ABOUT CARECENTURY

Our objectives

To achieve this goal of defining and explaining historical care practices, CareCentury has three objectives:

(1) to show the nature and scope of the invisible work required during the first 1,000 days of life using unexamined voices, spaces and things.

(2) to use insights from sociological and economic literatures to conceptualize and theorize the caretaking regimes of central and eastern Europe and explain continuities and discontinuities of caretaking within one diverse region.

(3) to examine the afterlife of caretaking regimes after 1989 and European Union expansion, while also exploring the legacies and debates about caretaking which endure today.

Historical context

While the birthing and nurturing of young children seems timeless, care practices and the hard work supporting them are historically and contextually contingent. The work of Elisheva Baumgarten shows us that Jewish mothers with expendable financial means often hired Gentile women to nurse and care for their infants in the early modern German lands. Centuries later in the Galician city of Kraków, Tadeusz Żeleński opened the first “Drop of Milk” station in 1905 and offered animal milk to supplement or replace breast milk to the caretakers of babies big and small. Before the First World War unraveled it, the Habsburg Empire possessed medical facilities which offered cutting edge maternal care. Vienna, the seat of that Empire, was home to the largest maternity clinic in the world in the mid-19th century. Despite this, only 20% of all the births in that city took place in a hospital setting around the year 1910 . By 1920, the number of hospitalized births in Vienna had doubled to 40% and it doubled again by the 1950s. Today less than 1% of births in all of Austria occur at “home” and wet nurses or jugs of animal milk have been replaced with pumped breast milk or powdered formula. How did the increase of technologies related to infant feeding and the hospitalization of childbirth, especially in the middle of the 20th century, change the earliest care given to newborns and the care instructions given to parents?

As babies in the past grew, they encountered equally contingent care. In 1905, a long-debated “New Poor Statute” was passed in Budapest which reconfigured how orphans and foundlings on the Hungarian side of the Habsburg Empire received care and played in institutional settings. Less than three decades later in the Warsaw Ghetto, the president of the Jewish Council Adam Czerniakow celebrated the opening of three new play spaces for the tens of thousands of Polish Jewish children confined to that space. Bands and youth groups joined Czerniakow in celebrating what appeared to be a loosening of Nazi-decreed restrictions. This loosening was short lived as the Great Deportation targeting the Jews of Warsaw began just seven weeks later. Care and play, it should be acknowledged, necessarily continued throughout good times and bad. Out of the ruins of that Ghetto, playgrounds materialized soon after the Holocaust and the Second World War alongside new socialist-style apartment buildings and magnificent memorials to the “Ghetto Fighters. Sandboxes multiplied on rebuilt or newly built urban topographies in places like Prague, Nowa Huta and Sarajevo across the 20th century to entertain children born in the wake of wartime destruction. How did playground design, placement and engagement change across large cities, small villages and many decades of observation, especially after World War II when cities were rebuilt and redesigned en masse in the region?

The post-World War II baby-boom specifically dovetailed with large swaths of women entering the labor force in “socialist countries” like Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia. There in the city of Lučenec a 24 hour daycare center opened and some parents who had most likely been raised by biological family members or neighbors just a generation earlier dropped their children off on Monday only to retrieve them on Friday. Today, thanks to family leave policies, daycares across central and eastern Europe monitor fewer children on the whole than during the Cold War and public play spaces are populated once again with mothers and fathers who to varying degrees are supported by their states to stay at home with their young. One of out six of those mothers and a less precise number of fathers, recent findings have suggested, will exhibit symptoms of post-partum depression at some point in the first few months of their newborn’s life. To what extent did moral assumptions about the superiority of maternal care impact societal views of parental mental health and the composition of caretakers working in orphanages, daycares and private homes?

Invisible work

Invisible work is, by definition, difficult to visualize. Work related to the birthing, feeding, playing cleaning and nurturing during the first 1,000 days is not often captured in archival documents or existing historiographies. Untapped historical sources, like the remnants of caretaker voices, remainders of the material “things” that helped caretakers and realistic images of the “places” that surrounded those receiving care help to focus our historical lens on the sensorial, daily experiences lived by the very young and those who cared for them. The voices, things and spaces which detail caretaking did not change in some ways but changed dramatically in others over the course of the 20th century, a century marked not only by rapid technological advancements, but by shifting ideologies. Why did families, communities, societies and states distribute resources specific to more public care outside of the private home in different ways over time?

Why central and Eastern Europe?

To answer this ambitious question and others posed above, this European Research Council Starting Grant Project focuses on central and eastern Europe, to be understood as the region encompassing the Habsburg Empire and, after 1918, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Austria and Yugoslavia. More than any other transnational region in the modern period, political entities in this hyper-diverse territory took on many forms (from imperial, liberal, fascist and socialist to capitalist, democratic, isolationist and integrationist) between 1905 and 2004. Polities shifted politically, economically and socially. This region was altered by two brutal World Wars, one Holocaust, other ethnic cleansings, occupations, the Cold War (with Austria in the “West”, the majority in the “East” and Yugoslavia unaligned) as well as successful (1918, 1989) and failed revolutions (1918-1920, 1956, 1968, 1989?).

So too did the communities rooted in this region change dramatically across the same era. People with different religious beliefs, inherited knowledge bases and ethnic belongings cared for their offspring alongside each other until at certain moments even co-nurturing became untenable. To what extent did religious, ethnic and national values impact and differentiate caretaking within communities? If caretaking as a concept cries out for historical interpretation and analysis, no region offers a more complex and diverse laboratory to study it between the years of 1905 and 2004 than central and eastern Europe.