14 ms·
Children for Sale, 1948
- Ballu 8y agoGrand Daughter comment in comments section complete the story... (If she really was her grand daughter).
- pergadad 8y agoThank you for pointing this out. Moving indeed, in particular how this pain is passed on to further generations.
- eee_honda 8y agoEvery so often on HN someone recommends the book "the body keeps the score" by dr. Bessel van der Kolk. Im a fan, so I'll do that here. A chunk of the book talks about intergenerational transmission of trauma. The rest of it is a fascinating insight into the mind-body connection. It's Thorough and well worth the read.
- benj111 8y agoIndeed. You would think that younger generations would learn from the mistakes of their parents, but far too often they end up perpetuating those mistakes in one form or another.
- HNLurker2 8y agoPoe's law
- hi41 8y ago>>Within two years all of the children pictures, Is there a typo there? Should it have been - Within two years all of the children in the pictures
- excalibur 8y agoI thought this photo was hilarious until I realized it was serious.
- dang 8y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- wallace_f 8y ago>Her opinion about her biological mother: “She needs to be in hell burning" Yea, and her sister's rape baby went on to live in another home. We have to care for the well-being of the victims here, but maybe one day come to terms with questioning a legacy of subsidizing the procreation rapists and people whom "should be in hell." Super politically incorrect, I know. This story is incredibly sad, but enlightens realities o this world that noone today is willing to confront.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dasil003 8y agoHow did she afford the professional sign painting?
- truebosko 8y agoI read this awhile back, but it helps explain your question https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7kiu0r/how_were_protest_signs_in_the_30s50s_us_so/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7kiu0r/how_w...
- Alterlife 8y agoFrom your reference: > (If your question is more of a technical one: These signs weren't all individually hand-lettered. A professional lettering artist makes one copy, then the artwork is photographed and turned into a plate for silkscreening or lithography.) Holy crap, was this so common they had it made produced like the baby on board signs? :(
- rangibaby 8y agoI'm guessing whoever made the sign arranged 4, CHILDREN, FOR, SALE words into the horrid sentence
- brianpgordon 8y agoIt doesn't look particularly professional to me. Anyone with a paintbrush, some black paint, and fairly decent handwriting could make it.
- frankbreetz 8y agoHere is a comment from the article (not me) Cheri Hofstater JULY 20, 2018 Unfortunately I am the granddaughter of this women. My mother, (Lana) was lucky enough to get sent to live with her grandmother on a farm in Wisconsin. At the age of 12 or 13 I believe, was when her mother came back for her. I remember my mom telling the story like it was yesterday. Her mother loved to drink and play bingo, but with four new children now she found it difficult to maintain her social life, so when my mother was old enough Lucille went and got her for the sole purpose of babysitting. At least that's my mother take on the situation. With no place else to go, my mother stuck around and eventually married and had 7 children. Me, I'm right in the middle. I don't remember much about my grandmother except that she was a strong and demanding women, and I feared her. I remember my half aunt's who were always wonderful to me and my siblings. My mother eventually left her abusive and alcoholic husband and we moved away, never to see them again. Until after my mom died that is. We reconnected, breifly, with some of my mother's half sisters and there view of the situation is totally different. Because of that we never really talked about the relationship between my mother and grandmother, we were just glad to have the time together. I suppose being raised by your mother and being given away by your mother would have a tremendous impact on your opinion and thoughts about your life and the people in it. My mother never seemed bitter or angry at her, just afraid, of being hurt, I suppose. I thank God everyday for giving my mom the strength to endure her life, as lonely as it was. I guess you could say the pain, and or love, we receive throughout our lives doesn't have to dictate who we will become. My mom was proof of that. Thanks for listening. Respectfully, A tender soul.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> I suppose being raised by your mother and being given away by your mother would have a tremendous impact on your opinion Yeah, that seems pretty clear. Although I don't see why the impact should extend to your relationship with other random people. My grandfather was given away by his mother a little before the Great Depression, the theory being that she couldn't afford to keep him. (The other two children were kept.) He understandably bore a grudge -- he never spoke about her, and when she tried once, a long time later, to reestablish contact, he refused. But the only obvious candidate for a lasting impact on his relationships with people other than her was his habit of assuring us "Remember -- your (grand)father always loves you."
- gwbas1c 8y agoJust seeing the headline "Children for Sale" drove me into a panic. I could never imagine selling my children. Perhaps if I was in distress I would give them to someone willing to do some form of open adoption, and only until my personal situation recovered. The whole situation was formidably cruel.
- taneq 8y ago> The whole situation was formidably cruel. This is the natural state of the world. The fact that it's so abhorrent to us now is a testament to how far we've managed to come.
- serpi 8y agoThe world is what we make of it. There is the shadow and there is the light. Still I believe our natural state is that of love, before all concepts of anything that is all there is.
- adrianN 8y agoOur natural state might be love in a world of material abundance. Once you make resources scarce, humans are vicious.
- mruts 8y agoWell, we can look at evolution on other animals to understand where we came from at what the “natural” state of the world. And the answer is clear: the natural state of the world is suffering, sex, and death. I’m not sure how you could ever think that love is somehow the a priori concept of the world. Do single-celled organisms “love”? What about insects? The answer is no, and evolution tells us what this cruel world is all about: propogation of genes through sex. We, as beings, are irrelevent: just hosts for a game that is being played at a different level.
- ripsawridge 8y agoRidiculous. If the natural state of the world is "suffering, sex, and death," it's also joy, sex and birth. Sex is at least value neutral -- if you are going to sandwich it between suffering and death I may as well put it between joy and birth -- which are real experiences. Animals seem to experience joy, to play, etc. Animals also take care of their young, they often mourn those who died. Plus, your incredulity at the thought of "love" between single-celled organisms is without basis. Love is a subjective state which we can only infer. We (well, some of us, not you I guess) think it's real because we've felt it at a level to which to describe it as not real would do violence to our conception of real/unreal. And then we infer that it's felt in other organisms around us based on their actions. Now, a single-celled organism really doesn't have a great range of "actions/behaviors" it can show us. Therefore we don't get to see it. This says nothing about whether it's experienced or not.
- steve19 8y agoThis story is so heartbreaking. I expected to see an old restored photo from the distant past, and being sold by a slaver not a parent. Sadly, this plays out today in many countries with parents or grandparents selling children into sex slavery, with motives ranging from pure evil to (still terrible) justifcstion of sacrificing one child so that the others can be fed.
- peteretep 8y agoFor some reason I thought of: https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/07/01/white-slave-propaganda-images-light-skinned-former-slaves-elicit-sympathy-northern-wealthy-donors-1860s/ https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/07/01/white-slave-propag...
- andrepd 8y agoI thought of this... :( http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/news/a3618/diary-escaped-sex-slave/ http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/news/a3618/diary-escaped...
- mruts 8y agoI mean, this is just adoption essentially. Would it be more or less heart-breaking if they all starved homeless on the street instead?
- tptacek 8y agoNo, as the story says, it's not just adoption essentially.
- ReptileMan 8y agoIt is "just adoption" if the kid is lucky. Otherwise it is horror story. Edit: Also it was not done for the good of the kids, but for the good of the parents. Which puts it into different situation.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 8y agoThat's a horrific story. The historical nature of the photograph might soften the impact a bit but there is plenty of nastiness going on today, even if a sign like that today would be unthinkable.
- duxup 8y agoJust heartbreaking looking at those kids faces. No child deserves that.
- tamaharbor 8y agoSo you can kill them, but you can’t sell them?
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- sytelus 8y agoI have wondered if drive for mothering is powered by built-in gene programming. If that was the case, I'd say there was possibly a mutation in this case.
- toasterlovin 8y agoThere are probably multiple reproductive strategies out there in the population at large. Heck, we each probably have multiple strategies encoded in our genes that get activated depending on what kind of opportunities and obstacles we find in our environments. Interestingly, this particular lady supposedly had another 3 children after selling her first 5. If her behavior was a result of genetics, those genes were pretty successful.
- wahern 8y agoSuccessful enough to maintain some base rate in the population, but not more successful than more typical, nurturing strategies.
- toasterlovin 8y agoTo be pedantic, the success of this strategy is probably frequency dependent (which is common, see the classic hawks vs. doves game theory literature). That is, it is more successful the rarer it is, but less successful the more common it becomes (because the people buying your children are more likely to be callous and treat them as slaves, rather than as adopted children), eventually settling on some stable ratio in the population.
- mruts 8y agoMothering is about propogation of 50% of your genes. Your interests aren’t fully aligned. In many situations, it makes sense to kill or get rid of children, in order to improve the chances of future offspring. Moreover, if the child is a girl, their reproductive skew is very low: it’s highly unlikely she will produce more than 15 offspring in her entire life. So it might make sense to sell your girls, and keep your boys. Why, you might ask? Because in an ideal world, each boy could potentially have thousands of children. This, of course, is unlikely but we can look at history to just see how reproductively successful a man can be. Genghis Khan in all likelyhood had thousands of children.
- aaron695 8y agoThe informal custody transfers of children is a interesting and similar idea currently in practice - https://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/#article/part1 https://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/#article/part1
- hossbeast 8y agoIs this illegal today?
- pizzapill 8y agoMy step-grandfather grew up in a very poor part of south Germany. He was sold by his parents at 7 years to herd sheep. That must've been ~ 1920. During WW2 he fought in Stalingrad and survived a Russian POW camp with maybe 10% survival rate. He lived to become 98 years old. With half his limbs and organs missing. A very hard life, but he was one of the happiest people I knew.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoWhen your life improves that dramatically it's hard not to be positive.
- mruts 8y agoOver history, it seems like people disagree on the monetary value of children. Sometimes people get paid for their children, and sometimes they have to pay. Also the standard deviation of prices (in 19th century London and current day Russia) is quite high. My wife’s sister is a professor who studies human trafficking and has quite a bit of data on this sort of thing. One unsurprising trend is that girls are significantly more value than boys: they can potential do housework, cause less problems, and their sexual access can be monetized.
- Mirioron 8y agoI wonder how much of a role culture plays in this as opposed to economics. We say that the reason kids worked in factories and were sold was due to economic hardship, but most people wouldn't find that acceptable nowadays even when they are going through economic hardship. I guess the reason why we care less about the economic aspect nowadays is that we have enough social services that will at least minimally take care of the kids if necessary.
- Tsubasachan 8y agoActually not so long ago countries like Sri Lanka and Colombia made a lot of money providing "orphans" to couples who wanted children in Europe. Caused quite the scandal.
- belorn 8y agoI would like to see that data. Some nations has even laws where only women can be human traffic victims, which likely has an impact on human traffickers. I could easily imagine that the price they demand is thus higher for girls and women, which then get interpreted as higher value by researchers.
- mruts 8y agoThe dataset she assembled was in Russia, over 100 years or so.
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- ConcernedCoder 8y agoHow/why is this even legal?
- yitchelle 8y agoIt's probably not, but that doesn't stop it.
- throw2016 8y agoThe article mentions horrific abuse of 2 of the children including being tied up in chains and forced to work and the rape and abuse of the other leading to an unwanted pregnancy an being sent to a home for pregnant girls. And one of the kids becoming violent and sent to prison. This is clearly not the road to a civilized society. History shows all cultures and religion dominated by stable societies and family structures going back thousands of years, and while things like famines, war, epidemics, slavery and others led to breakdown, desperation and widespread suffering they cannot be passed as 'normal' in any age or gloss over abnormal human behavior.
- jotjotzzz 8y agoInitially, I thought it said "Chicken for Sale" and I was alright with that.