Book review of Xiaobei Chen, Tending the Gardens of Citizenship: Child Saving in Toronto 1880s-1920s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. $50.00 hardcover

Herrick, John M.

English

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The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare Volume 34 Issue 1 March Article 14 2007 Review of Tending the Gardens of Citizenship: Child Saving in Toronto 1880s-1920s. Xiaobei Chen. Reviewed by John M. Herrick. John M. Herrick Michigan State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw  Part of the Social Work Commons Recommended Citation Herrick, John M. (2007) "Review of Tending the Gardens of Citizenship: Child Saving in Toronto 1880s-1920s. Xiaobei Chen. Reviewed by John M. Herrick.," The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare: Vol. 34 : Iss. 1 , Article 14. Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw/vol34/iss1/14 This Book Review is brought to you by the Western Michigan University School of Social Work. For more information, please contact wmu-scholarworks@wmich.edu. Book Reviews 183Xiaobei Chen, Tending the Gardens of Citizenship: Child Saving inToronto 1880s-1920s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,2005. $50.00 hardcover.At its website, the Child Welfare League of America is de-scribed as "an association of more than 900 private and publicagencies that assist more than 3.5 million abused and neglect-ed children and their families each year...." Its counterpart inCanada, the Canadian Child Welfare League assists an arrayof agencies offering services to vulnerable Canadian childrenand families. Given the centrality of child and family welfarein contemporary social services, Xiaobei Chen's revisionisthistory is welcomed. Informed by the prodigious scholar-ship of the postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault, sheexplores the complex trajectories and meanings of child pro-tection in the late 1 9 th and early 2 0th centuries and concludeswith a provocative essay on early 21s' century Ontario childprotection. Her work is a welcome addition to the pioneeringscholarship which deepened understanding of how Westernsocieties assisted vulnerable and dependent children withincontexts of changing power relationships. It complements theresearch of Anthony Platt, who in the1960s wrote about childsavers in the United States and the invention of delinquencyand the pioneering work of Philippe Aries on the evolution ofchildhood and family life.Primary sources, such as the records of the TorontoChildren's Aid Society and the papers of J.J. Kelso, a promi-nent Canadian child welfare pioneer, reveal the gender andEurocentric dimensions of child saving. Most work done tosave neglected children was led by men but carried out bywomen. The society justified intervention into the lives offamilies who neglected their children by not providing appro-priate guidance and discipline by using gardening metaphorswhich taught that children, like plants, needed careful tendingand cultivation in order become reliable, responsible Christianadults and good citizens. In effect, children had socially con-structed citizenship rights to sound nurturing. The disciplin-ary message to parents was clear: if they did not cultivate goodhabits in their children the society might remove them fromtheir homes.184 Journal of Sociology & Social WelfareThe social class dimensions of early child saving are appar-ent and important. Middle and upper class child savers did notexpect their wards to assume upward trajectories of social mo-bility. They guided children to become reliable and dependableworking class citizens: boys would be factory or farm workers;girls, household servants. To carry out its work and to ensureparents would comply with its orders, the society used newhelping technologies such as case record keeping, reports,home visits, a shelter for neglected children and a detentionroom for delinquents. These innovations enforced disciplineand parental compliance. The history of the children's shelterwhich opened in 1892 is instructive for contemporary childwelfare professionals. Initially, the shelter provided temporaryrefuge for children who were removed from their parents orfor those who voluntarily sought refuge. As time went on, chil-dren remained in the shelter for more than the recommendedone month and the society was criticized for assuming parentalchild rearing responsibilities. Eventually, the society eliminat-ed the residential shelter, ending a community resource whichhas no contemporary counterpart. Today, foster homes havebecome the preferred placement for children needing place-ment because of abuse or neglect.Adhering to her mentor Foucault's dictum that history caninform the present, the last chapter is a provocative analysis ofchild protection in Ontario at the beginning of the 21st century.In contrast to early child savers who believed their work wasan investment in good citizenship building and that childrenhad rights to community support, today it is assumed thatchildren have narrow, individualized citizenship rights, exem-plified by preoccupation with the right to personal safety.Lurid accounts of child abuse in Canada and the UnitedStates focus on children as victims of parental abuse andneglect. Chen argues that this individualizes the phenomenonof abuse, leading to a nearly exclusive focus on perpetrators,who are often impoverished single parents and their punish-ment, rather than on the broader social issue of childhoodpoverty or other marginalization factors which contribute tochildren's and parents' vulnerability. The early child savingvision of children and parents as persons who could be guidedto become morally responsible citizens seems to have beenBook Reviews 185abandoned. In Ontario reports and recommendations to attackchild abuse do not advocate revisions of child protection poli-cies and services that would change the current emphasis onpunishment of abusers. Societal preoccupation with personalsafety and punishment trumps efforts to create a sense of collec-tive responsibility for social problems such as the vision of theearly child savers who saw child protection, rather than pun-ishment, as an obligation of a moral and just society. A visionof the collective good could allow investments in supportiveinfrastructures such as day care which could reduce the stressof parenting and perhaps reduce child abuse and neglect. Thisbook is an insightful comparative history of how communitiesat different times conceptualized children's citizenship rightsand how those ideas have informed child protection.John M. HerrickMichigan State UniversityMichhlle Mor Barak, Managing Diversity: Towards a GloballyInclusive Workplace, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,2005. $49.95 papercover.This book extends knowledge on issues of diversity in theworkplace into a global context. The focus is interdisciplinary,drawing on research and theory from the academic disciplinesof social psychology, sociology, and economics, as well as fromthe human resource and employment literatures. The chap-ters tackle issues of central importance to those interested inconsidering the inter-relationships among social policy, socialwork, and employment in today's world economy.The book is divided into three sections. The first sectionsets the "macro" context for conducting business in the worldtoday. Detailed data and analyses are presented on cross-na-tional trends in social policy, population growth and migra-tion, socioeconomic indicators, and educational levels. Thesecond section considers "micro/mezzo" dimensions of di-versity, which include individual and inter-group experienc-es. These chapters look at workforce diversity from differentsocial psychological perspectives, including prejudice and

Review of \u3cem\u3eTending the Gardens of Citizenship: Child Saving in Toronto 1880s-1920s.\u3c/em\u3e Xiaobei Chen. Reviewed by John M. Herrick.

https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3237&amp;context=jssw

Review of \u3cem\u3eTending the Gardens of Citizenship: Child Saving in Toronto 1880s-1920s.\u3c/em\u3e Xiaobei Chen. Reviewed by John M. Herrick.

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