Rhetoric and the Rise of Foster Care

ABSTRACT

This article examines the modern foster care system through its intersections with rhetorical theories of care and rhetorical practices of hospitality and provision. At the beginning of the twentieth century, policy makers and activists promoted different rhetorics of fostering as they debated ways to care for America’s vulnerable and dependent children. From this national crisis of child welfare, the modern foster care system emerged. Revisiting the rhetorical struggle over foster care reopens the question of what it means to foster and brings into focus practices of family-making, parenting, child-rearing, and basic hospitality that are implicated in the response.

Notes

1. This essay was shaped through helpful insights from RR reviewers Susan Kates and Jeremy Engels. I am grateful to these reviewers and also to Liane Malinowski, Kim Tweedale, and Ryan Skinnell for their guidance.

2. The earliest acts of fostering in medieval communities refer to “the fostre” as a morsel of nourishment or “daily bread” (Dictionary of Old English), but the term fostre could also designate provisional offerings given by communities as tithes or “food rents” for priests or soldiers (Russo 141).

3. Grace Abbott offers a helpful and contemporary rundown of some of these historical tensions in her 1938 introduction to The Child and the State. For more recent histories, see Ashby and Rymph.

4. For a different take on the Delineator campaign, see also Claudia Nelson’s Little Strangers.

5. In the late nineteenth century, foster care was set up through both boarding homes and free family homes, which were distinguished by the compensation they offered. Boarding out arrangements expected families to provide free lifetime board in return for the child’s performance of manual labor. Binding out, similarly, “bound” the child to become a working laborer of a family without the expectation of family kinship. The movement towards foster family homes thus represented an important shift not only in material arrangements, but also in social constructions of family and childhood as well. See Birk 174-175. For the importance of family values in the early and mid-nineteenth century, see Jessica Enoch’s excellent article on childcare centers.

6. Michael Mendelson describes antilogic as “a distinctly feminist response to argument that recognizes the inevitable hierarchies at play in controversy and at the same time seeks an approach to opposition that is [fair]” (126).

7. The “cracks” in the system are a favorite metaphor of foster care writers (see for instance Weinberg’s bleak assessment in Through the Cracks). Wilson and Evetts show how the burden for systematic failure often falls on foster parents, who are expected to become more professional and more “morally involved in their work” (45).

8. See also Joan Orme, who advocates for a new “attitude of caring” in social work (810).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew M. Heard

Matthew M. Heard is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of North Texas. His interdisciplinary research explores intersections of rhetorical theory and history, ethics, and social policies of child welfare and foster care. His articles have appeared in Philosophy and Rhetoric, College English, Pedagogy, and College Literature, and he is currently at work on a larger project bringing together rhetorical theory and foster care research. Readers may reach him at [email protected].