Jill Lepore
“Baby Doe: A political history of tragedy"
The New Yorker, February 1, 2016
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jlepore/files/childhood_bibliography.pdf
A Note about Sources
N.B.
For readers who’d like to read more, or who are undertaking their own research, here is a select bibliography of my sources for this piece.
As with all the bibliographies for New Yorker essays that I post on my Harvard faculty website, this brief discussion mentions a good number of works consulted but it’s neither an exhaustive inventory of my sources nor a survey of the scholarship in a given field.
Instead, I’ve listed works I found
most useful or especially provocative.
I have generally only included manuscripts,
journal and magazine articles, and books; I haven’t listed interviews here at all; I’ve
generally not included things like newspapers, advertisements, patents, legislation, and
policy statements; and I’ve left out citations from specialized bodies of literature in fields
like medicine and law.
A last caveat: these brief bibliographies are all frozen in time: I do not update them, and they therefore don’t include anything written on these subjects after the date on which my essay was published.
My accounts of the Baby Doe investigation and the pre-trial proceedings relating to
criminal charges against
Rachelle Bond and
Michael McCarthy are derived from court
documents, press coverage, and interviews, especially with Bond’s attorney,
Janice Bassil, and with employees of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.
Sources for
my account of the current controversy at the
Massachusetts Department of Children and
Families
include published investigations into
recent deaths, including reports published by
DCF itself, by the
Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate and by the
Child
Welfare League of America.
My thanks to everyone I interviewed, including DCF
Commissioner Linda Spears and the Massachusetts Child Advocate, Maria Mossaides.

My account of the Gallison case is based on the complete records of the separate criminal
trials of Denise and Edward Gallison (including court briefs, dockets, and trial testimony); newspaper accounts from
1978-1980; the results of the state-mandated
investigation,

“Report of the Massachusetts Child Abuse and Neglect Fact-Finding Commission: First Case Study,” typescript, June 26, 1978; and interviews with Denise
Gallison, with members of her family, and with her caregivers, that appear in a one-hour
documentary,

Denise: The Tragedy of Child Abuse (Boston: ABC-TV, 1980).

I also
interviewed Eleanor Dowd, who served as a staff member for the Fact-Finding
Commission.
Primary sources that I cite regarding the history of child protection in the nineteenth
century include Florence Davenport Hall, Children of the State: The Training of Juvenile
Paupers (New York: Macmillan, 1868); Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, Revised manual of the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of
Cruelty to Children: Laws of Massachusetts Concerning Children (Boston: The Society,
1882); and Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Junior
Division, A Few Words to Children about Some Other Children (Boston, MA: Junior

Division, Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1920). A
secondary account of the MSPCC is Ray S. Hubbard, Crusading for Children: The
Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (Boston: MSPCC, 1943).
My accounts of the history of child welfare, of child protection, and especially of the
post-1974 report-abuse regime are derived from materials that include articles in medical
journals (most notably, John Caffey, “Multiple Fractures in Long Bones of Infants
Suffering from Chronic Subdural Hematoma,” American Journal of Roentgnology [1946]
and C. Henry Kempe et al, “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” Journal of the American
Medical Association 181 [1962]: 17-24); coverage of the issue in newspapers and
magazines; and public records (including legislative hearings, legislation, and newspaper
accounts of legislative debate). These individual sources are too numerous to cite here. A
representative Progressive era account is Homer Folks, The Care of Destitute, Neglected,
and Delinquent Children (New York: Macmillan, 1902). An element of this history that I
did not discuss is the Children’s Bureau, but see Katharine Briar-Lawson et al, eds., The
Children’s Bureau: Shaping a Century of Child Welfare Practices, Programs and
Policies (Washington, DC: NASW Press, 2013). Popular polemics about child abuse
about from 1962-1980, see, e.g., Naomi Feigelson Chase, A Child Is Being Beaten:
Violence Against Children, an American Tragedy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1975) and Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert J. Solnit, Before the Best
Interests of the Child (New York: The Free Press, 1979).
I also relied on the considerable scholarship in the fields of history, political science, and
public health policy, tracing the history of child welfare, as well as on a significant body
of academic literature critiquing the scandal-reform cycle. A sample of notable works in
this field includes: LeRoy Ashby, Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and
Abuse in American History (New York: Twayne, 1997); Ian Butler and Mark Drakeford,
Social Policy, Social Welfare and Scandal: How British Public Policy is Made (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Lela B. Costin et al, The Politics of Child Abuse in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Juliet Gainsborugh, Scandalous
Politics: Child Welfare Policy in the States (Washington, DC: Georgetown University
Press, 2010); Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of
Family Violence, Boston, 1880-1960 (New York: Penguin, 1988); Ruth Homrighaus,
Baby Farming: The Care of Illegitimate Children in England, 1860-1943, Ph.D.
dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003); Emily Horowitz, “’I was
a child abuser!’: What we read when we read about child abuse,” Psychology of Popular
Media Culture 3 (2014): 79-96; Duncan Lindsey, Child Poverty and Equality: Securing a
Better Future for America’s Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009);
Duncan Lindsey, The Welfare of Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004),
specially chapter 5, “The End of Child Welfare: The Transformation of Child Welfare
into Child Protective Services”; John E.B. Myers, Child Protection in America: Past,
Present, and Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Barbara J. Nelson,
Making an Issue of Child Abuse: Political Agenda Setting for Social Problems (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984); Nigel Parton, The Politics of Child Protection:
Contemporary Developments and Future Directions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014); Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America’s Young in

the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Eve P. Smith and
Lisa A. Merkel-Holguin, eds., A History of Child Welfare (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 1996); and Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern
Childrearing in America (New York: New York University Press, 2003). I have written
about the history of childhood in several essays, including in a book called The Mansion
of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (New York: Knopf, 2012), whose endnotes
point to a broader literature on the history of childhood as a stage of life.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences studies are available online, as are many materials
relating to Yale’s Minding the Baby Program. My particular thanks to the faculty and
staff at Minding the Baby, for particularly illuminating interviews regarding the provision
of preventative care. Publications reporting the results of the clinical trial include Monica
Roosa Ordway et al, “Lasting Effects of an Interdisciplinary Home Visiting Program on
Child Behavior: Preliminary Follow-Up Results of a Randomized Trial,” Journal of Pediatric Nursing (2013).