Go back a couple of centuries, and some of the things society considered perfectly acceptable are almost unimaginable to us today. Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, poverty was often viewed not simply as a misfortune, but as evidence of laziness, irresponsibility, or moral failure. Even children could suffer the consequences of that thinking.
In fact, for many poor and working-class children, there was very little “childhood” as we understand it today. Childhood wasn’t necessarily viewed as a protected period of life devoted to growing, learning, playing, and being cared for by adults. If a family was desperately poor, children were often expected to begin contributing to the family’s survival as soon as they were physically capable of doing so.
Education wasn’t something every child could simply expect to receive, either. For much of the 19th century, schooling for poor children was inconsistent and often provided by churches, charities, Sunday schools, workhouses, or other voluntary organizations. Poor families frequently needed their children’s earnings or labor at home, which meant that even when some education was available, many children couldn’t take advantage of it.
There was also a widespread assumption that the kind of education appropriate for a child depended upon that child’s place in society. The son of a wealthy family might need an extensive education to prepare him for a profession or public life. A poor child expected to spend his or her life performing manual labor or domestic service was thought to need considerably less.
A child who was orphaned, abandoned, or born into desperate poverty wasn’t necessarily met with protection and compassion. Many ended up in workhouses, entered domestic service, or were sent to farms, mines, mills, and factories. Some orphaned and impoverished children were actually sent away as “pauper apprentices” to work in factories.
Children worked extraordinarily long hours, ten to sixteen hours per day, sometimes six days a week, around machinery that could permanently injure or kill them. Others worked in mines or in factories filled with dust and fibers that damaged their lungs. Children were desirable workers partly because they were cheap, small enough to perform certain jobs, and had very little power to object to how they were treated.
Even some of the early laws that were considered reforms are shocking by today’s standards. Britain’s Factory Act of 1833 prohibited factory employment for children under nine. That was progress. But the same law still allowed children between nine and thirteen years old to work as many as nine hours a day. Think about that for a moment. A law allowing a nine-year-old child to work nine hours in a factory was considered an improvement.
Children could also be treated astonishingly harshly by the criminal justice system. Children far younger than we would consider capable of adult responsibility today could be prosecuted for crimes, including theft committed out of hunger or desperation, and subjected to punishments we would now consider unconscionable.
Perhaps one of the most striking examples of how differently society once viewed the protection of children comes from the United States. In 1866, Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in New York. Laws against cruelty to animals were being strengthened and an organization existed specifically to enforce them.
Eight years later, in 1874, a church worker named Etta Wheeler learned about a little girl named Mary Ellen Wilson who was being horribly abused in her home. Wheeler tried unsuccessfully to get authorities to intervene. Eventually, she turned to Henry Bergh, the founder of the ASPCA, for help. Bergh and his attorney, Elbridge Gerry, helped get Mary Ellen removed from the abusive home and brought her case before the courts.
The case attracted enormous attention. Later that year, Bergh, Gerry, and others began organizing what became the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, incorporated in 1875. It was the first child-protection organization of its kind in the United States.
Just consider the chronology. America had an organized society devoted to protecting animals from cruelty before it had an organization devoted specifically to protecting children from cruelty.
That doesn’t mean people in the past didn’t love their children or feel compassion for suffering. Of course they did. Many people were horrified by these conditions, and reformers fought for decades to change them. The fact that those reformers existed is precisely why things eventually did change.
But as a society, suffering that would horrify us today was often accepted as an unfortunate but normal part of life. Eventually, something changed, not human nature, poverty, or the fact that some people make bad choices, but our understanding of what we owe to vulnerable human beings.
Over time, we began to reject the idea that a seven-year-old should have to earn the right to eat. We decided that children belonged in schools rather than factories and mines. We established limits on child labor. We expanded public education. We developed protections for workers and assistance for people who could no longer support themselves.
None of those changes happened because poverty disappeared. They happened because society gradually reconsidered what suffering we were willing to accept. But one idea has proven remarkably difficult to leave behind: the division between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. For centuries, assistance has often come with a question attached: Did this person do enough to deserve our help?
Children weren’t the only vulnerable people whose treatment reflected very different ideas about who deserved protection, independence, and a place in ordinary society. People with physical, intellectual, developmental, and psychiatric disabilities were often treated in ways that would be difficult for us to accept today.
For much of American history, many disabled people were hidden away at home, placed in poorhouses or almshouses, or confined in institutions, sometimes for much of their lives. Conditions varied enormously, and some institutions were originally created with humanitarian intentions, but overcrowding, neglect, abuse, forced labor, inadequate medical care, and the loss of even the most basic personal choices became realities for many of the people who lived in them. Having a disability could mean losing not only your independence, but much of your control over where you lived and how you lived your life.
Some American cities went even further and passed ordinances that have since become known as the “ugly laws.” Beginning in the late 1800s, these laws targeted people whose disabilities or physical differences were considered unpleasant or disturbing to look at and restricted their presence in public places. Chicago’s ordinance, for example, prohibited people who were considered “diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed” and an “unsightly or disgusting object” from exposing themselves to public view. In other words, instead of making public spaces accessible to disabled people, some communities attempted to remove disabled people from public view.
By the early 20th century, these attitudes became intertwined with the eugenics movement. People with intellectual and developmental disabilities, psychiatric conditions, epilepsy, and other disabilities were sometimes labeled “feebleminded,” “defective,” or otherwise unfit. Many states enacted compulsory sterilization laws, allowing people to be sterilized without meaningful consent because authorities had decided they shouldn’t have children. In 1927, the United States Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s compulsory sterilization law in Buck v. Bell, and thousands of Americans were ultimately sterilized under state eugenics programs.
Disabled children could also be excluded from public schools simply because schools weren’t required to educate them. For generations, many families were told that their children couldn’t attend the neighborhood school, couldn’t be accommodated there, or would be better off in an institution. It wasn’t until the latter part of the 20th century that federal law established the right of children with disabilities to receive a public education.
Even disabled adults who were perfectly capable of living in their communities encountered barriers that society largely expected them to endure. Buildings had stairs but no ramps. Public transportation wasn’t accessible. Employers could openly refuse to hire someone because of a disability. Businesses could simply be inaccessible. The prevailing assumption was often that the disabled person needed to adapt to the world as it existed, rather than considering whether the world could reasonably be changed to include them.
Those attitudes didn’t disappear because disabilities disappeared, nor did disabled people suddenly become more capable or more worthy of participating in society. What changed was our understanding of disability itself. Gradually, we began to recognize that many of the limitations disabled people experienced weren’t caused solely by their bodies or medical conditions. They were also created by stairs without ramps, schools that wouldn’t admit them, employers who wouldn’t hire them, transportation they couldn’t use, buildings they couldn’t enter, and laws and customs that excluded them from ordinary community life.
Many of the protections we now take for granted are remarkably recent. The right of children with disabilities to a public education was established nationally only in the 1970s, and the Americans with Disabilities Act wasn’t signed into law until 1990. People alive today can remember a United States in which many forms of discrimination against disabled people were entirely legal.
Looking back, it’s easy to ask how society could have tolerated those things for so long. It’s much harder to recognize the assumptions of our own time that future generations may someday find equally difficult to understand.
We still hear versions of that question today. Why can’t they work? Why didn’t they save more? Why did they have children they couldn’t afford? Why don’t they get a second job? Why did they buy that? Why do they have a smartphone? Why should taxpayers have to support them?
Sometimes those are reasonable questions in discussions about how public programs should operate. Resources aren’t unlimited, and no system is immune from abuse. Accountability and compassion aren’t mutually exclusive.
But there’s a difference between designing responsible programs and beginning with the assumption that people who need help must have done something wrong.
Illness happens. Disability happens. Companies close. Jobs disappear. Marriages end. Parents die. Children are born with disabilities. Accidents happen. People become caregivers. Economies change. Housing costs rise. People make mistakes, too, because human beings have always made mistakes. And sometimes people simply have terrible luck.
We have spent generations building systems intended to keep those events from becoming absolute catastrophes. Social Security, disability benefits, unemployment insurance, public education, food assistance, Medicare, Medicaid, workplace protections, child labor laws, and countless other programs and protections didn’t appear because previous generations suddenly decided that everyone should be entitled to an easy life.
They developed because, over time, we came to recognize that people shouldn’t be left without food, shelter, medical care, education, or other basic necessities simply because they’re poor, disabled, elderly, unemployed, or facing circumstances beyond their control. We also came to recognize that not everyone has family who can help them, opportunities available to them, or even the physical ability to simply work harder or “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.”
Providing that basic level of support has never meant that everyone will have the same life or that individual choices don’t have consequences. Nor does it mean that government can or should solve every problem. It simply means we’ve decided that certain forms of suffering shouldn’t be prerequisites for proving that someone deserves help.
Perhaps that’s one measure of a civilized society: not whether everyone in it makes perfect choices, but how we treat people when illness, disability, poverty, age, tragedy, or circumstances beyond their control leave them vulnerable and in need of help.
Two hundred years from now, people may look back at some of our attitudes with the same disbelief with which we now look at nine-year-old children working in mines and factories. Practices that once seemed ordinary eventually became things we could no longer justify, not because human beings suddenly became more deserving, but because our understanding of our responsibility to one another changed.
I wonder what future generations will find hardest to understand about us. I wonder which hardships we accept as inevitable, which suffering we dismiss as the consequence of someone’s choices, and which people we decide haven’t worked hard enough or suffered enough to deserve help. Most of all, I wonder which things we defend as perfectly reasonable today will someday leave our descendants asking the same question we ask when we look back at the past: How could they possibly have thought that was okay?
