Category Archives: Child Study

More About Foundlings

16 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Child Study, History of Emotions, Infancy

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Photographs of people in times gone by have a particular poignancy. In his article, ‘The Undead: Necromancy and the Inner World’, psychoanalyst Jed Sekoff writes about how one might contemplate a photograph, or a portrait – or a piece of writing – ‘until it hits you: the subject or the writer is dead’. This piece of writing, that photograph is a monument – much like a gravestone – designed  ‘to counter memory’s propensity to fade.’ A photograph is a moment frozen forever. Sekoff writes, ‘It is ourselves we wish to dominate, to fool time, to trick death, to resist the relentless movement of the world’. He continues:

Looking at a photograph places us at the edge of a certain time. Neither the moment before or after. Yet, this singular moment, ever present, ever still, evokes a boundless space, alive, in motion. The dead are somehow conjured into life. And yet again this very magic makes their death all the more certain; our loss stares us in the face. We might better describe the boundless boundary of the photographic image as a peculiar frontier – ‘a region that forms the margins of settled territory’… – where the flora and fauna of the past, present and future are captured in one compact space.

It seems to be part of the historian’s craft to fill in the background, to describe the  past that is, before being named, an invisible and apparently empty space. The act of interpretation enters  this space.  There is always the differentiation between my present day ‘self’ and the historical/cultural ‘other’.

In the Australian Town and Country Journal published in November 1901 these two photographs appear. They were taken at Sydney’s Ashfield Infants Home which was celebrating the opening of its new wing.

Scenes from the Ashfield Home

Scenes from the Ashfield Home

According to the Australian Women’s Register the Sydney’s Ashfield Infants Home, established as the Sydney Foundling Hospital in 1874 and  became the Infants’ Home in 1877. It assumed responsibility for the care of infants of single mothers and destitute parents and provided a temporary home for the mothers. Rules for admission established in July 1874 ‘required firstly for each application to be dealt with on its merits; secondly, for the infant to be no older than three months; thirdly for the mother to produce satisfactory evidence of her previous respectability and fourthly there had to be proof that the father had deserted the baby and be beyond the reach of the law to enforce him to support it’.

The lower photograph shows thirteen of some forty children residing in the Home where , despite being ‘some of the happiest and best cared-for youngsters in Sydney’, they lacked parents, relatives and names – excepting that their guardians have bestowed upon them. These are the foundlings, stumbled upon by a policemen or left at someone’s doorstep. No one ever sees the person who left it there – a reporter wrote. There is never a clue to its identity. Mother and infant are lost to one another. But, the Town and Country these children had a great claim upon society ‘by reason of their absolute helplessness’.  And so begins an account of the Home as a showpiece of all that is ‘best practice’ that was early twentieth century child rearing at a time when, according to well known Adelaide doctor Helen Mayo, infant mortality was high – particularly amongst the children of unmarried mothers.

Two or three years before reports from the Child Study Association, formed in Sydney in 1898 had begun to focus on infant behaviour, the sounds and gestures they made as communication. Following developments in the United States and United Kingdom well known anthropologist Professor Alan Carroll gathered a group of interested men and women to meet with the purpose of studying the child mind. During the next two decades the Association included leading educationists and welfare officials as well as drawing interest from feminists and women leaders such as Maybanke Anderson.

 More recently historians have been exploring the intersection between psychology and emerging ideas about children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The historian Sally Shuttleworth’s The Mind of a Child published in 2012 explores ideas about infancy and childhood during the  nineteenth century  Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre and Edmund Gosse’s autobiographical account of his childhood  illustrate the growing apprehension of children as having different and separate lives to those of the adults around them. Missing from her account  is Thomas Hughes’s 1857 classic: Tom Brown’s Schooldays, about the world of boys and school but this is a minor quibble against the richness and thoroughness of Shuttleworth’s research into the development of nineteenth century psychology. The ‘current cultural dominance of Freudian theory has tended to obscure the interesting pre-history of child psychiatry in the second half of the nineteenth century’, Shuttleworth writes. (p.18). She points to Charles Darwin’s observation of one of his children in 1840, published 37 years later in the journal, Mind, as a response to  M Taine’s  essay ‘The Acquisition of Language by Children’. M Taine established the practice similar to what has become known as Infant Observation. The observations, M Taine wrote, ‘were made from time to time and written down on the spot.In his study the  subject of them was a little girl whose development was ordinary, neither precocious nor slow’. He detailed each movement, moment by moment.

From the first hour, probably by reflex action, she cried incessantly,
kicked about and moved all her limbs and perhaps all her muscles. In
the first week, no doubt also by reflex action, she moved her fingers and
even grasped for some time one’s fore-finger when given her. About the
third month she begins to feel with her hands and to stretch out her
arms, but she cannot yet direct her hand, she touches and moves at
wrandom; she tries the movements of her arms and the tactile an
muscular sensations which follow from them ; nothing more. In my
opinion it is out of this enormous number of movements, constantly
essayed, that there will be evolved by gradual selection the intentional
movements having an object and attaining it. In the last fortnight (at
two and a half mouths) I make sure of one that is evidently acquired;
hearing her grandmother’s voice she turns her head to the side from
which it comes.

M Taine’s account of a baby’s discovery of herself in the world prompted further investigations using child observation  In 1898 An American woman, Millicent Shinn , building on the work of the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, published the observational study of her niece, ‘The Biography of a Baby’.Shinn’s methodology also drew on the work of Dr Joseph Le Conte  on a daily basis from birth, drew  was a response to the notion that through scientific observation one would that ‘children in developing passed through stages similar to those the race had passed through’. Even so, Social Darwinism which placed white society at the top of the tree relative to asian and aboriginal societies remained a strong underpinning in people’s’ thinking about children. During a visit to the Ashfield Babies Home in 1903, the writer “Barbara Baynton” wrote of her encounter with a small boy, ‘Australian born of Indian Parents’.

Quick and agile as his unknown forbears, he darts into the arena, and gripping one of the visitors around the knees [ensures] at least her attention. Releasing his hold, and flopping on the floor, he demonstrates conclusively that heredity is stronger than environment, doubling, twisting, contorting, somersaulting till his swarthy smooth skin flushes muddily. Standing erect he raises his hands above his head preliminary to a dry dive, and one is immediately transported to Columbo, with its shoals of child-beggars and their incessant cricket-like chirruping of “I’ll dive! I’ll dive! I’ll dive!”

We learn of Rangi’s parentage. He is about seven. His mother died at birth and he was placed in the Home shortly afterwards. His father visited for a short time… explanation enough to twentyfirst century readers about his neediness. Here though it is undestood in terms of heredity…His performances, the author writes ‘was not taught nor caught from association with his kin or race’. ( Sydney Morning Herald: 18 July 1903, p.5)

In his 1930s publication, The Civilising Process  Norbert Elias also argued that  in the latter half of the nineteenth century children were increasingly seen as less as little adults – as when the philosopher Erasmus was alive in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – but  as children in their own right. Increasingly they were separated and segregated from adult concerns.

The development of orphanages segregating children from the adult world of the workhouse were one response. An Infants Home – a space where small children were raised until they were ready for adoption or fostering – with air and light, space to breathe and the provision of good food was considered essential. It was far away from the dingy crowded squalor of the workhouses and the orphanages were children were herded without maternal care. Such children ‘never grow properly if you have the lot of them together’, wrote  English activist, Florence Davenport Hill in her 1867 book, Children of the State. ‘They only grow up into half-idiotic men and women’.In overcrowded conditions even a ‘good nurse was unable to relate to each child as an individual. Nor was there time to ‘draw out the intelligence of every child and nurse it as it would be nursed in a family home’ ( p.235).

So what do we see in the photograph of the thirteen babies at Ashfield? One of them is crying. Another looks solemnly into the camera. Are there others not ready to sit up? There are so many of them. We wonder who is caring for them and wonder about the impact of parental loss upon the children. For the reader in 1901 it is clear that the Home is a triumph, the photograph of healthy active babies a tribute to the modern techniques that are being followed in the care of the children, some of whom were very ill from neglect and starvation when they arrived.

The emphasis is upon luck. The idea is that environment rather than heredity will prevail and ultimately help the children to live better lives. We learn about the physical surroundings of the Ashfield Home, the flowers and trees evoking a sense of fecundity and care. But there is also the beginning idea that environmental provision also means psychological provision. There is the perception that loving care is best for children. We can be assured that all is well.  The staff are trained: ‘duly qualified in the difficult art of nursing children’. Unmarried mothers also reside in the Home performing domestic duties – *the more reliable ones*  assisting with the children. And at the Home they remain, these babies, until they are around three years old when they are taken over by the government and boarded out to foster parents.

Perhaps the best indicator of the Home’s success, the Town and County Editor writes, is the demonstrable affection between the children and their nurses… deemed better than most mothers. ‘Few mothers have the knowledge and tact which the staff nurses possess, and still fewer are able to spare the time which is devoted to the little ones here… A child does not pretend to be fond of its guardians just because visitors are present…’

For readers in 1901 these were lucky children.

References

 Jed Sekoff, ‘The Undead: Necromancy and the Inner World’, in Gregorio Kohon, (ed), The Dead Mother: The Work of André Green, Routledge, London, 1999, pp. 109 – 127.

Florence Davenport Hill, Children of the State 1867.

Australian Town and Country Journal 16 November 1901, p,38.  nla.gov.au/trove

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Foundlings

06 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by in Australian History, Feminism, Government policy

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I have been tracking newspaper items about foundlings – newborns abandoned by their mother – from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century. The state: New South Wales although I am sure the other states had similar matters to consider.  Foundlings were newsworthy. This entry is not  atypical but it is rather more fully reported than many such items. It was published in 1879.

A FOUNDLING

A strange discovery was made on Saturday night at Ashfield, by a gentleman living near the Foundling Hospital, who found attached to the gate of his private residence a red carpet-bag containing a healthy-looking   female child, apparently about 2 week old,wrapped in a piece of soft flannel. The other contents of the bag were a glass feeding-bottle and the following letter written in a neat female hand, and addressed to the matron of the Foundling Hospital:—

“Dear Madam,

—Please to be kind to this dear little girl, for it is hard, hard, for me to part with her; but I am a poor girl and have not the strength to work for its support; but if things turn out better than they are at present I will send money for its maintenance. Please call her Hilda McCarthur, and a fond mother’s blessing will be your reward. For the present, I do wish it was in my power to keep the dear little lamb, and the great God above, who is the only witness to my sorrow at this moment, will forgive me for this cruel act; but I hope I may yet, perhaps, in after years, show her a mother’s care, for a mother’s love she has already. And now I once more beseech you to call her the name mentioned above, and to be kind to her, for she is very good. And I remain, my dear Madam,

— A mother in sad, sad trouble.” (The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954) Monday 7 July 1879 p 5).

One line of interpretation might be to consider the mother’s background – single, holding a secret, torn between her love for her baby and social expectations of her; hoping, vainly, most likely, that she might find a way to support her infant. Perhaps she was an educated lass, of the middle classes where education was more than basic reading and writing. She wanted a particular name for her child: what does that mean? In a society with so very few rights for single mothers, where illegitimacy was a mark of doom; a sign of inherited degeneracy, this mother was giving as much as she could to her child.

We can only imagine what might have happened next. Little Hilda would have been taken in and cared for, perhaps in a large nursery. Perhaps she was boarded out, Maybe her mother was able to find a position – as a servant or governess. It is clear though that she was one of many that the government of the day was turning its mind to – at the urging of a group of leading women and, indeed, if this report is indicative, sympathetic newspaper editors.

In 1881 New South Wales was one of the first of the Australian colonies to pass legislation making provision for state children to be boarded out – fostered – with families. The  government, led by the venerable and colourful Henry Parkes, was influenced by a group of women – including Lady Mary Windeyer  whose concern for the well being of orphans and foundlings was awakened by British reformer Florence Davenport Hill through her friendship with South Australian woman reformer, Caroline Clark. Hill had written of children living in workhouse and barrack style conditions, their uniformity, the subsequent loss of individuality and the ‘idiocy’ resulting from lack of parental care and bonding. Caroline Clark whose advocacy of boarding out also determined the direction of South Australian government policy. In her little book published in 1907: ‘State Children in Australia’  South Australian  author, reformer and also a  friend of Caroline Clarke, Catherine Helen Spence wrote of the value of boarding out for these abandoned children. Not only  was their vitality apparent but the bonds formed with their foster families continued beyond these formal arrangements. Far better, she affirmed, for the stability of the state.

Hill, Clark and Spence all argued for the contribution of environmental factors as these interacted with inherited traits. They challenged popular notions of abandoned and illegitimate children being of inferior genetic stock – a position affirmed by American sociologist Richard Dugdale in his 1877 study of five generations of a New York family – which he called the Jukes family. Seeking to  understand the origins and intergenerational transmission of ‘crime and dissipation’ Dugdale, I suggest, affirmed the importance of  environmental factors in early infant development… traces of thought taken up by  Freud  and later theorists of the infant mind: D W Winnicott and John Bowlby.

Psychoanalysis, Children In Care and Government Policy, Melbourne,Victoria, 1957

26 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by in 1950s, Government policy

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In my wanderings around Melbourne’s libraries I  have stumbled upon a slim volume with a long title: Child Care Staffs in Institutions: Report on Survey Undertaken for the Children’s Welfare Advisory Council To Determine the Need for Courses of Training. It is softcovered and 111 pages in length, including eight appendices of proposed trainings for mothercraft nurses and the staff of occupation centres. A list of some fifty odd institutions covered in the report heads the field: a mixture of government and religious based institutions, many run by Roman Catholic orders. The report was commissioned by the newly formed Children’s Welfare Advisory Council on 18 September 1956. Established simultaneously with the implementation of the 1954 Children’s Welfare Act the Council was intended to form a link between government and voluntary child care institutions: a way of getting religious and secular institutions on to the same page, maybe. Up until then the two groups had operated separately. Some were happy enough with the new arrangement. Others clearly were not: perhaps the level of co operation from these organisations – particularly Catholic run organisations – were indicative of resistance to the new order. The report was completed in 1957.The powers be thought the public should read it too, so it was  released the following year.

This report is a remarkable historical document – signalling a response to post-war developments in Britain where psychoanalytic clinicians began to articulate the needs of neglected and abandoned children in the light of their experiences with evacuated children. Britain’s 1946 Curtis Report, Children Without Homes, ( ‘Report of the Care of Children Committee’)  written by former University of Western Australia lecturer and then member of Anna Freud’s group, Ruth Thomas.

There had been problems getting it incorporated into British policies, a matter taken up in the House of Lords by Lord Iddesleigh who explained:

Many children were suffering quite unnecessarily because the adults responsible for their upbringing in the various homes and institutions were untrained. There was a most serious lack of trained child workers, and the Curtis Committee therefore established a sub-committee to investigate the whole matter of training. This committee reported, and its report was adopted by the main Committee. There are three recommendations in the Interim Report which appear to have a particular urgency. In the first place, there is the recommendation for the appointment of a Central Training Council of qualified persons representing various bodies engaged in the field of child care. The function of that Central Training Council was to survey the whole field of training, and to establish such facilities as they considered needful. 

Lord Iddesleigh, was worried about a lack of response to the Committee’s findings and that the report and the children would be  forgotten.

Criticisms made by the Curtis Report are very painful, and the revelations are shocking. It it one of the most distressing features of the local authorities’ administration of Poor Law children that very often they are kept in workhouses not for six weeks which I believe is the legal period-but for months and months and months. I do not think that I should be doing my duty if I do not read to your Lordships one brief description of the conditions that prevail in these workhouses. One paragraph in the Report says: “The smell in this room was dreadful. A premature baby lay in an opposite ward alone. This ward was very large and cold. The healthy children were housed in the ground floor corrugated hutment which had been once the old union casual ward The dayroom was large and bare and empty of all toys. The children fed, played and used their pots in this room. They ate from cracked enamel plates, using the same mug for milk and soup. They slept in another corrugated hutment in old broken black iron cots some of which had their sides tied up with cord. The mattresses were fouled and stained. On inquiry there did not appear to be any available stocks of clothes to draw on and it was said by one of the assistant nurses that ‘everything was at the laundry and did not come back.’ The children wore ankle length calico or flannelette frocks and petticoats and had no knickers. Their clothes were not clean. Most of them had lost their shoes; those who possessed shoes had either taken them off to play with or were wearing them tied to their feet with dirty string. Their faces were clean; their bodies in some cases were unwashed and stained.”

This was one of the worst cases, Lord Iddesleigh acknowledged… but coupled with Britain’s history of providing barrack type accommodation for children, his description underlined the depth of the problem. Trained people, he reckoned -(he believed this to be work for women) – would do much to move the situation beyond  what it then was.

It is a very frightening thought, my Lords, the extent to which the happiness of deprived children is confined to not very competent little clerks and minor officials, who are often over-worked, who are not specialists in their subject, and whose horizon is bounded by very petty departmental considerations.(Lord Iddesleigh, 12 December 1946, Session 1946-47,House of Lords Hansard,George VI year 11,853,Fifth Series, Volume 144, cc.882-908).

A decade later, in Victoria, Australia,  David Merritt took up the main thrust of the report as he developed his research project. He argued that the  main danger of institutional life was ‘lack of interest in the child as an individual’, and the tendency to ‘remote and impersonal relations’. The children ‘continually feel the lack of affection’, he continued. It was ‘in striking and painful contrast to the behaviour of a normal child of the same age in his parents’ home’.

Merritt echoes earlier commentary on destitute and state children. In 1909, South Australian writer and activist, Catherine Helen Spence, had made similar observations during the first interstate congress of workers amongst State Children. Her work, in turn, drew upon the work of Florence Davenport Hill whose writings on children living in orphanages and workhouses eventually published in her 1889 book Children of the State  – influenced the direction of government policy in New South Wales and South Australia.  Challenging contemporary eugenicist views of poverty and illegitimacy, Spence argued that that the quality of environmental provision was far more influential for the development of children into contributing members of society than genetic inheritance. She asserted that children who were boarded out, rather than institutionalised, generally fared better than institutionalised children, in the long term, as a result of the bond formed with their foster parents.  At the same congress, a delegate from the New South Wales State Children Relief Board also warned of the detrimental effect of institutionalisation on the individual development of the child.

Recognition of the value of boarding out, and of sustaining the bond between parent and child as much as possible, found endorsement in John Bowlby’s Attachment theory. Perhaps its research base, for Bowlby had assembled his evidence, enabled observations such as Spence’s and anecdotes such as Davenport Hill’s, to be elevated into something more scientific. The effects of maternal deprivation were spelt out afresh. Quoting from Bowlby’s Child Care and the Growth of Love ( Penguin, 1953), Merritt recorded,

The direct studies are the most numerous. They make it plain that, when deprived of maternal care, the child’s development is almost always retarded – physically, intellectually, and socially – and that symptoms of physical and mental illness may appear. Such evidence is disquieting, but sceptics may question whether the check is permanent and whether the symptoms of illness may not be easily overcome. The retrospective and follow-up studies make it clear that such optimism is not always justified and that some children are gravely damaged for life. This is a sombre conclusion, which must now be regarded as established. (Bowlby, 1953, pp.19-20, quoted in Merritt, 1956, p.14).

There was an additional warning: that the effects of deprivation arising from separation in the early years conceivably led to the formation of psychopathy and delinquency. Bowlby’s work had had its origins in clinical work at the London Child Guidance clinic. He had exchanged ideas with D.W Winnicott. It was taking time, but the swing away from views of delinquency as a result of genetic inferiority, to acceptance of notions child development contingent on parental availability and consistency, continued to gain ground steadily during the first half of the twentieth century.

What was required of institutional staff, Merritt concluded, was possession of the ‘qualities and abilities necessary to encourage normal development of each of the children in their care’. Drawing from the Care of Children Committee  Merritt listed the essential features of out of home care: (Note: Forgive the use of the masculine pronoun –  convention in 1956)

(i) Affection and personal interest; understanding of defects; care for his future; respect for his personality and regard for his self esteem.

(ii) Stability; the feeling that he can expect to remain with those who will continue to care for him until he goes out into the world on his own feet.

(iii)Opportunity of making the best of his ability and aptitudes, whatever they may be, as such opportunity is made available to the child in the normal home.

(iv)A share in the common life of a small group of people in a homely environment.

It would be interesting to see the working documents and correspondence that were part of the formation of this report; to turn the pages of the files, to note what was typed copy, what was not; to see what was said in the margin notes and asides, to observe the stuff of a busy day in public service. Who were the clergy who refused to participate, who decided that Merritt’s questionnaires were irrelevant  to their work? And who were the child care staff that became frightened that his questions masked criticism. Can we have  a sense of their ages? their years of experience? and indeed, of those who were kind and who were not? These questions belong to deeper documentary research than I can do here. We can only explore, with Merritt, some of the conditions he found in the institutions he visited and form our own questions.

David Merritt visited seventy-one institutions, each on two occasions. He interviewed staff and provided them with questionaires. He observed  the daily life of children living within the institutions: voluntary and statutory childrens homes, migration homes, babies homes, voluntary and juvenile schools, babies homes and homes for special categories of children: intellectually disabled, deaf and children suffering from spasticity. Accommodation ranged from a training farm accommodating six boys, but with but three resident at the time, up to a statutory institution with a capacity for 250 but actually accommodating 260. The most common type of accommodation was the dormitory style -with mass dining rooms. The largest dormitory was one for 50 boys. Merritt provided statistics and graphs. Of 3,204 state children in 1956 the majority -1500 – were boarded out in Children’s Homes. Only 449 were boarded out in foster homes with 129 placed without payment in foster homes. About 107 children were living in ‘Juvenile schools – having come before the courts -104 were placed in special schools in conjunction with the ‘Mental Hygiene’ department, 304 were living with relatives and the rest variously in live-in employment, hospitals, or were livingin institutions while they were treated for psychological problems.Material provision was high – fresh rooms, plenty of toys but inconsistent care.It appeared that a high proportion of children were ‘educationally retarded’, Merritt said. It was not clear whether this was a consequence of parental neglect or institutionalisation or a result of the frustrations encountered at school.

Merritt seems to have seen himself to be  faced with the problem of reconciling a system which lacked a framework for understanding the emotional, attachment needs of children and adults, with emerging ideas about the  needs of children in out of home care. At times Merritt was critical of the staff – his progressive views conflicting with the old school practicality.’Some staff members saw no problem at all – children were either “dull” or “bright” and that was that. Others were inclined to attribute poor school results to such things as ‘difficulty concentrating, sheer laziness or bad heredity’. He commented” ‘It would be true to say that a number of persons I interviewed failed to show an awareness of the needs of children in this area’.

There was failure to recognise or understand emotional disturbance in children. Merritt’s frustration is palpable when he writes of one person in charge of 100 children or more who claimed there were no emotionally disturbed children amongst them. Closer analysis revealed children from broken homes, that about 50 were wards of the state, some were illegitimate and others ‘she regarded as mentally retarded’. He continued”

When asked about the children’s behaviour she described temper tantrums, bed wetting, stuttering, wilful destructiveness, sulkiness and pilfering amongst the types of behaviour she encountered. That none of these children were emotionally disturbed and consequently had a special need for affection and understanding appears highly unlikely to say the least.

While not all institutions and staff groups were lacking in such understanding there was room for more concern for the emotional and environmental provision for children in care, Merritt concluded after his visits. In many instances  ignorance of the nature and stature of children’s’ needs, inadequate numbers of staff contributed to the malaise – a fact  noted by the British Care of Children Committee. There was a need to modify the organisational structure of such institutions, to train staff, to work to bring the situation in Victoria up to those standards practised in other parts of the world.

Despite resistance by some staff to scrutiny and training there was acceptance and a desire for change. There had been agitation in the press – about institutional conditions and about the lack of training amongst their staff. There were perceptions of abuse, that child welfare practices were not right.  In september 1952 Melbourne’s Argus newspaper had reported extensively on two fourteen year old girls had been incarcerated in the large Bluestone building Pentridge Gaol – a place for the worst criminals and the location of many executions.  That the rival Sydney press gloated that such an event as gaoling young teenage girls would not occur in its state rubbed salt into the wound.

By 1954 a new Children’s Act had been passed by parliament. Merritt’s report, drawing on the understandings provided by psychoanalytic theories and clinicians, promised much – and, at least professional training for staff. It was the beginning of a revolution.

A Letter Home – Ruth Thomas

19 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in 1940s, Anna Freud Centre, Australian Women in Psychoanalysis, Child Study, Government policy, History of Child Guidance, Lay analysis, Ruth Thomas

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Ruth Thomas was born in Sydney in 1902. She a graduate of Sydney’s Fort Street School and continued onwards to Sydney University to study psychology and, in 1923, the founding year of the Australian Society of Psychology and Philosophy, runner up in an essay competition adjudicated by Professor Francis Anderson. The winning essay, ‘The Relation of Repression to Mental Development’ by a Mr Cunningham from the University of Melbourne was published in the Association’s journal. Sadly, Ruth Thomas’s essay, nor the title were published.  On 3 February 1924 the Social and Gossip Column in Perth’s Sunday Mail announced her impending arrival as a lecturer at Claremont Teacher’s College – also under the directorship of Robert Cameron.By 1933 Perth had claimed her as its own. She was moving further afield, the newspapers announced,  she moved to London to take up the post of Principle Lecturer in Education at St Gabriel’s College in Camberwell. ‘Rarely are Australian’s so well treated’ wrote the editor of the Daily News in October 1933. Ruth Thomas had written to her friends who passed her letter to the paper. It was published in full. it is a digression, but reveals some of the liveliness of this woman who seems to be soaking the old world and its beauty into her being..

‘I have just spent a week-end at Cambridge, which is lovely. We went over Trinity and King’s on a wet Sunday afternoon. One or two punts were out on the river in spite of the weather, and the light falling through the woods along the parklands where most of the colleges ‘back’ in (so, Cambridge ‘Backs’ they are called) was almost green as it fell through the bright colors of the new trees. I’ve seen nothing like it before. You’d laugh at it on canvas as unreal. It was fun to see the solemn young undergraduates in grey flannels and brown Norfolk jackets pacing about with the inevitable pipe. I guess they’re luckier than they know.

All was of consuming interest, even where she lived..

‘I have ‘digs’ of my own over-looking a lovely square just off the river and ten minutes from everywhere. I climb solemnly up four flights of very dirty stairs, with the odor of last century’s cooked eggs, and purple wallpaper. At the top I’ve managed to set up some thing like a decent ‘diggings.’ My room is 16ft. by 13 ft., newly done out in cream, and with a built-in wardrobe. Hence it was easy to make it look like it a study. I have a nice Davis carpet, very oriental, in orange and fawn, and ‘ a low divan you’d never recognise as a bed, bookcase and a desk, and other I whatnots, scoured from the Jewish shops in Fulham Road. The scouring required when I got them was another matter.

Perhaps London life at last sated Ruth’s hunger for the arts and culture, and a bit of ‘star spotting’.

‘The other night I went to all night place where artists congregate, for beer and food, and had a table near [the writer] Beverley Nichols. He is what you’d imagine — long and fair and thin — in immaculate evening dress, and with the air of the very modern young man. ‘Alfred Noyes [the poet] is quite different. I went recently to hear him on religion and poetry in a lunch-hour lecture af St Martin’s-in-the-Fields. He has a lovely voice and recites poetry like an angel, but he has also an illogical mind. His matter was horrible. It interested me to hear him say Shakespeare’s greatest line was ‘Ab- sent thee from felicity awhile.’ I shouldn’t have thought it. He is fat and very forty-ish, with a few hairs pulled across a quite bald head, wears large glasses and double-breasted suits. It seems a pity, for the’ author of [the play] ‘Sherwood.’–

For ‘native-born’ Ruth, London was a place of firsts, of seeing sights and artwork hitherto read about in books; the subject of daydreams. There was an exhibition of artwork, murals by Frank Brangwyn commissioned by The House of Lords as a memorial to the Great War ‘Quite the acme of my artistic life here have been the Brangwyn Panels’, Ruth continued.   They were, originally painted for the walls of one of the galleries in the House of Lords as a war memorial, and range from ten to twenty feet in height. The Lords could not see that they were a war memorial, and turned them down after the artist, Brangwyn put nearly ten years’ work in them’. Only five of the eighteen proposed were completed.  The Brangwyn Murals have been uncovered by devotees of lost art….I have found three – also published via the web.

Here are three of the murals Ruth saw at the exhibition.

Ruth Thomas continued: “He strikes the note of actual warfare only, in relation to all living. The riot of life, struggle for power, parasitism and greed, sex, mother love, and pleasure are all portrayed in a most exotic symbolism and the brightest and most exhilarating of greens, blues and oranges. He contemplated, too, a modern panel, with industrialism and luxury in contrast, but there is only a rough sketch of it. It is now thought they will be bought by America and the Lords wont wake up until 2050”.

In September 1937 Ruth Thomas returned to Australia to attend the New Education Fellowship Conference then being held across Australia – after an initial stint in New Zealand. Susan Isaacs, a follower of Melanie Klein, was a keynote speaker. By this time Ruth was on the staff of the London Child Guidance Clinic.

When war broke out in 1939 Ruth Thomas was amongst those recruited by Dame Evelyn Fox to advise on the needs of evacuated children. Others included the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby. As had Winnicott, Ruth Thomas addressed ‘ordinary mothers’ on the needs of children via the BBC. By 1943 she was in charge of a children’s home in Pusey in Wiltshire. She wrote a memo which was included in the  1946 ‘Curtis Report’ – “Children Without Homes”. Its recommendations instrumental in the development of substitute care in the United Kingdom – and a decade later in Australia, in the Victorian State Government’s 1954 Children’s Welfare Act.  after the war. These all brought her into contact with Anna Freud who was also working with displaced children, including a group from European Concentration camps.  There were practical considerations alongside the psychological. Money and goods were scarce. Ruth sought contributions from the folk at home. One such was published in 1947.

Miss Thomas desires clothing that may no longer be needed -knitted woollies, jumpers and cardigans, little boys’ trousers, socks, underwear and old cloth ing that could be cut down. Parcels may be sent to “Miss Ruth Thomas, I Cornwall Gar dens, London S.W. 7.” They must not exceed 11pounds ( weight) or £5 in value, must not contain over 21b. of knitting wool, must be clearly marked “Gift” and a statement must be attached giving details and value. The sending of piece goods in parcels to England is prohibited.

When Anna Freud began a training program at her clinic in 1947, Ruth Thomas was appointed as a training analyst and as a lecturer. In an appreciation published in the Journal of Child Psychotherapy  after her death in 1983 it was noted that ‘her seminars on ego and ego development were models of clarity’. She was much sought as a supervisor; was tough, kindly with high expectations of her students….

There is always going to be migration to and fro, knowledge transmission leaving and coming to Australian shores. Perhaps it is a manifestation of transnationalism, and, as Australian historians begin to explore the possibilities within this concept, it implies a movement away from a defensively assertive independence as the influence of the mother-country is to be shaken away to recognition that we are part of something rather more global….

References:

Kenneth Brill and Ruth Thomas, Children In Homes, London, Victor Gollancz, 1970.

E. E. Model, Ruth Thomas 1902–1983: An appreciation,Journal of Child Psychotherapy, Volume 9, Issue 1, 1983.

The Daily News, 30 June 1933, p.8.

The West Australian, 29 October 1933.

The West Australian, 24  September 1937.

The West Australian, 20 February 1948, p.15.

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Making Wayward Children Wise Citizens – Sydney Feminsts and Psychoanalysis in the 1920s

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in 1920s, Child Study, Feminism, NSW

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Writing on behalf of the National Council for Women for in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Women’s Column of 15 June 1921 Maybanke Anderson set out a  proposal for the development Child Study circles for women. ‘Increasing understanding of psychoanalysis, and all that it involves, may, if women choose to study it and compare notes have an inestimable effect on future generations’. Hopefully ‘if every mother knows how to make a wayward child into a wise citizen our gaols and asylums might, in one generation, be converted into playgrounds’. She invited interested women to the first meeting at 3 o’clock the following Friday.

It was probably inevitable that Maybanke, born in 1845, whose activism  on behalf of women and children since the early 1890s, would make this link between psychoanalysis and child study. Interest in psychoanalysis was remarkably widespread across Australia during these immediate  years after the end of the Great War.  Perusal of the National Library’s Digital Newspaper collection shows that lectures and literature about psychoanalysis drew much interest – not just in the capital cities but in centres as far afield as Northern Queensland, and the far west of New South Wales. There was, of course, the realisation that  shell-shock could be treated using psychoanalytic techniques,  practiced by members of the medical fraternity.

During the 1890s Maybanke Anderson had been a suffragette and,in 1894 founded her own paper, Woman’s Voice  to promote reforming ideas about the rights of women and children. Her friends and associates of that time included a number of significant women reformers –  Rose Scott, Lady Mary Windeyer and her daughter, Margaret,  Louisa Lawson, and  Dora Montefiore. In 1896 when she was a campaigner for womens’ rights she and her colleagues had begun  the world’s first free kindergarten in the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo, She continued working with the Free Kindergarten Union well into the second decade of the twentieth century.Her marriage to Francis Anderson, Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Sydney in 1899 also brought her into contact with the university world.  Francis Anderson’s associate, the psychologist H Tasman Lovell was a particular admirer and friend. He had been charged with developing the first experimental psychology course, including the study of psychoanalysis at the University. Maybanke’s experience with children included teacher training and a period running her own school, Maybanke College in the early to mid 1880s. She was mother to seven children from her first marriage to Edmund Wolstenholme in 1876. Only two  survived to adulthood.

It seems that the take-up of psychoanalytic – and psychological – ideas by women and women’s groups in Australia at this time has not been documented. I cannot find much on this, even though the most recent published history of psychoanalysis in Australia, Joy Damousi’s 2005  Freud in the Antipodes has pointed to the work of the professors at various Australian Universities, and to the significance of the medical fraternity in the development of this arena. Yet women, such as Maybanke, were beginning to argue that as mothers and as educators the understanding of the inner world of the child was as important as physical care.

Maybanke’s book, Mother-Lore, published in 1919, written in the form of an advice manual, picked up notions from the ‘New Psychology’ and from the Child Study Associations  active in Sydney at the time.  In her book she was  concerned not with the physical, bodily care of children – there were plenty of such tomes,  but with the parents’ responsibility to care for the developing minds of their children. She wrote in common language, eschewing technical, psychological terms. Her message was for mothers – and fathers. Maybanke’s argument was that the child’s mind is something that is to be understood nurtured and developed. Children were not miniature adults, nor primitives to be trained in the ways of civilisation but sentient beings learning about themselves in the world. Far from utilising stringent measures as those promulgated by  New Zealander Dr Truby King, (was she having a  swipe at him when she remarked that few doctors were concerned about the developing mind of the baby?) famed for his advocacy of the strictly timed, four hourly feed, Maybanke Anderson  underlined the significance of the maternal/ parental relationship for the growing child. Her account of infant and child development is based  upon careful observation and experience. Maybanke directs her reader’s attention to the developing baby – born blind and deaf,  she asserts in the early chapters. She alerts readers to the babe’s exploration of self  – of arms, legs, hands, toes and fingers but also notes the child’s developing emotional life. She notes that patterns established in early childhood continue for life,  fears, lies, instincts and education. For twentyfirst century readers it is a glimpse into the common problems of child-rearing and notions of citizenship in middle-class English- Australian life during the early 1920s.  A baby has a brain, of course, she wrote. It is the mother’s task and responsibility to direct and help the child to develop.

Overall Maybanke seems to be groping, if not reaching for the notion that the mother’s/parents capacity for attunement and recognition of the babe’s gesture is central to the child’s  sense of becoming.  Her writing is powerfully clear.

Note how the energetic child may become a lazy man. His small endeavours to construct were burned as rubbish, or swept away because they littered the floor. He hurt his fingers with the hammer and we denied him the result of his experiments and hid the tool he longed to use. He cut the furniture with his little saw and scratched the floor with his chisel so we took them both away, not remembering that training he got by his endeavours would be of more use than the polish of the furniture and the tidiness of the floor. He was a troublesome boy, always wanting to do something. So we sent him to school early; and there all the work was talking and reading, he learned that work with the hands was degrading rather than ennobling, and that, if he wanted to be a gentleman he must wear a stiff collar and a good coat. So at length with his bright enthusiasm killed, he learned to sit still and smother his instincts, and the world lost an inventor, and gained a draper’s assistant. If it were not so common we would think it a tragedy. ( Mother-Lore, pp 17-18).

As a representative of the National Women’s Council Maybanke could have been following the lead of other women’s organisations in Sydney. It may be that some of its members also attended a lecture on psychoanalysis and war trauma given by Ethel Mortimer Langdon at the Women’s Club. In October 1920, the Feminist Club sponsored a lecture on psychoanalysis by Ruby Rich,who had just returned to Sydney after eight years away, some of these,  a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald, said, spent studying ‘under Freud in Switzerland’. Perhaps this was an error… Switzerland was the place where  Carl Jung, Freud’s former protegé, was located. Rich’s lecture described as captivating by its listeners, was  followed by a second lecture. Both were repeated. A month later Ruby Rich announced her intention to ‘form a study circle on the subject of psychoanalysis under the aegis of the Feminist Club’. Apparently the Club continued its interest in mental health matters. On 9 February 1921 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that  the Feminist Club had passed a motion urging the re-centering of   ‘the clinic of psychiatry’ in general hospital work, and not be carried out by the Lunacy Department’.The Club paid especial attention to children. It included a clause ‘that special provision should be made for children temporarily mentally affected under the aegis of the work of this (hospital) clinic’.

Psychiatry was not Maybanke Anderson’s field. Her’s was education, in kindergartens and schools.  It is clear though, that in the immediate post-war years that she and her colleagues were working together, albeit following different threads of thought – to advocate for the development of psychological services within their particular communities of parents and children. For them psychoanalysis – and psychology –  held ideas that should not remain exclusive, confined within the portals of the medical fraternity. They had a place in the broader community to be used for its development.