The Future of the Nation: The Emergence of Poor Children as a Problem

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social changes and the echoes of ongoing debates on destitute childhood prompted the emergence of a specific interest in analogous issues over the Lithuanian lands of the Tsarist Empire. The countryside remained the most unsympathetic to the idea of separate poor children’s assistance. Meanwhile, larger urban environments, Vilnius in particular, proved to be more responsive to new understandings of orphans’ and poor children’s assistance that were spreading internationally. Though it accepted the main ideas of orphans’ and poor children’s assistance through moralization and hygiene-oriented practices, the Lithuanian intelligentsia inscribed them within the horizon of nation-building. Until the outbreak of World War I, however, the spread of Lithuanian facilities for orphans’ and poor children’s care happened very slowly due to the lack of financial support and in constant competition with the Polish child assistance network.