Feminine Women, Hard Workers: Foster Motherhood in Midcentury America (1946-1963)

Abstract

Through an analysis of case records from two Philadelphia-based child welfare agencies, this article explores professional definitions of foster mothering as well as the experiences and beliefs of women who engaged in child fostering in mid-century America. It argues that social work experts, agency staff, and foster mothers themselves vacillated between an understanding of foster motherhood as an expression of femininity and as a form of valued labor. Influenced by growth of the psychological sciences, these competing discourses reflected larger tensions around changing postwar gender norms and beliefs about motherhood while simultaneously providing a space to contain them.