Conditions surrounding the emergence of the child-protection movement in the Americas: gender tensions in the construction of legitimacy, categories and practices

The article analyzes the conditions surrounding the emergence of the child-protection movement in the Americas in the early twentieth century, focusing on three main aspects: child welfare as a central concern in calls for greater state involvement in countries in the region, the role of science in pursuing those transformations and the processes whereby a transnational circuit for "children of the Americas" was constructed. Combined analysis of these dimensions helps reveal that the social organization of the sexes and rigidly-fixed binary gender categories were determining factors in the legitimization of this movement, as were the versions of childhood and the family it advocated.