Current Ideas and Practices concerning Poor Children in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the plight of impoverished children came to be of grea t concern in Brazil. This was the moment when childhood was first seen as a social problem whose solution was fundamental to a larger project of nation building. The country’s elite sought to forge a nation that was at once “cultured and modern,” 1 along the lines of important European and North American cities—especially Paris, London, and New York—and the transformation of childhood was part of this larger endeavor. In several influential circles, there was talk of the “magna causa of childhood” and “the crusade for childhood.” Childhood was seen, not only in Brazil, but also elsewhere, as “the key to the future”. In Brazil, this nineteenth-century notion that “to save children was to save the country” implied the concomitant imperative of distancing children from the 1 temptations that might lead them astray from the straight and narrow of discipline and work; society had to be protected from those given to vice, from those who threatened public order. New ideologies concerning the control and protection of children paralleled those in other Western countries, suggesting an extensive exchange of information among the political and philanthropic elite of this era. This paper examines the emergence of the idea that childhood was the key to the future; it also cons iders the problems that were perceived in and the solutions proposed for the task of “saving” poor children and rendering them useful to the overarching goal of “civilizing” the country. The expression “child saving,” current at the time, turned on the notion that investing in children was tantamount to investing in the nation’s future. I begin, then, with a discussion of the historical context, moving on to examine the child saving movement in Brazil, its origins and repercussions.