Family and Friendship
Family and Friendship
Kin-like Relations and Racialized Universalism
This chapter assesses the promise of intimacy by exploring the intersection of kin-like relations and racial ideologies in the 1950s and 1960s. It focuses on mainline Protestant Christian Children's Fund (CCF), founded in 1938 and the largest organization of its type at the time, along with two of its evangelical competitors, World Vision and Compassion, founded in 1950 and 1952, respectively. These organizations are exemplary of a major shift in twentieth-century sponsorship from emergency relief into a form of permanent fundraising. The chapter then considers the role of race in sponsorship's promise of kin-like relations. Unlike their First World War antecedents, which principally focused on white children in need of wartime relief, mid-century sponsorship organizations solidified a pattern that continues today: the presumed white sponsor of the non-white child. The chapter also studies how organizations shaped children's letter-writing and the dynamics of U.S. family life in which the letters played a part.
Keywords: kin-like relations, Christian Children's Fund, World Vision, Compassion, sponsorship, fundraising, sponsorship organizations, race, letter-writing, U.S. family life
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
