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Histories of ChildhoodAuthor(s): Hugh CunninghamSource: The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 1195-1208Published by: on behalf of theOxford University Press American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2651207Accessed: 15-01-2016 15:32 UTC

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Review Essay

Histories of Childhood

HUGH CUNNINGHAM

MORE, PERHAPS,

THAN ANY

OTHER BRANCH OF HISTORY,

the

history

of

childhood

has

been shaped by the concerns of the world in which its historians live. If it is now a

lively field, that is in large part because

in

the Western world

in

the late twentieth

century there is considerable anxiety about how to bring up children, about the

nature of children (angels or monsters?), about the forces, primarily commercial-

ism, impinging on them, and about the rights and responsibilities that should be

accorded

to

them. Historians themselves are

subject

to these

anxieties

and

frequently acknowledge them as the inspiration for

their

work.1 But,

in

addition,

they

are also

responding

to

demands

from

the public

at

large. Seeking

understand-

ing

and

guidance, people turn to the past, hoping that scholars may be able to tell

them about children and childhood in history.

This

stimulus to understanding the historical roots of contemporary anxieties in

the West exists

alongside but often

in

isolation from another incentive

to

historical

research

on

childhood: the poverty

in

which many

of

the world's children live,

frequently work, and

all too

often

die.

Can a historical perspective

on

the life

chances

of

poor

children

in

the

past

contribute to

understanding

the economic and

other factors

that shape the circumstances

of

poverty

in

which most

of

the

world's

children exist?

For those

seeking guidance, the historiography

is

likely

to

impart

confusion.

Historians differ not only in their interpretation of the past but in their definition

of the

field

of

study,

and

in

the kinds

of

questions they

ask.

One

approach suggests

that

the most

interesting

and answerable

question

to

ask about the

past

is not to do

with the lives

children lived but with

the

ideas

surrounding childhood,

and with the

way

childhood

has

in

different cultures variably

stood for

innocence, hope,

naivete, incapacity,

or

evil,

or has embodied a

nostalgia

for times

past.

The

emphasis

here

is

firmly

on

the cultural construction

of ideas to do with childhood.2

An

extension of this

approach

is to look at how

such

cultural constructions

impact

on the lives of

children.

Often advocates

of the

rights

of the

child,

and alert

to the

suppression of the voice of the child in the present as well as the past, such scholars

are

engaged

both in a rescue

operation

and in

an

attempt

to

recast

the

way

we look

1

See, for example, Philip Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious

Roots of Punishment and the

Psychological mpact of PhysicalAbuse (New York, 1991). Greven acknowledges that his exploration of

the physical abuse of children

in

the past stems

from a

wish to

eliminate it in

the

future.

2

For this argument, and a rich exploration of its possibilities, see

Carolyn Steedman, Strange

Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority,1780-1930 (London, 1995).

1195

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3/15

1196 Hugh Cunningham

at the world; they

want to

make us

more aware of children as

agents.3

At the

opposite end

of

the spectrum are those who

argue

that

biology largely

determines

how

children

develop,

and

indeed

how

adults relate

to

them,

and

find

in

the

past

evidence

for this.4

In

this

approach,

the

history

of

childhood

merges

into a

history

of motherhood. Somewhere in between lie those who arguethat the important thing

to do is to write a

history

of

children-flesh and

blood

human beings of a certain age.

Those

whose

starting point is the condition of poor children tend to place their

studies within a

familystrategy approach.

This field of

study

itself

subdivides into

many component parts,

depending on whether its inspiration is anthropology or

neo-classical economics.

In

the former, the emphasis is on kinship patterns and

roles

within the

family

and in

relation

to other

families,

in

the

latter

on the

ways

in

which families

seek to

maximize their economic

well-being.

Children are sometimes

marginalized

in

family strategy

studies-the

emphasis

is on

adult

decision-making

and the norms of the adult world. But a family strategy approach has the potential

to enable the historian

to

evaluate

differences

in

the role of children across time

and culture-and

to do

this

at

the level of the mass of

society

and not

just

the elite.

Differences

of

approach

are

reflected

in

the sources used. Those interested

in

concepts

of childhood and in

the

day-to-day

lives of children

draw

on

advice

literature, diaries and autobiographies,visual images

of

children, material culture,

and a

miscellany

of written

material.

In

the

family strategy approach,

the

preferred

sources are

quantitative

in

nature,

and the

approach

often

incorporates a formal

model of human and family behavior.

The multiplicityof approachessuggests that there will be no uncontested answers

for

anyone looking

in

history books for

guidance

to

present-day problems.

The

issue

is further complicated by the fact that childhood is not a terrain on which

historians are

the

only

or

even the chief

guide.

Social scientists of

many

kinds-

sociologists, anthropologists,

psychologists, psychoanalysts, demographers-can all

claim to have

distinctive

approaches

to the

study

of

childhood,

which

historians

ignore

at

their

peril.5

This review

of some

recent work on the

history

of childhood will seek to take

stock of where we are.

A

fundamental

question

is whether the

approaches

embodied in the different questions asked and in the different types of source

material have

anything

to

say

to each other or whether

they

will continue to exist

in

hermetically sealed compartments.

If

they do,

it will be

suggested, our ability

to

address

the

anxieties that

surround

childhood,

both

in

the

West and

globally,

will

be

seriously

diminished.

We need to

create

space

for

dialogue

between discourses

that now tend to focus too

exclusively

on the cultural construction of ideas about

childhood,

on

biological

factors

in

the

growing up

of

children,

or on the roles of

children

in

family

economies.

3The most sophisticated and influential representation of this approach is Allison James and Alan

Prout, eds., Construlcting

nd

ReconstructingChildhood:Contenzpora;yssutes n the Sociological Stuldy f

Childhood

(London, 1990).

4

See,

for

example,

Linda A.

Pollock, Forgotten

Children:Parent-ChildRelations rom 1500

to

1900

(Cambridge, 1983); Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties That

Bounzld:easanzt amilies in MedievalEngland

(New York, 1986), 10-11.

5For some guidance to the literature, see C. Philip Hwang, Michael E. Lamb, and Irving E. Sigel,

eds., Inmagesof

Childhood

(Mahwa, N.J., 1996).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL

REVIEW

OCTOBER

1998



4/15

Historiesof Childhood 1197

ALL HISTORIES OF CHILDHOOD can be placed in some relationship to the

historiog-

raphy of the subject. The vast majority are informed by what is easily the most

famous

book in that

historiography, Philippe Aries' L'enfant

et la vie

familiale

sous

l'ancien

regime

(1960), translated as Centuries of Childhood (1962). It was Aries'

achievement to convince nearly all his readers that childhood had a history:that,

over time and in

different cultures, both ideas about childhood and the experience

of

being

a child had

changed.

Like

all

historians of the

topic,

he was

drawn

to it by

his own experiences, in his case the sense of stifling, family-bound childhoods in

mid-twentieth-century France. Had childhoods always been like this? The answer

was

firmly no. Aries traced how the family and the school became the locus

for

children,

and

how they became excluded from the world of non-family adults.

Nearly all subsequent historians of childhood have related to some part of Aries'

agenda,

for

its scope was wide: he studied changes over time and

in

different

cultures in the concepts of childhood, the adult treatment of children, and the

experience

of

childhood.

Aries' influence remains profound nearly forty years after the publication

of his

book, particularly with respect to the study

of

medieval childhood.

An at

least

partial mistranslation has galvanized medieval scholars into a mini-industry.

The

English version of Aries' book contains the famous statement that in medieval

society

the

idea

of

childhood did

not

exist. 6 The word idea

was

in

fact a

translation of the

French sentiment, which conveys

a

very different meaning.

But

medieval scholars have, by and large, taken the English translation at face value

and, moreover, assumed that Aries' statement was a slur on the Middle Ages: the

outcome has been a body of literature, summed up and best represented

in

Shulamith Shahar's

Childhood

in

the Middle

Ages (1990),

in

which it is shown

beyond any

manner of doubt that

there

was a

concept

of childhood

in

the Middle

Ages; indeed,

in

Shahar's account, the Middle Ages

were

rather

more

enlightened

and

progressive

in their attitudes to childhood and treatment

of children than

later

centuries. What

this

body of scholarshipleft open, however,

was the

precise

nature

of this

medieval concept

of

childhood,

and its chronological and

geographical

scope.

It is the great strength of James A. Schultz, in The Knowledgeof Childhood in the

German

Middle

Ages,

1100-1350

(1995),

that

he breaks

away

from

this

obsession

with

defending the Middle Ages against an imagined

slur

by Aries.7

Schultz's

study

does not

attempt

to cover

the

Middle

Ages

as a whole either

chronologically

or

geographically.

He

draws

on

extant

Middle

High

German

texts, many

of

them in

fictional

form,

to

argue

not

simply

that there was

a

concept

of

childhood

in

Germany

in

this

period but,

more

important,

that

this

concept

was

radically

different

from

the

concepts

dominant

in

the West since the

Enlightenment.

In

the

German

High

Middle

Ages, people

did not think that the

way

in

which children

were treated would affect how they turned out as adults (the characteristicmodern

assumption); they

believed rather that the

discerning eye

could

pick

out from

childish traits

what the future adult would be like: childhood was

important

not in

6

Philippe

Aries,

Centursies of Childhood,

Robert Baldick, trans. (London, 1962), 125.

James A. Schultz, The Knowledgeof Childhood in the

German

MiddleAges, 1100-1350

(Philadel-

phia,

1995).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1998



5/15


itself but for what it might tell you about

the

adult

to

be. Quite contrary to modern

opinion,

whether a child was treated well

or

badly

would

have little effect on

its

adult future.

In

this

closely

contextualized

study

of a defined

body

of

texts, Schultz

has opened up a refreshingly new range

of

questions about childhood

in

the Middle

Ages. He has broken free from the thrall of the mistranslation of a word in Aries

and

is

able

to

suggest

that the

concept

of childhood he

explores

for

the

German

High Middle Ages was

in

fact

the

dominant one

in

Europe until the eighteenth

century:childhood

was marked

by

its

deficiencies more

than by its attributes. At a

time

when there

is

a

danger

that

the

focus

will

be

on

the

similarity

of childhood

across time

and

place,

Schultz

argues powerfully

and

eloquently

for the

historicity

of childhood :

the lives that children lead reflect not

simply

their human

biology

but

also the cultural assumptions

of the time and

place

in

which

they live-continuity

is not, as Linda Pollock's work

has

influentially suggested,

the

key theme

in the

history of childhood.8

The view that Aries wantonly impugned

the

beliefs

about

childhood

of non-

modern

societies

has by

no

means

been confined to the Middle

Ages

or to

Europe.

Scholars

of

the

ancient

world,

of medieval

Islam,

and

of

many

other societies have

set out

to

see

whether an idea of childhood could

be

discerned within them.9 The

triumphant

conclusion has

always

been that it can.

Although Aries

is

nowhere

referred to

in

Anne Behnke Kinney's

Chinese Views

of Childhood (1995),

his

presence and

that of other Western historians

of

childhood

can always

be

felt.10The

essays

cover the

period

from

the

Han

Dynasty

to

the

present.

What

emerges

is

a

pattern of thinking about childhood with similarities to and differences from that

discerned

by

Aries and others.

Although

the

available sources do not

allow

for

confident

generalizations,

there seems to have been a

growing sentimentality

about

children

within the elites of

Chinese

society.

The most

striking

evidence for this

comes

from the

mourning

literature

analyzed by Pei-yi

Wu. From the

Tang

to at

least

the

fifteenth century,

he

claims,

children

were more written about in China

than

in

Europe. 1

The form of

writing

he

investigates

is

necrology, writing

about

the dead. For those familiar with debates

in

Western

historiography

as to

whether

parents grieved

for

their dead

children,

the

Chinese material will

be

of

great

interest. It provides evidence from the ninth century of grieving and mourning

considerably beyond

what

ritual

demanded, especially by

fathers for

daughters

more than for sons.

In the

sixteenth

and

seventeenth

centuries,

under the

influence

of the

Wang Yangming

school of

Neo-Confucianism,

there

emerged

a veritable cult

of the child and an articulation of sentiments

that

in

the

West had

to

await

William

Wordsworth:

children were raised above adults in

understanding.

If one

loses

the

heart

of

the

child,

wrote Li Zhi

(1527-1602),

then

he

loses

his true heart. '12

This cult of the

child has to be weighed against the considerable evidence of

8

Pollock,

Forgotten Children.

9

See,

for

example,

Mark

Golden, Children

and

Childhood in Classical Athens

(Baltimore, Md.,

1990);

Avner

Gil'adi, Children of Islam: Concepts of Childhood in Medieval Muslim Society

(Basingstoke,

1992).

10

Anne Behnke Kinney, ed., Chinese

Views of Childhood (Honolulu, 1995).

11

Pei-yi Wu,

Childhood Remembered: Parents

and

Children

in

China,

800 to

1700,

in

Kinney,

Chinese Views

of Childhood,

137.

12

Kinney,

Chinese Views

of

Childhood,

147.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL

REVIEW

OCTOBER

1998



6/15

Histories

of Childhood

1199

infanticide, especially female infanticide, in China.

Ann Waltner notes the difficulty

of establishing any precise measure of its scale

but

does not doubt

its

prevalence.

Her main

explanation

for this has to do with dowries. Girls were expensive. Upon

marriage, their only acceptable destiny, they had to

be dowered, the amount of the

dowry being all the greater because of the desirability that the groom should be of

higher social status than the bride. Moreover, once married, brides and their

dowries

belonged to the groom's family. Where ideas

and practices of this kind were

prevalent, no amount of official condemnation of infanticide (and there was plenty

of it) was likely to have much impact. At an institutional level, one Chinese

response, similar to that in the West, was to set

up foundling hospitals from the

seventeenth century onward.13

THE

LEGACY OF

ARI'ES,

in provoking numerous attempts at rebuttal of what was

assumed

(wrongly)

to be his

prime thesis,

has

produced

a body

of

scholarship

that

one

may hope

has

now run

its

course;

it is

time,

as Schultz argues, to

shift the

agenda.

In

other

respects, however, Aries

set a

challenge

that has

proved

to be too

demanding

for

most historians. Aries assumed

that

it was possible,

within

the covers

of one

book,

to

write about concepts of childhood,

about the way children have

been treated

by adults, and about the experience

of

being a

child. Most

subsequent

historians have

more cautiously

confined

themselves to one

of these tasks.

They

have,

in

addition, restricted themselves

in the

range

of evidence they study. Aries

drew on a wide range of evidence and has been much criticized for failing to subject

it to proper scrutiny. In particular, it has been said that he read images too

literally.14Such criticisms have induced caution among historians, and only now

is

non-written evidence

beginning

to make a renewed and welcome impact.

Three

examples may

be

taken as indications

of

a

new confidence in the use of non-written

sources.

First,

on

Aries' own ground, the pictorial representation

of

children,

Andrew

Martindale has

argued that,

around

1300, images

of children

became

more

lively,

more

human,

and more

probable.

In

a

carefully

contextualized study,

he

highlights

the work of Simone Martini and his altar piece in Siena, which depicts a saint's

involvement

in

miracles concerning children. Martindale explains

these naturalistic

images

of

children

by relating

them to a wider thirteenth-century acceptance

of the

importance

of

human experience

and the human

senses;

all

of this

suggesting

that

the

evaluation

of

childhood

Aries

was

concerned to

trace may

have been

on a rather

different and

earlier time scale than

he had

imagined.15

Second,

still

in

the Middle

Ages,

Nicholas Orme has attempted

to see whether

Aries was

right

in

thinking

that children and adults shared

the same culture.

Drawing

on

archaeological finds,

he examines

the

evidence of lead-tin

alloy toys,

which were capable of being mass-produced from about 1300, and links it with

13

Ann Waltner, Infanticide

and Dowry in Ming and Early Qing China, in Kinney, Chinese

Views

of Childhood.

14

See,

for

example, Pollock,

ForgottenChildren,47; Shulamith

Shahar, Childhood n the MiddleAges

(London, 1990), 95.

15

Andrew Martindale, The

Child in the Picture: A MedievalPerspective, in Diana Wood, ed.,

The

Churchand Childhood (Oxford, 1994), 197-232, quoting 197.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

OCTOBER

1998



7/15


associated literary

evidence.

(In 1582,

for

example,

the crown taxed

imported

''puppets or babies

for

children. )

Added to this is the evidence from

games,

calendar customs, and schoolbooks: together,

it

provides at least some evidence

that children

enjoyed

a

culture

of their own.16

A final example is Karin Calvert's Children n the House: The Material Cultureof

Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (1992).

Aries'

account of the evolution of attitudes

towardchildhood draws

to

a close

in

the late seventeenth century:it is as though at

that point

he can discern a

clear

road that leads to the mid-twentieth

century.

It is

one of the strengths

of

Calvert's book that she delineates

the twists

and

turns

that

were

part

of that evolution. In

an earlier

study,

she showed how a

comprehensive

study

of American

portraiturerevealed significant changes

in

the

prominence given

to children.17

The

same theme

is

developed

from a wider

body

of source

material,

including furniture

and

clothes,

in her book: she

argues

a

shift from

the inchoate

adult:1600 to 1750 to thenaturalchild: 1750to 1830 to the innocent child: 1830

to 1900.

The most

convincing

of these shifts is the first: Calvert shows

how,

in

every

aspect

of

child-rearing

in

the seventeenth and

early eighteenth centuries,

the aim

was

to

get

the

young

child

upright: swaddling

clothes and

walking

stools

both

had

this

purpose.

The

implication was

that childhood was a

stage

of

life

to

be

passed

through

as

rapidly

as

possible.

It was therefore a

change

of

enormous

significance

when

in the second half of

the

eighteenth century

the advice

given

to

parents

was

that children should be allowed to

develop

at their own

pace; Calvert

shows how

this

was accompanied by

a

discarding

of old forms of

furniture and clothes.

It

has

long been an issue in the history of childhood how far the advice given by experts

was acted

on

by parents:

Calvert demonstrates from a

study

of the

material

culture

of the home that

in

middle-class

America,

at

least,

the advice

was

heeded.

This

renewal

of use of

non-written

evidence,

in

particular

of

what comes under

the term material

culture,

is

opening up many

new

possibilities

for the

study

of

the

history

of childhood.

Curators

of

museums

of childhood

across the

world,

who

must

have

been baffled at

the failure

of

professional historians

to

give

serious

attention

to their

collections, may begin

to

expect

a

change.

The material is

abundant,

much of

it

published

in

museum

catalogues

or books derived from

collections.18One sign of burgeoning interest in this field is the history of toys and

dolls. Long

of interest to

antiquariansand collectors,

it is

now beginning to attract

the attention

of

historians

responding

to

contemporary

concerns about the

impact

of commercialism on

children

and

to the

way

in

which

gender

is

shaped.

Miriam

Formanek-Brunell

in

Made to

Play House:

Dolls

and

the

Commercialization of

American

Girlhood, 1830-1930 (1993) emphasizes

how the manufacture of dolls

became a male-dominated

industry

and

how

girls,

as the

consumers,

were ambiv-

alent about what was offered

to them.

Although

a

thoroughly scholarly book,

it is

difficult to

read

it as

anything

other than a decline from a

pre-lapsarian past when,

16

Nicholas Orme, The Culture of Children in Medieval England, Past and Present 148 (August

1995): 48-88.

17

Karin Calvert, Children n the House: The MaterialCultureof EarlyChildhood,1600-1900 (Boston,

1992); Calvert, Children n American Family Portraiture, 1670-1810, Williamand Maiy

Quarterly,

d

ser.,

39

(January 1982):

87-113.

18

See,

for

example, Anthony Burton,

Children

Pleasures:

Books,

Toys

anidGames

from

the Bethnal

Green

Museum

of

Childhood

(London, 1996).

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REVIEW

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Historiesof Childhood

1201

antebellum,

dolls

were homemade and their use taught skills valuable in the

domestic economy, to a world where female manufacturers

lost out in their battle

against

the

mechanization of dolls

by males,

and where dolls came

to

embody the

desired preparation for motherhood.19 Gary Cross in Kids' Stuff: Toys and the

Changing Worldof American Childhood (1997) is determined to break away from

this approach, telling today's parents that fantasy toys have a history dating back to

the

early twentieth century, and that, in the 1930s,

toys, especially for boys, were

liberated from adult concerns about instilling proper values and began to appeal

directly to the child's imagination-and to the child as consumer. But, in the

conclusion, he reveals his own unhappiness about these developments, and hopes

that

children, through their toys, may recover an

imagination more rooted in the

real world. 20

These studies of the material culture of childhood

in the past contribute both to

the understanding of concepts of childhood in the past and to the real life

experiences

of

children: we begin

to

know the

material world in which they lived.

But children's lives were shaped by more than what surrounded them, and a fuller

understanding of what

it

was like to be a child

in any culture requires a broader

approach.

The sources for such

a study are likely

to be greatest for recent periods

of

history where written documents can be

integrated with personal testimony,

whether autobiographical or gathered by oral historians. Anna Davin's Growing Up

Poor.

Home, School and Street in London 1870-1914

(1996) indicates what can be

achieved

in

a

properly contextualized study.21

The context is partly geographical-

the homes and streets of late nineteenth-century London are brought alive for

us-but also

chronological, for the period from

1870 to 1914 is seen by many

historians

of

different countries as one

in

which the state began to take a markedly

more

prominent role

in

the regulation of family

life and in which a definition

of

childhood as

properly

a

period

of

dependence

became

dominant.22One

key

issue

underlying Davin's

book is how

far working-class

families and

children in

particular

were

aware of

this

intrusion and how

they responded

to it. The main intervention

was the

introduction

of

compulsory schooling:

this not

only

had

its effects on the

management of the family economy but also gave the state the opportunity

to

try

to

impose middle-class standardsof speech, dress, deportment, and civilization. It is

Davin's

contention that the burden

of this fell on

girls: they

were more

likely

than

boys

to be

kept

at

home to

help

with domestic

chores,

so

that

they

missed out

on

educational

opportunities;

what

schooling they

did

have

placed huge emphasis

on

needlework, depriving them of access to some of the more

academic

subjects;

and

the

pressure

to

conform

to new

gender

stereotypes of neatness

was more

compelling.

In

short,

whereas the

new

conditions of

childhood relieved

boys

from

19

Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play

Houise:

Dolls and the Commercializationof American

Girlhood, 1830-1930 (New Haven, Conn., 1993).

20

Gary Cross, Kids'

Stuiff:

Toys and the

Chaniging

Worldof American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.,

1997), 238.

21

Anna Davin, GrowingUp Poor: Home, Schlooland Street

n

Londonl

1870-1914 (London, 1996). For

a complementary study, also with much to contribute to the history of childhood, see Ellen Ross,

Love

and Toil: Motherhood n OuitcastLondon 1870-1918 (Oxford,

1993).

22

This theme is pervasive in the essays in Roger Cooter, ed., In the Name of the Child: Health and

Welfare,

1880-1940

(London, 1992).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER

1998



9/15

1202 Hugh

Cunningham

some

of the

labor they

had

previously

had

to

endure,

for

girls

it

tended to

bring

further burdens.

It would be easy to assume that,

within

the

experience

of

childhood, girls have

always

drawn the

short straw-that

there

is,

in

almost

any society one can

think

of,

a set of practices and assumptions resulting in differentiated and subordinate

treatment of girls. Calvert's study,

drawing on clothes and hairstyles, shows that the

issue is more complicated. Until the

late eighteenth century, girls' clothes and

hairstyles were scaled-down

versions of those

of

adult

women. From about 1770,

girls began to wear muslin

frocks that were

quite

distinct

from the elaborate

clothing

of adult

women,

and

they

wore

their

hair short

in

a manner

scarcely

distinguishable

from that of

boys. Boys'

dress, however,

from the

age

of about

three,

when

they

were

breeched,

remained

distinctively

masculine.

A

change-came

in

the

1830s and 1840s,

when both

girls

and

boys

from the

ages

of three to seven

began

to

wear ankle-length pantaloons and half-length petticoats; this, combined with short

hair, drew attention to what boys

and

girls

had

in

common-their childishness-

rather than what

divided

them.

In the

later nineteenth

century, gender

was

again

emphasized,

a

process

that culminated

in

the

adoption

of color

coding

for children's

clothes

(blue

for

boys

and

pink

for

girls) shortly

before World War

II.

These

trends

in the

outward

appearance

of children were matched

by

similar

ones

in

adult

responses to the display of

emotion

in

children.23

Studies of this kind

by Davin,

Calvert,

and other scholars

have

opened up

the issue

of

gender

in

childhood

as

history, as something that changes over

time;

other contributions

canssurely be

expected.

THE

BOOKS

I

HAVE CONSIDERED

SO FAR have all

been influenced

to some extent by

Aries. But there are limitations

to the

legacy

from Aries. The

questions

he asked

and the sources on which

he drew directed

attention to the

upper

and middle

classes. Those who

have followed

in

his

footsteps,

either

to

support

or rebut

him,

have equally concentrated

on those

classes.

In

sophisticated hands and with

adequate documentation,

as

we have seen in

the case of Davin's

book,

it is

possible

to find out about the experiences of childhood outside the privileged classes. But

not

many people have

been able to do

it,

and we

cannot be satisfied with

the

historiography of childhood

while

its

focus is so

exclusively the lives and thoughts

of the well-to-do.

The

potential

benefit of a

family

strategy approach

to the

history

of

childhood

is

that

it will

enable us

to

gain

some

understanding

of the

experience

of

childhood and

attitudes toward

childhood

in that

majority

of the

population

that is

beyond

the

reach of the

approach

and

sources

characteristic of Aries and his

followers. Family

strategy

is a term

whose

difficulties

need

to be

recognized.

It

has been

used

in

widely different ways, sometimes implying conscious choice by families or, often

implicitly,

one or more

family

members,

whereas in

other hands

the

strategy can be

23

Peter

N. Stearns

and

Timothy Haggerty,

The Role of Fear:

Transitions

in

American

Emotional

Standards for

Children, 1850-1950,

AHR

96

(February 1991):

63-94;

Peter N.

Stearns, Girls, Boys,

and

Emotions: Redefinitions

and Historical

Change,

Journal

of American

History 80 (June 1993):

36-74.

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Histories

of Childhood 1203

unconscious, observable

only to the outsider.24Two recent books enable us to take

stock of

how successful

it is

proving to be

in the

analysis of

childhood

among

the

poor. The essays

in

John Henderson and Richard

Wall, Poor Women

and

Children

in the European

Past (1994), draw largely on the sources of institutions (foundling

hospitals and orphanages) to try to reconstruct what led people to abandon children

to them.25 This

approach

of course leaves us

somewhat

in the dark

about that

majority

of the

population who

did

not at any point

in

time abandon children to

institutions;

nevertheless, the proportion who did, particularly n the eighteenth and

nineteenth

centuries,

is

sufficiently high to ensure that

the conclusions reached will

give considerable

insight into how families weighed their responsibilities. The chief

conclusion is not a

surprising one, although

it needs

emphasis

in view of a

common

supposition that the

opposite

was the case: children were a burden on the

family

economy. B. Seebohm Rowntree's famous

analysis

of the life

cycle (1901),

in

which

he showed how the poverty level of a family was adversely affected in ratio to the

number of young

children, proves to have been valid not only for late nineteenth-

century York but for most societies

in

early

modern

and modern

Europe.

The essays center

on issues of concern to demographic and family historians:

does the

famous

north/south

divide between nuclear and

complex family

structure

still

hold? Can the nuclear

hardship argument-that nuclear

families

were

less

likely than complex

ones to be able to rely on their

kin in

times of hardship and

more

likely

to

turn to the

collectivity-retain validity

in

view of

the

vast number of

institutions for the care of

children

in

the south of Europe? Pier Paolo Viazzo

valuably notes how the nuclear hardship theory has largely concentrated on

treatment of the

elderly.26 Bring children into the

picture

and a different set of

issues and

conclusions emerges, focusing on bastardyand abandonment. There has

been something of a

division of labor, with historians in northern Europe studying

bastardy

while those

in

southern Europe

have

researched abandonment.

The

assumption

has

tended to be

that

foundling hospitals

were the south's Catholic

way

of

coping

with

illegitimacy.

In

fact, they had,

as

the

essays show,

rather

more

complex

functions.

Philip Gavitt shows how

in

fifteenth-century Florence

many

of

the babies

abandoned were the offspring of well-to-do men and their slaves or servants-the

illegitimacy/abandonment

ink

holds.

But

in

the

Basque

region

in

the

early

modern

period,

the situation was

quite

different: a

high

rate

of

illegitimacy

coexisted

with

24

The historical literature on familystrategy is extensive. More recent studies on the

economic

role

of children have been much

influenced by Michael R. Haines, Industrial Work

and the

Family Life

Cycle, 1889-1890, Research in

Economic History

4

(1979): 289-356; and Claudia

Goldin, Family

Strategies and the Family Economy in the Late Nineteenth Century:The Role of

Secondary Workers,

in

Theodore Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia:Work,Space, Family, and GroupExperience n

the Nineteenth

Century New York, 1981). Robert V.

Robinson, FamilyEconomic Strategies

in Nineteenth-

and Early

Twentieth-Century Indianapolis,

Journal of Family History 20 (Winter 1995): 1-22, is an influential

recent contribution. Wider questions on family strategy are addressed in contributionsin Historical

Methods 20 (Summer 1987): 113-25;

and in Graham Crow, The Use of the Concept of 'Strategy' in

Recent Sociological Literature ; and

D. H. J. Morgan, Strategies and Sociologists:

A

Comment on

Crow, both

in

Sociology

23

(February 1989): 1-29.

25

John

Henderson

and Richard

Wall, eds.,

Poor

Women

and

Children n

the

European

Past

(London,

1994).

26

Paolo Viazzo, Family Structures and the Early Phase

in

the Individual Life Cycle: A

Southern

European Perspective, in Henderson and Wall, Poor Women and Children.

AMERICAN

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11/15

1204 Hutgh Cunningham

a low rate of abandonment.

It

was, ironically,

when the

illegitimacy rate declined

in

the eighteenth century that abandonment increased, largely,

it

seems, because

responsibility for the care of illegitimate

children

passed from fathers

(who were

more

likely

to

have resources

to care for

them)

to mothers.27

In the eighteenth century,both illegitimacy and abandonment increased but not,

as one might have expected,

in

step

with

one another. Much of the

increase

in

abandonment was

fueled

by legitimate

children. In

Florence, for example, in

1792-1794, 72

percent

of those admitted to the

Foundling Hospital

were

legitimate,

and throughout the first

half

of the nineteenth century the

percentage of the

legitimate among those abandoned ranged between 40 and 70

percent. Volker

Hunecke's work on

Milan in the

1840s,

translated into

English

here

for

the

first

time, provides

the most

telling

evidence.28About one-third of all legitimate

births

were

abandoned,

a tradition

having grown up

that

not more

than

two children

should be kept at home at any one time. The intention, and the norm, was to

reclaim

the child when economic conditions

in the

family

eased. In

Florence, Milan,

and

many

other

cities, foundling hospitals

created to rescue the

illegitimate

became

used

by

families at

pressure points

in the

family

life

cycle,

or at times of

general

economic stress, to

relieve themselves of their

legitimate

children. Nor was it

only

babies

who were

abandoned.

Eugenio

Sonnino examines

orphanages

for

girls

in

seventeenth and

eighteenth-century Rome, showing

how

the loss of one

parent

could

well imply

the admission of a child to institutional care

in

its

early teens.29

In

many parts

of

Europe,30

here

grew up

an

economy

of abandonment

in

which

rural

areas supplied wet-nurses for babies abandoned in the cities and then themselves

contributed to the

level

of abandonment

by ridding

themselves of their

own

offspring

in order to feed

(at

least until the

next

pregnancy)

the

other

babies of

the

foundling hospitals.

A

system

created

by philanthropists

for

one purpose became

diverted

by

its customers to serve a

quite

different

one.

Where the

facilities for

abandonment were limited or

contained,

as

in

Florence's

neighbor Bologna, people

must

have

coped

in other

ways

with the

pressures

of

the life

cycle.

The

records of institutions

for the care of children are a rich

source; they

can

sometimes include

or be

linked to

demographic

and

other evidence.

Together, they

provide overwhelming evidence that families adopted strategies for their own

survival and

well-being dependent

on the

availability

of

facilities that

could be

molded to their use.

Furthermore,

the extent of abandonment is such that

it

raises

fundamental

questions

about the

value, both

emotional and

economic,

placed

on

children.

27

Philip Gavitt, 'Perce non avea chi la ghovernasse': Cultural

Values, Family Resources and

Abandonment in the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici, 1467-85, in

Henderson and Wall, Poor Women

and

Children.

28

Volker

Hunecke,

The Abandonment

of Legitimate

Children in

Nineteenth-Century Milan and

the European Context, in Henderson and Wall, Poor Women and Children.

29

Eugenio Sonnino, Between the Home and the Hospice: The

Plight and Fate of Girl Orphans in

Seventeenth-

and

Eighteenth-Century Rome,

in

Henderson

and

Wall,

Poor Women

and

Children;

ee

also Lola

Valverde, Illegitimacy

and the Abandonment of Children in

the Basque Country,

1550-1800,

in

Henderson and Wall.

30

See,

for

example,

David

L.

Ransel,

Mothers

of Misety:

Child

Abandonment

in

Ruissia

(Princeton,

N.J., 1988); James R. Lehning, Family

Life and

Wetnursing

in a

French

Village,

Jourlal

of

Interdisciplinzaty istoty

12

(Spring 1982): 645-56.

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Histories of Childhood 1205

By comparison, as is

demonstrated in the essays in Richard L. Rudolph, The

European

Peasant

Family

and Society: Historical Studies (1995), historians

of the

European peasant family

are relatively deprived-or, perhaps,

it

should

be said that

they deprive themselves,

for peasant families, though

one would not guess

it

from

these essays, were often linked into urban/rural networks that made them part of

the economies of abandonment.31

The focus

of

the

essays is on the relationship

between

land ownership

or use and family formation and on

the

impact of

proto-industrialization. Children

feature in it as the

outcome of decisions about

how best to preserve or

enhance family fortunes. As Stanley Engerman puts it,

Individuals may choose between more goods for themselves,

more children, and

more leisure. 32 f

they

had

children,

it

is

implied,

it

was because of

their

perceived

economic

usefulness,

as

in

proto-industrialization, or as an

insurance

against

old

age.

If

they

did

not,

as

in

the Alpine region of Austria,

which had

the

highest age

of marriageand the highest proportion never married in Europe, then again it was

an

economically

driven decision reinforced by cultural

norms. There were

huge

variations across Europe

in

age of marriage, levels of

celibacy

and of

illegitimacy,

numbers of children born to a family, and destiny of

children according to birth

order and

gender.

Scholars

have

spent

much effort and

displayed

considerable

ingenuity

in

trying to plot

and to provide explanationsfor these variations.

Since the

emphasis of

this

approach

is on decision-making within constraints,

it is

the

decision-makers (the adults)

and the

constraints (climate,

inheritance

systems,

family forms, opportunities for migration)

on

which

attention

is

focused.

Children

are only the outcome of those decisions: thus, by implication, the key factor in the

history

of childhood

is

the powerlessness of children. But

it

is legitimate to wonder

whether the focus

on

decision-making may not over-rationalizehuman activity:

t is

one

of the,

advantages

of

using

some

of

the

foundling hospital

records that

one can

find in the tokens and messages attached to the abandoned

child some evidence of

the

human

processes

beneath those sets of data

that

most easily

lend

themselves to

statistical

enquiry.

It is

perhaps significant that

the

only essay

in

Rudolph's

collection to

give

extended treatment to childhood

is

not

on the

peasant family

at all but on

families

in the Rouen textile industry during the nineteenth century; there, the emphasis is

not on the families' decisions but on the

responses

of

Rouen manufacturers

to

proposals for changes

in

the law on child labor.

Gay

Gullickson

describes

the

emergence by

the

1870s of a set of ideas

that not

only

considered

that

young

children should be

kept

out of the work force

but also

that women should

be

restricted

in

their

participation

so

they

could

play

their proper

roles

as mothers.

The

issue,

Gullickson

suggests,

had arisen from the

new need for

child care where

paid

labor

happened

in

factories from

which

children

were

barred;

in

proto-industry

or

in

agriculture,

such

issues did

not arise.33

The contrast between these two books suggests that the polarity drawn at the

31

Richard

L. Rudolph, ed., The

Eutropean easanit

Family and Society:Historical

Stuidies Liverpool,

1995).

32

Stanley L. Engerman, Family

and Economy: Some Comparative

Perspectives,

in

Rudolph,

EulrXopeaneasant

Family, 236.

33

Gay

Gullickson, Womanhoodand Motherhood:

The Rouen Manufacturing

Community,Women

Workers,

and the French

Factory

Acts, in Rudolph, EutropeanPeasant

Family.

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1206

HughCunningham

beginning of

this

essay

between

approaches

influenced

by

Aries and those by family

strategy may

be

oversimplified,

and

in

particular

that there are different

emphases

within the family strategy approach.

This

surely

is to

be welcomed

and

should

encourage

some meeting

of minds.

Historians

in

the Aries tradition

may

well find

the material in some of the essays in Rudolph's volume rebarbative, but they are

likely to find

the approach in Poor Women and Children

in the European Past

accessible

and

interesting.

A

family

strategy approach, adopted

with

sensitivity,

can

enormously expand

the

range

of histories

of childhood.

These two family strategy studies

have concentrated on Western societies.

It

is

becoming increasinglyapparent that

a history of childhood, taking its cue

from the

late twentieth century, must be a global

history.

A

key

ingredient of this would be

an exploration of divergent patterns

in

the

experience

of childhood

in

different

cultures

in

the past century

and a half.

The

trend

in the

West

in the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries was for the length of childhood to be extended. There

was no

one formal

measure that

brought

this

about, although

there can be little

doubt

that the introduction

and enforcement

of

compulsory schooling

was the

central

issue.

As the

age

of

leaving

school rose to

reach

fourteen

in the

early

twentieth

century

and

up

to

sixteen later

on,

so childhood

seemed to be extended.

Alongside

this

were numerous measures

intended to

separate

out childhood as a

distinct

phase

of

life-a

separate system

of

justice,

a

higher age

at which

marriage

was

permissible,

a ban

on

access

to such substances as alcohol and tobacco. It was

easier to

legislate

for full-time

compulsory schooling

than to

impose

it'. as Davin

shows, both working-class parents and many magistratesbelieved that contributions

to the

family

economy

should take

precedence

over schooling. Nevertheless, over

a

period

of about

thirty years,

the

school

habit became

accepted.

One of

the central

arguments

in

the recent focus

on childhood

in

the

West during

the

late nineteenth

and

early

twentieth centuries has been

that

state and philan-

thropic action,

together

with

rising

standards of

living,

succeeded

in

bringing

about

a common

experience

of childhood

for all children. That

development brought

to

a head

what

in

the

longue

duree

must

be the

most fundamental

shift in the

experience

of

childhood,

from one

where

nearly

all

children

expected

to

contribute

to the family economy at an early age to one where they were a net drain on that

economy throughout

their childhood

and

youth.

The

importance

of

this

shift

in

the

length

and nature of childhood

was

brought

out vividly

in

Viviana Zelizer's

landmark study

in

the

historiography

of childhood.

She

showed how the valuation

of children

changed

from one

where

they

were valued

according

to

their

contribu-

tions to the

family economy

to one

where

they

became

productively

useless

but

emotionally priceless-partly

as a

consequence

of rising living

standards but also

because

of

the spread of

new

cultural norms respecting

childhood.34The more

emotionally

valuable

they became,

the

longer

in life

they

were

likely

to

be

perceived

as children. Such a change opens up for inquirydifferences over time and between

cultures

in

the

perceived length

of and

meanings

attached

to

childhood.

Myron

Weiner

in

The Child

and

the

State in India

(1991)

aims to show

why

this

34Viviana A. Zelizer,

Pricingthe Priceless Child:

The

Changing

Social Value of Children(New York,

1985).

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OCTOBER

1998



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Histories of Childhood 1207

vital transition has not occurred

in

a particular non-Western culture.35 He is

concerned to find out why child labor, described in telling detail, is so prevalent

in

present-day India. His analysis is historically

informed; he argues that a comparison

of experience

in

Europe, Asia, and Africa shows that it is not simply legislating for

compulsory schooling but, more important, a willingness to enforce it, that can

bring

about this transition. In

India,

he

argues,

the willingness has been absent, and

the consequence has been a higher level of child labor there than in many countries

with lower per capita income. There is in

India, he suggests, a culture at an elite

level that accepts child labor, and until that

culture changes no amount of laws or

reports will have significant impact.

Weiner's

approach represents

one

pole

in a spectrum of attempts to understand

what factors explain the prevalence or otherwise of child labor. At the other end lies

the

neo-classical family strategy approach:

decisions about the deployment

of

family resources, it is argued, will arise out of an assessment of what will work best

for the

well-being

of the

family

as a

whole; child

labor will diminish when

a

family

has both the resources to invest in schooling

(in terms of foregone income) and

a

perception that such investment will bring its own return.36 n between lie analyses

that

suggest the complexity of

the

processes

that

have transformed the

relationships

between children and their parents.37It is

a

debate

with

some way yet

to

run,

and

whose importance it is difficult to exaggerate.

IT

SEEMS LIKELY THAT THE ISSUES RAISED BY ARI'ES

will

continue to set part of the

agenda for the history of childhood for the

foreseeable future. From his stance in

mid-twentieth-century bourgeois France,

Aries

sought

to understand how

a

partic-

ular set of beliefs about childhood and

practices

of

child-rearing

had come into

being.

Both those beliefs and

practices

have changed substantially

in

the

succeeding

half-century,

but

that

of course has not lessened our need

to

try

to

understand the

present by

reference to

the

past.

It is that need which nourishes

the

impulse

to

research

the

history

of childhood.

It is

reasonable

to

hope that, inspired by

what

has

been achieved

by Schultz,

other scholars

will

seek

to achieve

precision

in docu-

menting the ideals of childhood held in different societies at different times.

Schultz's own work

and that of other

scholars

such

as

Carolyn

Steedman

indicates

that

the outcome

of such

inquiries may

well

be a renewed

emphasis

on

the

period

of

the

Enlightenment

as the

point

of transition to a

world

expecting

adult lives to

be

shaped by

childhood

experience and,

at the same

time, looking

to childhood as

the

repository

of values held in

high

esteem.

Taken

together, they

made children

and childhood of central

importance

in

the

West,

with all the

consequences

that

followed: the evaluation of children in terms of emotion

rather than

economic

35Myron Weiner, The Childand the State in India: Child Laborand Education Policy in Comparative

Perspective Princeton, N.J., 1991).

36

An argument developed

most forcefully in Clark Nardinelli, Child Labor and the Industrial

Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1990).

37

See Hugh Cunningham

and Pier Paolo

Viazzo, eds.,

Child Labour in Historical Perspective

1800-1985: Case Studies rom

Europe, Japan and Colombia (Florence, 1996); and,

for a

study that uses

first-person testimony to

chart the complexity

of

historical change,

Harvey J. Graff, Conflicting

Paths:

Growing Up in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL

REVIEW

OCTOBER 1998



15/15

1208

Hugh Cunningham

contribution to the

family,

the enhanced

spending power

of

children

and

the

pressure to consume

that

is

targeted

at

them, the issue of the

rights they should

enjoy. This emphasis

on

how the child foreshadows

the adult invites

a

focus on the

gendering

of

childhood,

an issue that is

likely

to be

of central importance in

forthcoming work, as it is in many of the books considered above. What one may

with less confidence

expect

is a

willingness to compare different

cultures. Scholars

of non-Western cultures

writing

about

childhood

nearly always

make

implicit or

explicit reference to

Western experience (though rarely abreast of the more recent

historiography). Within the

writing

about

childhood

in the

West, comparative study

is

rare, scholars often remaining locked within their own

national literatures.

Systematic comparison

would be valuable.38

There are,

in

addition, issues

not

on Aries' agenda that demand attention.

Taking

our cue from the

present,

the most

striking

fact about childhood

in

the world

today

is the gulf in life experience separatingthe childrenof the wealthy from the children

of

the poor.

Its most obvious manifestation

is

the

division between children who

are

an expense to their parents throughout childhood and

beyond,

and

those who,

through work of some kind, contribute

to their

family economies.

This is

primarily

a

global geographical division,

with

child

labor in the

developing

world

a

rising

cause for concern.

But it is a

division

that

also exists within the

developed world;

research

is

revealing

levels

both

of

child

poverty

and

of

child

labor once

thought

to

be things of the past.39It

is

the

challenge

of Weiner's

book that

he

links this

difference

in the

economic

experience

of children to the

spread or otherwise of

a

set of ideas about childhood. These were issues that Aries ignored. In the

circumstances of

the late twentieth

century,

they

demand to be

addressed,

and

addressed in

a

way that

brings together more

effectively

than is

being

done

at

present the different

discourses

and

academic practices of cultural history, eco-

nomic

history (the globalization

of the world

economy

and its

effects

on

children

are of fundamental

importance),

and

family strategy studies.

It is

no mean

task.

38

J.

M. Hawes

and

N.

R.

Hiner, eds.,

Children in Historical and

ComparativePerspective:An

International Handbook and Research Guide (New York, 1991), contains valuable guides to the

literature, country by country, but does not advance very far in the work of comparison.

39.

See,

for

example,

Michael

Lavalette,

Child

Employment

n the

CapitalistLabourl

Market

Aldershot,

1994).

Hugh Cunningham is a

professor

of Social

History

at the

University

of

Kent at

Canterbury.

His

work on

the

history

of

children and childhood

includes The

Children

of

the Poor:

Representations

of

Childhood

since the

Seventeenth

Centuwy

(1991) and Children and

Childhood in WesternSociety since

1500 (1995). He

has

co-edited with Joanna Innes

Charity,Philanthropy

and

Reform:

From the

1690s

to 1850 (1998).

Cunningham is currently

following up issues in the history of

child labor, first

formulated

in

The

Employment

and

Unemployment

of

Children in England c. 1680-1851, Past and Present (1990), and in a volume

published by UNICEF

and co-edited with

Pier Paolo

Viazzo,

Child

Labour in

Historical

Perspective

1800-1985:

Case Studies

from

Europe,

Japan

and Colom-

bia (1996).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL

REVIEW

OCTOBER 1998

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