When Orphans Aren’t Actually Orphans
Pop culture is full of lovable orphans. There’s Annie, of course, and Harry Potter, and the Boxcar Children, and James (with the Giant Peach), and Cinderella—the list goes on and on. They have familiar stories: The protagonist loses parents and finds themselves in dire straits, typically under the supervision of evil caretakers. But through grit, wit, and, often, the help of a wealthy, generous benefactor—think Daddy Warbucks—they’re able to succeed.
When author Kristen Martin lost her own parents to cancer as a child, her experience as an orphan was nothing like that. There were no evil stepparents to outsmart before going on epic adventures. Relatives stepped in; the grief was consuming. The “utter disconnect,” she says, between her experience and those of pop culture protagonists was part of the inspiration for her book, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood.
Martin explores the history of orphanhood in America since the 1800s and its harsh reality today, coming to a striking conclusion: It is poverty—rather than the death of both parents—that has often led children to be deemed orphans. “The fact is,” Martin writes, “most of the children we’re talking about when we’re talking about orphans had one or two living parents but were separated from them, either voluntarily or involuntarily,” she writes.
Despite the narrative that “we are a nation that values the nuclear family, rallies around children in need, and believes all young people have promising future,” in reality, “only some are deserving of strong familial ties.”
The book takes readers from the proliferation of religious orphanages in the 1800s; to orphan trains, when a quarter million poor children from East Coast cities were sent on trains to homes in the Midwest, where they often labored as farm hands; to the Foundling Asylum of the Sisters of Charity (now New York Foundling), where mothers anonymously left their infants in a cradle on the stoop, relinquishing them for adoption; to Indian boarding schools, part of a 150-year effort to dispossess Native children of their identities and reform them in Christian ideals; to the modern foster care system, in which poverty and addiction often drive home investigations and family separation.
At each step, Martin reminds readers that, despite the narrative that “we are a nation that values the nuclear family, rallies around children in need, and believes all young people have promising future,” in reality, “only some are deserving of strong familial ties.” In the 1930s, when the number of orphanages in America peaked—and when Annie takes place—only a tenth of institutionalized children had lost both parents. Letters from parents of children sent on orphan trains reveal their desperation: “I wish to ascertain what part of the United States he is residing in and if he is well cared for,” wrote one father in 1860 to the Children’s Aid Society, which spearheaded the orphan train movement. “I was promised when he was sent away that I would know what place he was to be sent to. He left my house last January and it is as you are aware a long time to wait to hear from him…I feel worried about him, as he was sent away without me seeing him.”
The parallels to today are unmistakable: The Foundling cradle has an eerie resemblance to modern day Safe Haven Baby Boxes, which are installed outside places like fire departments, and which anti-abortion policymakers often tout as a safe, anonymous option way for desperate mothers to surrender their children. The distress in the father’s letter sounds like that of parents today asking about their children in foster care. The letters of children on orphan trains asking the Children’s Aid Society for basic information about where they were born and how old they are echoes the efforts of present-day adoptees requesting their birth certificates and birth parents’ identities.
I spoke to Martin about her research and the stories we tell ourselves about orphanhood. Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why do you think we tell the stories we tell about orphans in pop culture?
There’s the narrative plot answer to that question, and then there’s the deeper, critical answer to that question. If you have an orphan as a protagonist, they come with a built-in conflict. Especially for children’s stories, they are expedient protagonists, because you don’t have to worry about the issue of them having adults who are going to stop them from doing the things that they are going to do in the story, like go off on an adventure. The child has more agency in these stories.
“It’s like this whole fetish of individualism, essentially, that we’re promoting. It’s very, very American.”
But the fact that we have so many of these stories, and they they often have very similar beats and morals and takeaways—to me, it promotes this idea that America is a country where all children have the ability to make something of themselves, and that these children are able to, through their own resilience, grit, and spunk, to overcome horrible situations, both from losing their parents and then, usually in these stories, there’s some kind of evil caretaker at the beginning that the child has to get away from. And then usually, there’s an adult figure who comes along who’s super benevolent and saves the child. It’s like this whole fetish of individualism, essentially, that we’re promoting. It’s very, very American. And the reality that we’re not looking at is that, throughout American history, the children who have been most vulnerable, who we’ve considered to be “orphans”— mostly what they’re suffering from is being in a society where their parents are poor, and they’re separated from their parents. That is something that we just don’t want to look at.
How do you define “orphan”?
Before I started the book, I would say it was either a full orphan, someone whose parents both died before they were majority age, or a half orphan, someone who had lost one of their parents before age 18. And now I would say that this is a largely symbolic category—that it means what we want it to mean, and that historically, a lot of orphans have just been poor children or children who were separated from their families. That would also include Black children during slavery, who were sold away from their parents. It would include Native children who were forced to attend boarding schools and were taken away from their families and their tribes. And now in foster care, it would also include children who are, by court order, separated from their families. If we think of all of these children as full orphans like me, whose parents are dead, it renders their parents and families as non-entities, and it’s very convenient. It’s convenient to not have to think about the family connections with these children. It’s easier for us as a culture to just ignore that they exist.
I was shocked to learn that, back in the 1800s and early 1900s, so few kids in orphanages had actually lost both parents.
“The children who were spending time in orphanages mostly had at least one parent who was living.”
The first thing that really blew my mind when I was doing my research was, wow, orphans are not orphans. The children who were spending time in orphanages mostly had at least one parent who was living.
You did archival research, looking at letters that parents and kids involved in orphan trains wrote to the Children’s Aid Society in the 1800s. What was it like reading those letters?
It was parents who were asking for information about their children: where they had been placed and what had become of them. Those letters devastated me.
And then the letters the kids wrote were also very upsetting to read, because often they were asking for very basic information about themselves, like “How old am I?” Another thing in the records were letters sent from former orphan train riders as adults, seeking information about themselves. People were in their 60s and 70s and 80s, asking, “Where was I born? When was I born? Who are my parents?” These were things that were still hounding them, weighing on them so many years later.
It’s reminiscent of modern-day adoptees who don’t have access to their original birth certificates because they were sealed. When I was in the archives, I was thinking, wow, we have really learned nothing. Because we ignore this history, we’ve learned nothing from it. And the thing that we should learn is that it is devastating to not have access to this information about yourself. It is extremely harmful. It’s harmful for the children. It’s harmful for the birth parents to have this severance.
Baby boxes are popular today, particularly among anti-abortion policymakers. What do you make of that?
This is something that has existed since the Middle Ages in Europe. This was happening all over in Catholic countries, where we had this huge taboo against extramarital conception. And that’s what was happening in the United States, too. In the 1800s, Catholic organizations created these mechanisms for people to anonymously relinquish their children. We were doing this 200 years ago, and it had very bad outcomes, and we have not learned from that. When [baby boxes] come up in the news now, you don’t hear about the fact that these organizations existed in the past. Instead, it’s this happy story of, “Oh look, a firefighter has rescued this baby, and the mom must have been really evil, and it’s so nice that this baby’s gonna have a better life, and maybe the firefighter himself is going to adopt them. Oh, wow, great local news story.”
Often, after natural disasters or wars, we hear about orphans who need help. What should we keep in mind as we hear about such situations going forward?
Every time we have some kind of crisis—an example of this would be the earthquake in Haiti—there’s immediately this apparatus that pops up. It’s usually religious organizations, charities that want to scoop up children and make them adoptable. In general, these children are not orphans—they have either parents who can take care of them, who are still living, or larger family networks.
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