families produced within institutions.

References
[1] For more on the emergence of the “separate spheres” ideology, see, Mary P. Ryan, Cradle
of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1981); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s
Sphere in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale, 1977).

[2] Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven,

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: William McGovern, mcgovern@aiu.ac.jp

Citation: McGovern, W. (2021). “The Sacred Idea of the Home”: Domestic Ideology and Nineteenth-Century
American Child Reform Practices. Academia Letters, Article 1932. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1932.

3
 CT: Yale University Press, 1998), chapter 1.

[3] Report of a Committee Appointed by the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, in the
City of New-York, on the Expediency of Erecting an Institution for the Reformation of
Juvenile Delinquents (New York: Mahlon Day 1824), 7.

[4] Tenth Annual Report of the Managers of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delin-
quents, in the City and State of New-York (New York: Mahlon Day, Printer, 1835), 13.

[5] Peter C. Holloran, Boston’s Wayward Children: Social Services for Homeless Children,
1830-1930 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989), 26-27.

[6] For more on the international connections of child reformers and reform strategies, see,
William McGovern, “On Distant Shores: The Transatlantic Foundations of Child Reform
in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 17, no. 4 (2019), 506-
531.

[7] “State Industrial School for Girls, at Lancaster, Massachusetts,” The American Journal
of Education IV (1857), 359. Examples include the Boston Children’s Aid Society, Chil-
dren’s Mission Home, Indiana House of Refuge for Boys, Iowa Reform School, Maryland
House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, Michigan State Public School
for Dependent and Neglected Children, New England Home for Little Wanders, Ohio Re-
form Farm School, and Wisconsin Industrial School for Boys. See, History of the Origin,
Plan, and Success of the Work, of the Baldwin Place Home for Little Wanderers, for Seven
Years, (s.l.: s.n., n.d.), 2 (located in Box 6, Charities Collection, Simmons College Library
Archive, Boston, MA); Third Report of the Executive Committee of the Boston Children’s
Aid Society, from June, 1866, to June, 1867 (Boston: Prentiss & Deland, 1867), 3, 9; Ac-
count of the Proceedings at the Dedication of the Children’s Mission Home, on Tremont
Street, Opposite Common Street, Boston, March 27, 1867 (Boston: Press of John Wilson
and Son, 1867), 16; E.C. Wines, ed., Transactions of the Third National Prison Reform
Congress held at Saint Louis, Missouri, May 13-16, 1874 (New York: Office of the [Na-
tional Prison] Association, 1874), 110-116, 424-26, 433, and 591. In addition, the Mas-
sachusetts State Reform School partially incorporated a version the family system into its
existing model. See, Fourteenth Annual Report of the Trustees of the State Reform School
(Boston: William White, Printer of the State, 1860), 4-5.

[8] “Address Delivered at the Dedication of the State Industrial School for Girls at Lancaster,
Aug. 27th, 1856. By George S. Boutwell, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Edu-
cation,” Boston Daily Advertiser, September 5, 1856.

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: William McGovern, mcgovern@aiu.ac.jp

Citation: McGovern, W. (2021). “The Sacred Idea of the Home”: Domestic Ideology and Nineteenth-Century
American Child Reform Practices. Academia Letters, Article 1932. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1932.

4
[9] Clay Gish, “Rescuing the ‘Waifs and Strays’ of the City: The Western Emigration Program
of the Children’s Aid Society,” Journal of Social History 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1999), 121.

[10] Little Wanderer’s Advocate, (Boston: s.n., 1865), 99, 3.

[11] Account of the Proceedings at the Dedication of the Children’s Mission Home, on
Tremont Street, Opposite Common Street, Boston, March 27, 1867 (Boston: Press of John
Wilson and Son, 1867), 15-16.

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: William McGovern, mcgovern@aiu.ac.jp

Citation: McGovern, W. (2021). “The Sacred Idea of the Home”: Domestic Ideology and Nineteenth-Century
American Child Reform Practices. Academia Letters, Article 1932. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1932.