Hungary’s Forgotten Foundlings: State Care for “Abandoned” Children at the Turn of the 20th Century
Friederike Kind-Kovács
2022
Beitrag von Friederike Kind-Kovács, Hungary’s Forgotten Foundlings: State Care for “Abandoned” Children at the Turn of the 20th Century. In: Romanian Journal of Population Studies, Volume: XV Issue: 2, pp. 89–114.
Abstract
This article focuses on the emerging institutional protection for Hungary’s “abandoned” children around the turn of the 20th century. It engages with the shift from private philanthropic to state interventions on behalf of the so-called “illegitimate” children, meaning children who were born out of wedlock and/or had been abandoned. It scrutinizes the formulation of legislation targeting the protection of this particularly vulnerable group of children and the establishment of a specialized institutional infrastructure comprising child asylums and a foster system to provide care for these children.