An Outrage to Common Decency: Historical Perspectives on Child Neglect

Abstract

This chapter explores the historical roots of the perception that mothers are the parents primarily responsible for child neglect. It suggests that this focus on mothers has been at the expense of an understanding of, and efforts to change, the social and economic context in which child neglect occurs. The chapter examines two time periods: the late 1800s, when the concept of neglect and its legal and bureaucratic frameworks were developed; and the decade of the 1930s. The concept of child neglect was originally conceived in relation to the significant problems of abandoned and neglected children. A variety of conditions could bring a family to agency attention on grounds of neglect, but these were confined almost exclusively to the female domain of home and child care. The embarrassed worker pointed out that "a man walking nude even before his wife and child was an outrage to common decency, let alone before another woman and a child".

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