Christine Stansell begins her article with a CAS agent narration that stumbles on two children who are collecting pieces of firewood to take back home to their parent to enable them to stay warm. This was among the prevalent scenes back in the mid-1800s when crime and homeless people were at a high rate. As seen often, the children and their mother could not be assisted because of inappropriate upbringing or simply the times. However, they, in fact, had some achievements that would eventually assist them dramatically to reduce the rate of crime and homelessness.
Stansell brings up the role of children in the streets (Stansell 92). She contends to the fact that street children were at that time expected to earn their living. This implied that each day the children were to be sent to the streets to collect and peddle useful items. These children proceeded far from childhood experience that most people have at that particular age. Once they attain a particular age, children are often regarded not children anymore most particular at the age of seven. At this age, they are considered adults. They need to fend for themselves by selling items, stealing and conducting whatever they could to ensure they live on. From the very early age, these same children are not taught of anything to do with cultural practices nor are they taught behaviors that are recommended for children at their age. However, they are in fact taught how to survive in New York City without anything other than clothes on their back, if at all they had some.
Many jobs exist that can provide work for children with a variation of age. Among the very common ways of children making their living in the streets is street selling or Huskers. They can as well participate in legitimate jobs which include; crosswalk sweeping, horse holding, bootblacking, newspaper selling and errand running. A boy, for instance, trapped butterflies in the fall of summer and had the chance of selling the same butterflies to canary owners. There were additional scavengers. Often construct of the children who are seen to be younger, these children dig trash in search of things that can be of use to them. After a while, the only way that children could be able to make their keep was scavenging, or most of them considered huckster. Because of the increased number of immigrants, the number of children was greatly influenced, and most of them attempted to survive on the streets. Due to these, scavenging proved difficult for most of them and eventually they chose to steal from other people.
In the midst of 1880, the City of New York became a major crime city (Stansell 101). The more scavenging becomes theft, the more children hustled for one or two ways to make a living. This brought about prostitution for younger women to a point that almost fifty prostitutes existed in a single mile on Broadway. Additionally, due to home troubles, most children did not attend to their homes for a while at crimes living among the street children. Unfortunately, all the children street problems have entirely been blamed on women. Poverty was possible to strike women in case their man left. Also, women had the responsibility of taking care of their children.
Luckily, the CAS saved the day for most of the street children in New York City with the place-out program that they introduced. This program assisted in removing younger women form and did not place them in foster homes, but instead CAS taught them how to behave like women. The whole concept was training poor women to be mothers and avoid bad parenting which was the reason for many children in the streets.
Works Cited
Stansell, Christine. "Women, Children and the Uses of the Street." Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in US Women’s History (1990): 92-108.
