Child Welfare Classics

Abstract

This paper is the result of an enjoyable collaboration with several members of the staff of the Illinois Children's Home and Aid Society.1 It was read at the first of a series of professional meetings marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Society. The meeting was an informal one, and some of the informality of the occasion and a few of the parochial allusions have carried over into the paper in its present form. The task we set ourselves was to survey the American literature of child welfare for the past seventy-five years and identify what might be called the classics?those items which have had a critical influence in determining the shape of things to come. In most schools of social work too little attention is paid today to the history of philanthropy. This is too bad, because without this sense of history there cannot be either professional depth or poise. Thus, one of our objectives was to offer the outline for a short course in the history of child welfare. Our method of procedure was, first, a session in which we cast backwards to those books and reports which we recalled as bench marks for one reason or another. When we had assembled the titles we were able to discard a