NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Berkshire Conference on the History of Women:  Two Reports

Janet Golden and Rebecca de Schweinitz

From Janet Golden:

The Fourteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women met at the University of Minnesota in June and featured a number of sessions and individual papers focused on children.  Among them were sessions on “Indoctrination and Education: Continuities and Changes in the Construction of Girlhoods Around the World,” and “Narratives of Rescue: U.S. and Canadian Adoptions of Chinese Girls, 1873 to the Present,” and roundtables entitled “’Rescue Me’: Women, Children, and Transnational/Transracial Rescue,” and “The Modern Girl Around the World: Reflections and New Directions.” The appearance of so many sessions and devoted to childhood and particularly girlhood suggests the vibrancy of our historical enterprise and the kinds of contributions it can make to areas such as women’s history and gender history.

Childhood as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis: Lessons From and For Women’s and Gender History
Kriste Lindenmeyer chaired a compelling session on “Childhood as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis: Lessons From and For Women’s and Gender History.” Rebecca de Schweintitz, discussed the Civil Rights movement in modern American and examined how basing pleas for change on notions of childhood proved limiting because they signified "relationships of power" that ultimately placed the state in the role of parent and undermined claims of adults.  Leslie Paris reviewed the ways in which women's history subsumed studies of girls into "women's history" without acknowledging many of the subjects were adolescents living under parental authority and then turned to the topics girls studies needs to address, noting for example, that we know more about girls' consumer habits than about their religious feelings and practices.  Martha Saxton described the childhood of Mary Ball Washington, (mother of George Washington) and of the three child slaves she owned. Drawing from the literature on enslaved children she called for a "fuller, historically-inflected understanding of siblings" including the kinds of fictive sibling relationships created among plantation children.  Victoria Ott examined the category of youth and gender within the creation of Confederate Nationalism during the Civil War, noting how the ideals and political activities of Confederate daughters differed from those of their mothers and older female kin.  Tamara Myers, drawing from the literature on sexuality and the body examine how the troubled adolescents came to be part of a legal category: the juvenile, as their bodies were "prodded, probed, evaluate, judged and contained" within the court system.  Connecting the history of juveniles as legal category with emerging studies of adolescent bodies in medicine and biological sciences, she contends, provides a new way of understanding juvenile justice.  As the papers at this session suggest, the collective work of historians of childhood must be considered by historians in all fields and must be used to restructure the history presented in textbooks to secondary and college students.  The program committee of the Berkshire Conference should be commended for their inclusion of so many papers on the subject of children and childhood.

From Rebecca de Schweinitz:

As one of the many of us who made the jump from women and gender history to the history of childhood, or has one foot in both fields at least, I was not particularly surprised—although certainly pleased—that there were so many panels and papers related to the history of childhood and youth at this years' Berks. The following is a run down of some of the other work presented at the conference that may be of interest to SCHY members. (Thanks to all those who graciously shared information and comments about their panels/papers!) –Rebecca de Schweinitz

Modern Girlhood: Eastern and Western Europe in Comparative Perspective

According the session commentator Julia Mickenberg (University of Texas, Austin) the papers in this panel examined questions of agency, highlighting tensions between expectations placed upon girls and their own desires for (and experiences with) autonomy and self-expression. They explored the interplay between inner experience and outside forces: architecture and the built environment, the institution of marriage, and national imperatives. They pointed to the methodological challenges of understanding the experiences of girls from non-elite backgrounds—and even suggest that the category of "girl" is in some ways more class than age specific.

Rebecca Friedman's (Florida University) paper explored the relationship between "childhood, gender, and the domestic interior," arguing that childhood was at the focal point of discussions about turn of the century Russia's place in the modern world, and that construction of the ideal domestic interior was essential to the project of raising the ideal citizen and subject.

Mary Jo Maynes (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) looked at older girls in Central Europe and Great Britain and examined the ways in which the institution of marriage shaped girls' agency and choices in the context of an emergent liberalism in Western Europe. She expanded how scholars might think about the question of agency by highlighting how young women navigated social and familial expectations through marital "choice"—which given the conventions of the time meant that the strategic goal of action for respectable girls "was not so much to choose well as to connive to be well chosen."

Kristin McGuire (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) explored Polish girlhood in the context of efforts to sustain a Polish national identity during a period (turn of the twentieth century) of partition and control by Austria, Germany, and Russia. She highlighted the importance placed on education as the means to inculcate patriotism and as a site in which girls experienced the competing pressures of family and school as well as a competing set of civic instructions. As in other contexts, these Polish girls learned to sublimate many of their own desires in order to fulfill feminine norms of self-sacrifice and service, at the same time they developed as individual and gained a sense of themselves as autonomous beings and as citizens though the experience of education.

Rescue Me: Women, Children and Transnational/Transracial Rescue Narratives

This panel explored dimensions of "rescue" in contemporary and historical accounts of "child-saving" and reminded us of the ways that ideas about childhood and policies governing children are deeply connected to (racialized) politics and political agendas. 

Karen Dubinsky (Queen's University) used the ideological rescue of children in post-revolutionary Cuba, "Operation Peter Pan," and the 2000 case of Elian Gonzalez to illustrate "how the fate of actual children can serve as a compelling metaphor for a fractured nation." She looked at why children have been targets for rescue campaigns and how societal trauma is expressed through the bodies of the young.

Liz Coner's (University of Melbourne) paper explored the significance of native childhood to the colonial imagination. She linked the popularity of the pickanniny image in white Australian culture to national discourses and paternalistic policies—policies that resulted in the widespread neglect and abuse of Aboriginal children and families. 

Mary Ceasar (Queen's University) looked at the "multiple meanings" of Oprah Winfrey's new (2006) Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. The school and media coverage of the school, she argued, builds on and reinforces the idea that African children are in need of rescue. Yet the school occupies an ambiguous position in the lives of South Africans. Ceasar focused on "the view from South African," on how South Africans understand Oprah and her school's place in their collective and individual lives—and in so doing, again raised questions about still widely held views about child-rescue.

Sara Dorrow's (University of Alberta) presentation explored the notion of rescue in the North American adoption of Chinese children. She looked at discrepancies between professional adoption discourses and the narratives of many Christian adoption agencies which "foreground rescue as a kind of love transcending blood kinship." Her work, like the other papers in this panel, helps us understand the cultural politics of rescue and the ways that rescue continues to be embedded in transnational/transracial relationships.

Fostering New Motherhood: Renegotiating the Racial and Ethnic Boundaries of maternity through 20^th-Century Foster Care and Adoption

As panel commentator David Klaasssen (University of Minnesota) reports, although the papers in this panel focused on groups or organizations like the Unitarian Service Committee, Foster Parent Plan International, Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society, International Social Service, and Welcome House, and on those (adults) who responded to programs to help children, more than on the children themselves, they very much address issues within the history of children and youth. Broadly speaking, they looked at what motivated families, and individual women to get involved in adoption, fostering, or child-sponsorship programs--whether to help the child, to meet personal needs, to play a role in global struggles, or as an extension or religious and/or community solidarity. The papers also looked at the values that shaped these programs—professional standards, community/cultural values, ideas about maternal instincts—the natural relationship between women and children. They examined market factors: population, war and global politics, economics, legal and political structures. And they spoke to the relationships between birth parents, adoptive/foster parents, agencies, children, and the available adoption, foster, and institutional options.

Dianne Creagh (Pennsylvania State) went beyond the stereotypes of foster mothering to show how it actually worked in a particular time and place. She examined how agencies adjusted their policies and requirements to meet the realities of the Great Depression. She also provided a glimpse of what motivated mothers to become foster parents.

Tarah Brookfield (York University) similarly examined the real women who provided financial support and letters of encouragement to programs like the Christian Children's Network and Save the Children—programs more commonly known by magazine inserts and celebrity-studded television advertisements. She gave a sense of women engaged in "personal foreign policy initiatives" that they hoped would contribute to a better world.

Kori Graves' (University of Wisconsin, Madison) paper compared two agencies that pioneered in the inclusion of African American families who wished to adopt mixed race orphans from Korea. Her presentation was suggestive of the different ways that existing professional standards affected how agencies handled applications from African American families.

Continuities and Changes in the Construction of Girlhood Globally

Reflective of the session title, this panel explored changes and continuities in the construction of girlhood in three countries from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. It looked at why and how a variety of adults—missionaries, educators, experts, and authors—sought to reconstruct girlhood. It also focused on how girls resisted efforts to enforce gendered prescriptions, despite adults' use of strategies such as intimidation, education, and indoctrination.

Nancy Stockdale (University of North Texas) examined how British missionaries sought to "disconnect" girls from their Palestinian girlhoods in order to transform into Protestants. She showed that from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Palestinian school girls and orphans both accommodated and resisted the competing ideals of the teachers and parents.

Miriam Forman-Brunell's (University of Missouri, Kansas City) paper looked at how babysitter training from the World War II era to the new millennium provided generations of parents with "better" workers and was an important strategy for the containment of teenage girls. She argued that babysitting training provided girls with a measure of independence at the same time that it reinforced a narrow domestic and maternal imperative.

Kristen Alexander’s (York University) paper traced the ways that "old" and "new" ideas about gender and race worked (and often didn't work) together in different parts of the British empire during the 1920s and1930s: encouraging girls to be adventurous, risk-taking public citizens while reminding them of their maternal and domestic duties, and touting the benefits of international and inter-racial connection and sisterhood while continuing to rely on ideas about racial hierarchy and an Anglo-American 'civilizing mission.'  Her paper also included a discussion of sources and the problems scholars encounter as they look for things like resistance and agency

History/Theory/Masculinity: Continuities and Changes

Toby Ditz's comments for this roundtable were specifically dedicated to exploring "Youth," namely, friendships between older and younger men in the early modern era and their impact on the gendering of youths. He argued that the importance of relationships between youth and older men, in conjunction with male friendship norms that increasingly stressed intimacy, promoted a language of friendship imbued with a strong affective charge, but also one that did not disavow the workings of power and inequality. Such a combination of power and intimacy, Ditz argued, created complexities in the gendering of young men discernible in advice literature and family letters which treated young men as vulnerable to seduction and easily led to ruin by men with bad intentions. Also, like women, male youths were exhorted to please others because of their dependence on others for the resources that would eventually secure their status as fully adult men. Male youth, then, were not yet fully masculinized.

Queer Politics and American Identities in the 1970s and '80s

Gillian Frank's (Brown University) paper for this roundtable drew from a larger project that looks at how women-led social and political movements redefined the meaning of citizenship and civil rights by deeming certain political and cultural transformations as harmful to children. In this paper he explored how the national backlash against gay liberation in the 1970s, sparked by Save Our Children (a church-based social movement opposed to gay rights, the ERA, and busing), constructed  a sexualized idea of citizenship and civil rights around the idea of the endangered child. Frank suggested that SOC's sexual politics of child protection prescribed a normative sexual identity for adults, one that it organized around the goal of segregating white children from sexual knowledge and preventing sexual acts against children.