ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 traces developments that were motivated by a desire to make childhood a happy experience for children, to rescue ‘children without childhood’. Philanthropists initiated orphanages, schemes for the emigration of children, kindergartens and schools, and societies for the prevention of cruelty to children. Women were increasingly prominent in these organisations. The new way of thinking was influential in the campaigns to end or control child labour in factories. It was also evident, intermixed with fears for the maintenance of social order, in the attempts to rescue street children. Reformers built innumerable institutional ‘homes’ for such children with outcomes that were being fiercely criticised by the end of the century. By that time, too, philanthropy was being seen as inadequate to the scale of the problems. The state began to move in. The focus was on reducing infant mortality and on spreading full-time compulsory schooling, linked to medical inspection of schoolchildren. There were also attempts to formulate the rights that children might expect or ought to be entitled to even if they came accompanied by a concern for order and discipline in children.
