Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City, 1850-1860

Abstract

On a winter day in 1856, an agent for the Children's Aid Society (CAS) of New York encountered two children out on the street with market baskets. Like hundreds he might have seen, they were desperately poor - thinly dressed and barefoot in the cold - but their cheerful countenances struck the gentleman, and he stopped to inquire into their circumstances. explained that they were out gathering bits of wood and coal their mother could bur for fuel and agreed to take him home to meet her. In a bare tenement room, bereft of heat, furniture, or any other comforts, he met a stout, hearty who, even more than her testified to the power of hardihood and motherly love in the most miserable circumstances. A widow, she supported her family as best she could by street peddling; their room was bare because she had been forced to sell her clothes, furniture, and bedding to supplement her earnings. As she spoke, she sat on a pallet on the floor and rubbed the hands of the two younger siblings of the pair from the street. They were tidy, sweet children, noted the agent, And it was very sad to see their chilled faces and tearful eyes. Here was a scene that would have touched the heart of Dickens, and seemingly many a chillier midVictorian soul. Yet in concluding his report, the agent's perceptions took a curiously harsh turn. Though for her pure young children too much could hardly be done, in such a woman there is little confidence to be put ... it is probably, some cursed vice has thus reduced her, and that, if her children be not separated from her, she will drag them down, too.' Such expeditions of charity agents and reformers into the households of the poor were common in New York between 1850 and 1860. So were such harsh and unsupported judgments of working-class mothers, judgments which either implicitly or