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Introduction: Child Welfare and Social Action

Jon Lawrence
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
Pat Starkey
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Summary

The essays published in this volume have been selected from over fifty papers presented at an international conference on Child Welfare and Social Action held at the University of Liverpool in July 1998. Organised by members of the departments of History, Special Collections and Archives, and Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Studies, the conference marked the deposit of the records of NCH Action for Children (formerly the National Children's Homes) in the Special Collections and Archives Department of the University. There they joined an important voluntary social work collection, including the records of Barnardo's, the Fairbridge Trust, Family Service Units and the Simon Community. Liverpool is an appropriate home for them. The Social Science Department, founded in 1904 and perhaps inevitably associated with the name of Eleanor Rathbone, was one of the first in the country, and training for social workers has always been an important aspect of the work of its successor departments.

There is currently great academic and general interest in the question of child welfare. Recent historical work has done much to focus attention on changing conceptions of childhood and of children's rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This has gone hand-in-hand with a rediscovery of the ‘hidden histories’ of childhood – shocking accounts of the physical and sexual abuse of children and of forced child migration, but also histories which seek to re-emphasise the importance of childhood as lived experience as well as discursive construction. The present volume brings together a wide range of essays that engage with the major themes of this recent literature. The essays are organised into four thematic sections, each representing a key field of research into the history of childhood and child welfare. The first section brings together two essays that explore ways in which notions of ‘delinquency’ have been, and remain, heavily gendered. Tamara Myers’ chapter on ‘delinquent’ teenage girls in inter-war Montreal neatly intertwines accounts of changing representations and changing policy frameworks with the lived experience of young women cut adrift in an exhilarating, but also frightening, city environment. Myers argues that, whereas in the late nineteenth century runaway girls (her ‘deserting daughters’) tended to be portrayed as defenceless victims of predatory adults, by the inter-war period they were widely viewed, and treated, as ‘sex delinquents’.

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Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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