Lessons in Advertising, Act I: Guilt.

[autochrome.livejournal.com]

Comments

[janenx01.livejournal.com]

OMG. The matron in the glasses. The kid playing with a stick and a wad of paper. The scary locked gate. I'm calling my broker right now!

[pony-rocks.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, that orphanage caretaker looks sexy! The boy might grow to appreciate it someday. Or the girls.

[nekusagi.livejournal.com]

The line almost sounds ominous, like father got on the wrong end of the mob.

[marchenland.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I've seen this somewhere before, many years ago. I think it was reproduced in a Reader's Digest book my mom had, along with some other odd old ads.

Love it!

[cinnamonbite.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I kinda like orphanages better than foster homes. We should go back to those. People could volunteer at orphanages. In foster homes, kids are lost in the system.

So did this kid's ma get sent to debtor's prison? Would this kid not be in an orphanage if he did get a huge insurance settlement? Or would he have been adopted already (by a loving family, of course)? I don't get the connection this ad is trying to make.

[misstia]

i tend to agree with you about orphanages....the foster home system in the US is pretty broke...kids go from home to home and get lost in the system and are subject to all kinds of abuse and some foster parents only get into foster parenting for the money they get, not to help children....

and i wondered the same thing...where's the kid's mom?

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

Back when the ad was made, there would have been many many more kids in orphanages than could be adopted. And without the insurance, Mother would have had to go to work, which she couldn't do with the kids around. There's an Australian autobiography, "Caddie", about a divorced mother with two children. She works as a barmaid (only work she could get), and has to put her children into Children's Homes while she works because they're too young to live at home and she can't find anyone reliable to look after them (1930s Sydney)

[cinnamonbite.livejournal.com]

Is that how it worked? So the parents didn't actually give up custody and the kids weren't really available for adoption? Just continuous daycare? Still makes better sense than what we have now.

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

No, two different things. You could be an orphan if just one parent was dead, if your other parent surrendered you to an orphan's home. Then you were available for adoption, but there were many more children than were wanted for adoption. Children older than babies tended not to find new homes, and would instead be given various trades or taught skills that would serve them later. Quite often older children would be sent to be low-paid live-in farm workers in remote areas - the girls would be cook-cleaner-dogsbody and the boys would be labourers.

Children's Homes were the places kids would stay instead of foster parents. They'd be run the same as orphanages, but the parents would be paying a fee for the care of the children. In "Caddie", the Matron noted that Caddie was paying the lowest fee, but was the only mother who visited the children every single week.

My godmother was a carer in the Burnside Home in Sydney in the 1960s. By then, they were run more like normal homes in that there were only 8-10 children in a house (rather than a dorm) and the "House Mother" would be living in and caring for them. Again, this was instead of foster families (which existed but there weren't so many of them), and these would be children who were expecting to go back to their parents some day.

Which makes me wonder if for all that it's called "Orphan Asylum", I wonder if both sorts of children lived at the one in the picture. Or if the artist didn't know how the places worked.

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

My grandmother was put in an orphanage for a bit when her mom left her dad. I don't know details, as my grandmother never talked about it much, so I don't know how long she was there. When my great-grandmother remarried she took my grandmother back.

I do know my grandmother got influenza or something because they put her in a bed that was infected. (some disease that was plaguing people back in the 20s or 30s. I forget)

/anecdatata

That advert is just disturbing.

[telesilla.livejournal.com]

So the parents didn't actually give up custody and the kids weren't really available for adoption? Just continuous daycare?

Yeah, sometimes. A really famous example in the US is the ballplayer Babe Ruth. Both his parents were alive and he had a sibling at home when he was put in a reform school/orphanage (it was both) at the age of 7 and he stayed there until he signed with the Orioles at 19. He didn't actually have a police record or anything, but his sister later said that he was wild and that his father, who ran a saloon, couldn't keep him in line.
The school itself wasn't very academic; they concentrated on tyring to fit the boys to one of several trades they taught and not book learning.

[cactuswren.livejournal.com]

Eileen Simpson, in her book Orphans: Real and Imaginary, tells of how she and her sister spent several years in what they were told was a convent boarding school after their mother's death, but while their father was still alive. After his death they were moved to a preventorium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventorium) and then went to live with an aunt, but it wasn't until many years later that Simpson went back to the "boarding school" and learned that it was, and had always been, an orphanage: their father, a young widower in failing health himself, had not known where else to put them.

[singeaddams.livejournal.com]

I used to work for an adoption non-profit and everyone was unanimous in their disapproval of orphanages. No 'system' is perfect but a foster home gives a child insight and instruction on how to function within a family while an orphanage only teaches them how to withstand an impersonal institution.

[cinnamonbite.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, some of us grew up in, "families," and still have no idea how to function within a family. Everyday I'm just giddy to have furniture, ya know? Everything else is a bonus! LOL

[crossfire.livejournal.com]

Holy CRAP.

[spuzzlightyear.livejournal.com]

Oddly, I like how that girl is holding the stick. Does she have field hockey asprirations?

[tink-queen.livejournal.com]

Holy Toledo, I've no words.

[cuddyclothes.livejournal.com]

From the expression on the caretaker's face, I think she's jealous of the little boy talking to the sexy broad. Not only poverty, but hot historical girl on girl action!

ETA: Is it okay to say that I covet the sexy broad's coat?

[gillianinoz.livejournal.com]

OMFG - that is grim.

In England they took kids from these homes and shipped them to Australia - whether they had parents or not. Some scary scary stories of what happened to those poor little buggers.

Kids who lost a mother were often is just as serious straits - fathers had to work and couldn't take care of little ones. I know of more than one family that was split up back then - the kids farmed out to relatives when their mothers died.

My own mothers mum died when she was twelve and her father remarried almost instantly - to a widow with two little ones of her own. Better than an 'orphan asylum' I guess.

[pikkewyntjie.livejournal.com]

Just think. If Father hadn't been such a deadbeat, the kids would have been left a fortune! So instead of being sent to the Orphan Asylum, they could be exploited by greedy and abusive distant relatives and ended up penniless and living on the streets by 12 anyway. And that would be better how?

[cactuswren.livejournal.com]

Prudential did a huge series of guilt-based ads in the 1920s and 1930s. I'll have to see if I can find some of them. One showed a row of kids who look twelve to fifteen years old sitting outside a door marked "WORKING PAPERS ISSUED HERE"; this one was captioned "Children of the Lapse". Another, "Two Widows", showed one woman sitting in her beautifully appointed parlor, looking out the window as her children play; at her elbow is her uniformed maid. The implication is that one woman's husband was so irresponsible as to die leaving his wife unprovided-for. A third just showed a stricken-looking young man leaving a doctor's office (we can tell, because it's got DOCTOR'S OFFICE on the glass); the caption is "Sick! -- And I let my Life Insurance lapse!"

[murakozi.livejournal.com]

Father didn't keep his premium paid up so the insurance company offed him? Man, they were really strict back then.

[jocelmeow.livejournal.com]

I can remember a television ad along these same lines when I was less than five years old! It featured a mother standing by the telephone, obviously worried now that she was on her own, looking out a rain-streaked window as a child played nearby.

I probably remember this because my father was battling one of his three occurrences of Hodgkin's Disease that happened between 1978 and 1982. As much as my parents tried to shield me from it - I knew that Daddy was sick, and he threw up a lot - I knew something was wrong, and that what was happening in the ad could happen in my family. That ad terrified me.

My father, who was originally diagnosed as Stage IV, did eventually go into remission for good in 1982. He found Jesus at a very conservative church in the cancer years, and his newfound faith drove a wedge between him and my mom (they divorced), and eventually between him and me (we fought mightily when I was a teen), but I'm glad he was there for those things to happen.