Bringing Up the World's Boys and Girls: American Child Welfare and Global Politics, 1945-1979

During the years following World War II, American voluntary agencies initiated a great number of efforts designed to assist children overseas. These programs were humanitarian gestures with the aim of relieving human suffering. They were also political projects. American child welfare workers, this dissertation argues, supported larger U.S. efforts to guide the trajectory of development overseas, first in postwar Europe and Japan and later in Asia and throughout the developing world. American voluntary agencies looked to methods of child-rearing as a means of promoting democracy, fighting communism, and stimulating economic development. They situated personal transformations as the engine of global change, grounding political and economic revolutions in the individual drama of human development.;Armed with theories that stressed the importance of familial love and individual expression, American child welfare workers overseas redesigned orphanages, day care centers and schools. They trained foreign parents, child care workers and teachers in new ways of interacting with children. And they established child sponsorship programs that connected foreign children with American "foster parents" as a means of tying together nations with bonds of kinship, bonds they saw as stronger and more enduring than those forged by governments due to political expedience.;This dissertation sheds light on the ways in which a discourse of love, friendship and family facilitated the consolidation of American global power during the latter half of the twentieth century. It casts private voluntary agencies, and the many Americans who supported them, as players in the larger drama of American interventions abroad. Exploring the history of Americans' involvement in international child welfare highlights the ways in which relationships between ordinary people were implicated in the production and reproduction of global hierarchies. Child sponsorship programs, in particular, offered Americans a kind of virtual intimacy that had the potential to reorder relations of power even as they reified the categories of East and West, recipient and benefactor.;This project highlights the expansive and multivalent role of the family ideal during the decades following World War II. As many historians have noted, postwar American culture positioned the nuclear family as a haven of security in which to retreat to shut out a threatening world. But the ideal of the family, this dissertation demonstrates, was just as apt to encourage Americans to look across the globe as it was to facilitate a psychological retreat into the single-family home. It was just as likely to provide expanded professional opportunities for female social workers and educators as it was to discourage the employment of women in the public sphere. To American child welfare agencies, the family served not only as a source of shelter from an international crisis but also as a means of addressing that crisis.;This work contributes to the growing body of literature on modernization theory, as expressed in U.S. efforts to uplift the developing world during the 1950s and 1960s. The application of child psychology overseas, this dissertation demonstrates, was an integral component of modernization theory: both systems of thought sought to apply scientific principles to the process of guiding a vulnerable being through the often-unruly process of maturation. American organizations' efforts to uplift foreign societies by intervening in the process of child-rearing highlight the hitherto overlooked role of women within the project of modernization.;Bringing Up the World's Boys and Girls highlights the ways that American humanitarianism and U.S. global hegemony expanded in tandem. But in chronicling the experiences of voluntary workers, ordinary families, and children themselves, it also reveals the ways in which U.S. Cold War foreign policy and modernization programs were appropriated, reframed, and contested.