Gotham's waifs: Foundlings in nineteenth-century New York City

This dissertation is a social history of foundlings---abandoned babies---in nineteenth-century New York City. Because foundlings were traditionally understood to be the unwanted babies of unmarried mothers, the stigma of illegitimacy contributed to the decision of private charities in antebellum New York to exclude them. This dissertation explores the role of New York's public almshouse in caring for foundlings before the Civil War and in particular, the poor women who worked for the almshouse as wet-nurses. The story next turns to the shift in sentiments that led to the establishment of four foundling asylums immediately after the war: the New York Infant Asylum, Nursery and Child's Hospital, New York Foundling Asylum, and the public Infant Hospital on Randall's Island. This shift was the product of a number of factors. One of these was the increase in the number of foundlings due to the immigration-driven growth of the city. Another was the American Medical Association's mid-century crusade against abortion and the crusaders' belief that foundling asylums would prevent abortion by absorbing unwanted babies. The rise in the number of abortions among married, middle-class women combined with the increasing visibility of prostitutes and a seeming epidemic of unwanted babies lying in the street all looked like evidence that private sexual protocols were disintegrating. The influence of the linked child welfare and sanitary reform movements also created a more hospitable environment for the creation of foundling asylums, as did the rise in the sentimental valuation of children that occurred in the United States over the course of the nineteenth century.; Ultimately, three out of the four foundling asylums failed in the early twentieth century, as the religiously-based moral principles that drove them were replaced with the medicalization and professionalization of charity that came in with the Progressive Era. Catholic/Protestant conflict over public funding of private charity in New York City also contributed to the asylums' instability. The last chapters examine the troubled beginnings and rapid declines of the foundling asylums, and also the public reevaluation of foundlings as their Victorian image faded with the close of the nineteenth century.