Childhood
Beginning in the nineteenth century, a series of institutional initiatives aimed to address the needs of vulnerable children. Some of the most striking examples involved the abandonment of “illegitimate” babies. Strict sexual and family norms made premarital sex and children born out of wedlock socially unacceptable. As a result, many young single mothers had no choice but to give birth in secret and abandon their “child of sin” at a nursery. Such children had a long institutional journey ahead of them.
Traditionally, orphans exposed to uncertainty following the death of one or both parents (and whose extended family could not support them) had been entrusted to the care of a hôpital-général. Only in the nineteenth century did religious and secular organizations begin establishing orphanages specifically designed to house and educate such children. Located throughout Quebec, these institutions also took in “illegitimate” children from nurseries.
Finally, in the early twentieth century, the publication of photographs taken in slums inspired an often moralistic view of working-class families. Consider these photos presented at the International Child Welfare Exhibition, held in Montreal in October 1912. Depicting needy children who lacked any parental supervision, they provided the impetus for several programs aimed at saving children. In this way, the photos supported the arguments of those who suspected poor families of not doing enough to lift their children out of the cycle of poverty.
Nurseries
In 1754, Marguerite d’Youville launched the first Quebec charity dedicated to caring for foundlings. Originally established at the Grey Nuns’ Hospital in Montreal, the Youville Nursery had catastrophic mortality rates. In 1875, 88% of the 719 children admitted died in infancy. As for the Misericordia Sisters, they had been sending “illegitimate” babies born to single mothers at their hospital to the Youville Nursery since the mid-nineteenth century. Then, in 1890, they added a nursery to their motherhouse.
Were children better off at this new facility? Only slightly. Between 1890 and 1921, the mortality rate for infants was about 80%. Umbilical infections, bronchopneumonia epidemics and especially intestinal diseases linked to a diet based on poor-quality cow’s milk were largely to blame. The Misericordia Sisters discouraged breastfeeding, even though it was practised with great success at the Montreal Maternity Hospital, a nearby Protestant institution. The situation was largely the same at other Catholic nurseries in Quebec. For instance, the Gamelin Nursery in Trois-Rivières, run by the Sisters of Providence, faced harsh criticism in the early 1930s.
Babies who managed to survive remained at a nursery for about seven months. Then, they were either adopted by a family deemed morally upstanding or place in another institution run by the same religious community. For example, children in the care of the Misericordia Sisters of Montreal were sent to the Saint-Janvier Home in Sault-au-Récollet. Upon turning two, many continued their institutional journey in an orphanage.
Montreal’s Protestant elite set up a nursery in 1870. The Protestant Infants’ Home (1870-1935), located on Guy Street, was intended for needy families and “illegitimate” children. Recognizing breastfeeding as the best source of quality nutrition, mothers were admitted with their babies and could remain up to a year. This policy helped maintain mortality rates at about 22% and gave women time to re-establish their lives. Any child not removed by family was transferred to another Protestant child charity at the age of 5. From 1875 to 1905, 2329 children and 747 mothers received help. In 1936, the institution, then on Queen Mary Road, assumed responsibility for the Protestant Foster Care system. Due to the stipulation that mothers should enter the institution and/or assume ongoing financial responsibility, very few “foundlings” were admitted. It was not until 1891 when the Montreal Foundling and Baby Hospital opened on Argyle Street in Westmount that abandoned infants could be left in a Protestant institution. The managers opened a sick baby ward in 1897 and the first milk depot in the city in 1901 in conjunction with the Local Council of Women. In 1932, the institution, then on St. Urbain, merged with the Montreal Children’s Hospital.
Maternity and Childhood
Catholic Misericordia Hospitals
Misericordia hospitals were among the few institutions that housed pregnant single women (so-called unwed mothers). These institutions were established in response to a plea from Mgr. Ignace Bourget, Bishop of Montreal, to “save the lives of countless unfortunate children who, because they are born of sin, are at risk of falling victim to their mothers’ barbarity.” The fathers of the children were spared any such strong condemnation and did not have to bear the burden of sin faced by unwed mothers.
The hospitals provided safe, medically supervised deliveries while portraying themselves as institutions of penance and moral redemption. Accordingly, they sought to give penitent young women the opportunity to atone for their sins and to pursue an honourable life, in keeping with the patriarchal norms of the time. This meant either devoting themselves to a husband or dedicating themselves to God by leading cloistered lives as so-called Magdalenes. In the eyes of the Church and likely those of many women, true atonement meant severing the maternal bond so “the child born of sin” could be baptized and placed with a family.
The nuns who ran the institution gave both mothers and babies fictitious names that were assigned in alphabetical order from a predetermined list. Le séjour d’une pénitente dure en moyenne trois moisOn average, mothers stayed at the hospital for three months. If they could not afford to pay for their room and board, they had to stay in the public ward and provide housekeeping or child minding services for six months after giving birth, regardless of whether their own baby survived.
The Montreal Maternity Hospital
Opened in 1843 by the McGill University School of Medicine, the Montreal Maternity Hospital was designed to provide medical students with opportunities to complete clinical rotations in obstetrics. The university delegated responsibility for hospital administration to a committee composed of women drawn from the city’s English-speaking elite. Meanwhile, midwives were hired to attend deliveries. In its first forty years of existence, the hospital provided destitute unwed mothers with a discreet and safe place to give birth. Most of these women were Irish immigrants who had only recently arrived in Montreal. Their infants were entrusted to the care of the Grey Nuns’ Catholic nursery or the Protestant Infants’ Home.
It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that developments in medical science and technology made the Montreal Maternity Hospital the focus of obstetrical care for the city’s larger English-speaking community. Furthermore, as the type of patient admitted to the hospital changed, medical doctors began playing a larger role in administration and during deliveries. By the end of the period, unwed mothers had become the exception rather than the rule.
Supporting Mothers and Children
In the early twentieth century, Quebec was infamous for its very high infant mortality rate. Babies often died from gastrointestinal illness caused by drinking poor quality milk. To address the situation, dispensaries called gouttes de lait or milk stations were established to not only distribute pasteurized milk but also provide families with health advice and pediatric care. In 1930, Montreal had sixty-eight such dispensaries, compared to about fifteen in Quebec City.
In 1912 philanthropist Caroline Leclerc Hamilton created Assistance Maternelle with the aim of ensuring that needy mothers had access to medical care and medicine, both before and after childbirth. The organization coordinated various parish committees composed of lay women and nurses. In 1914, these committees carried out more than 500 home visits, while sometimes also providing families with material support. However, such services were not offered to single mothers, who were forced by social norms to give birth secretly and hand over their children to nurseries.
When the YWCA opened the Montreal Day Nursery in 1888 on Belmont Park working Protestant mothers, mostly widows or deserted wives, finally had access to a day care service. Open from 7 h to 19 h, six days a week, the Nursery accepted children aged 3 months to 12 years old for a fee of 10 cents a day. The Nursery provided meals, medical care, and clothing, if needed. Children’s days were filled with schooling, training in practical skills, gymnastics, and singing. By the late 1890s an annual average of 170 children attended. By 1920 this had increased to more than 264 children. A few years after opening the Nursery added a location that could accommodate mothers who worked nights. In special circumstance children whose parents were ill lived at the Nursery for up to several weeks. The Board also ran an employment service for charwomen. Many of the bourgeois women who managed the Nursery hired these workers to clean their houses. By 1942, the Day Nursery was housed in the YMCA building on Drummond where it still functions as a CPE.
A group of women affiliated with the YWCA and the American Presbyterian Church founded the Montreal Diet Dispensary in 1879 to provide nourishing food to the sick poor in their homes or in boarding houses. Open six days a week, the Dispensary made and delivered food including broths, jellies, cooked meats, milk, eggs, fruits, and vegetables at no cost or below cost. As of 1885, the dispensary also hired a visiting nurse; by 1899 three were on staff. These nurses accompanied volunteers on their visits to help with the sick, referrals to medical services, and with both births and deaths. The emphasis on mothers and births increased over the twentieth century and today the Diet Dispensary, located on Lincoln Street, focuses on prenatal care and healthy diets for low-income women.
Orphanages
Were they real orphans?
The number of orphanages dedicated to caring for children in difficulty increased greatly during the nineteenth century. Such institutions were established throughout Quebec to meet the needs of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish populations. Housing either boys or girls and run by a religious community or a secular organization, they could be found in the countryside as well as the city.
Most children living in an orphanage had been placed there by one of their parents. Boys and girls alike generally stayed for less than a year, while their families struggled through difficult times. Residents were given religious instruction and taught to perform manual labour deemed appropriate for their gender. The long days were filled with group prayer, schooling, and work sessions designed to produce good workers and housewives. The children’s labour also helped keep the institution running. Protestant institutions placed less emphasis on prayer and more on rudimentary education including reading, writing, arithmetic and geography alongside the teaching of work skills.
Unless they had a religious vocation, children who had not been reunited with their families were required to leave Catholic orphanages at age 16. They were expected to support themselves and eventually marry. Many so-called “children of sin,” who had been placed in care at birth, ended up in an adult institution like a psychiatric hospital. In Montreal’s Protestant institutions children not removed by parents remained until the age of 12 for boys and 14 for girls at which age they were sent to live in a family to learn a trade or to practice domestic skills. Their “apprenticeship” ended at 18.
Protestant Orphanages
The Protestant community of Quebec City established several institutions for orphans in the early nineteenth century: the Military Asylum (1825), the Quebec Asylum (1823), the Church of England Female Orphan Asylum (1829), and the Protestant Male Orphan Asylum (1834). In 1927, responsibility for managing the girls’ orphanage, which occupied a large building on Grande Allée, was entrusted to the Sisters of Saint John the Divine, an Anglican religious organization.
In Montreal, the Protestant Orphan Asylum admitted about thirty orphans each year, starting in 1822. For most of the nineteenth century the orphanage was situated on Saint Catherine near Drummond. In response to the devastating cholera epidemic of 1832, middle-class women founded the Ladies’ Benevolent Society, which annually offered shelter to about a hundred children between the ages of 3 and 14, along with a few destitute elderly women. The institution was located on Berthelet (Ontario) near Bleury. The orphanage and the Ladies’ Benevolent merged in 1946 and were reinvented in the 1960s as Summerhill (group) Homes. The Home and School of Industry/Hervey Institute (1848–1924) on Mountain Street was another institution families used to shelter and train children.
Unlike most Catholic charities, these institutions were run by lay women volunteers. These upper middle-class women supervised paid staff members who cared for the children.
Catholic Orphanages
In 1831, the Catholic Ladies Auxiliary founded the Quebec Orphanage in Quebec City’s Saint-Roch neighbourhood. Overwhelmed by the task, they entrusted management of the institution to the Sisters of Charity of Quebec in 1849. Thanks to the efforts of its volunteer workforce, this congregation developed a network of Catholic orphanages, including the Youville Orphanage, Saint Bridget’s Asylum, the Nazareth Orphanage and the Saint-Sauveur Orphanage. For instance, Saint Bridget’s Asylum, located at the corner of Grande-Allée and Salaberry Street was intended to serve English-speaking Catholic children, a population largely composed of Irish immigrants.
The cholera epidemic of 1832 prompted the Dames de la Charité, a philanthropic association of lay Catholic women to open a shelter for orphaned Catholic boys in Montreal. In 1889, financial difficulties forced the organization to entrust administration to the Grey Nuns. In 1917, the orphanage moved to a building on Decarie Street capable of housing 200 boys between the ages of 5 and 12.
Founded by Émilie Tavernier-Gamelin in 1841, the Congregation of the Sisters of Providence set aside a room in their refuge for orphaned girls. Founded in 1864, the Saint-Alexis Orphanage occupied a building at the corner of Saint-Denis and Mignonne (Maisonneuve) streets. It admitted about a hundred girls between the ages of 2 and 18 each year until 1963.
Waves of Irish immigration and the typhus epidemic 1847-48 created a need to care for Irish Catholic orphans. In Montreal, the Sulpicians assumed responsibility for this, helped by the Grey Nuns. A small home for orphans was opened on Murray Street in 1846. In 1851, Father Dowd opened St. Patrick’s Catholic Orphanage on Dorchester near St. Patrick’s Church. Eventually the institution moved to a larger building on Deom Avenue in Outremont. In the late 1960s, it was renamed Mount St. Patrick’s and moved to Lagauchetière where it remained until 1982 under the supervision of the Sisters of St. Joseph.
Criticism of Orphanages
Since the late nineteenth century, the child welfare movement had been critical of how institutionalization impacted the psychological development of orphans. For example, the Fédération nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a feminist association led by Marie Gérin-Lajoie, had long proposed giving pensions to needy mothers who would otherwise be forced by poverty to place their children in an orphanage. The same idea was championed by various Protestant groups, including the Society for the Protection of Women and Children, which also promoted adoption and foster care as alternatives to institutionalization. In fact, foster care became the preferred method under the (Protestant) Montreal Council of Social Agencies and the Children’s Bureau by 1924.
When a program of allowances for mothers in need was introduced by the Quebec government in 1937, not only were the amounts provided very small, but restrictive criteria were designed to exclude many women—including single mothers who still had little choice but to abandon their “children of sin.” As a result, despite the persistent criticism of institutionalization and the availability of allowances for needy mothers, Quebec orphanages continued to play a significant role in caring for children until the 1960s.
Adoption
Before 1924, Quebec lacked any legal framework for adoption. Informal arrangements created no legal relationship between the child and the adoptive family. In cases of so-called illegitimate births, the “biological” father retained his right to come forward and take custody of the child at any time. This possibility strongly discouraged many interested couples from adopting. The religious communities running Quebec nurseries recognized that the lack of a formal adoption process was partly responsible for overcrowding in their institutions. They made a joint request for the Taschereau government to develop a legal framework, which was ultimately defined by the 1924 Act Respecting Adoption. Apart from a few amendments to the legislation made the following year (requirement to adopt a child of the same religion as oneself, continued recognition of paternal authority in the case of so-called legitimate births), this legal framework remained essentially unchanged until the early 1970s.
