‘Fixing’ destitute children: The relational geography of an early twentieth century children's home through its archives

Abstract

Drawing from early twentieth century documents from the Home for Destitute Children in Burlington, Vermont, USA, I explore the notion of the archive as a site of knowledge, politics, and ethics. Despite the absence of children's own perspectives in this archive, I propose taking a geographical relational poverty approach to gain insights by examining power relations between middle-class adult women and ‘destitute’ children. Specifically, I use records generated by women in charge of the Home (the matrons and the Board of Directors) to identify three dimensions of relational relevance. First, the women exerted power in constructing the Home as a place through ordering temporal rhythms, influencing sensory experiences, and imposing social boundaries and material conditions. Second, I review discourses such as the ‘desirable child’, ‘innocence’, and eugenicist notions of ‘feeblemindedness’ employed by the women to ‘fix’ children, both to repair them and to keep them in place. Third, I provide a reflection on the possibilities of combining manuscript archives with digitized sources such as the census to uncover adults' production and containment of ‘destitute children’.