Children of the Polish Republic: Child Health, Welfare, and the Shaping of Modern Poland, 1915-1939

“Children of the Polish Republic” looks at the intersection of children, social care, and state formation. Beginning in 1915 and ending in 1939, the project traces the increasing encroachment of medical, social care, and state authorities into children’s lives and families, the expansion of care beyond philanthropic and charitable realms, and the crafting of approaches and environments to counteract the harmful effects of the home and the street on Poland’s future citizens. It looks at policy as enacted on the ground and scientific, medical, and political discourses as translated, negotiated, and altered in real-life practice. This dissertation explores Poland’s evolving network of child care through examining how state and non-state actors shaped and disciplined society through child- and family-focused interventions; the evolution of the child as a conceptual category and a container for intense social anxieties; the formalization of the medical community’s knowledge and power in society; and the transition from philanthropy and charity to social medicine, social welfare, and social pedagogy amid persistent shortages in funding, resources, and personnel. It traces the transformation of child welfare from an entirely private, charity-driven system during the partitions to a mixed welfare economy characterized by a weak state and robust non-state providers. The project draws on archival and published source material related to wartime relief work, international humanitarian relief efforts, inspections of welfare institutions, institutional activities, and professional discussions about child well-being. By focusing on children as a tool of state building, children’s activists chose a particularly moral-social issue to an otherwise political-economic project. Interrogating the discourses and methods of childhood governance employed by the interwar Polish state and non-state providers reveals the kind of “model citizen” they were hoping to create.