NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Brigham Young U. Undergraduates Present Research on History of Childhood
Amy Harris, Brigham Young University

In fall 2007 I taught an undergraduate course on the history of families in Europe and told the students that they could choose to use their papers as rough drafts for conference presentations in spring 2008.  Three students began projects looking at kinship, gender and childhood in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.  One student, Adam Brady, explored the connections between gender and play in early modern England and discovered the importance of class on sex-segregated games and play.  He is hoping to explore these ideas further in his senior thesis and eventually an article.  The second student, Suzanne Earnshaw, used family letters and census data to explore grandparent-grandchild relationships in Victorian working-class families.  This is a relatively new area of research and she found that grandparents were often central to the gendered practices of childrearing.  She too hopes to expand this research in her senior thesis and in preparation for graduate school.  The third student, Ardis Smith, explored the importance of non-parental childcare in the eighteenth century – particularly for aunts and nieces.  She used diaries and letters to bring children and childhood history together with the newer interest in marital status and expanded definitions of eighteenth-century family life.  She is currently expanding her research during a summer term at King’s College Cambridge and plans to revise it into an honors thesis.  She also plans to attend graduate school. 

The three students revised their term papers for presentation at Idaho State University’s gender history conference this past March.   They then revised them once again for the Mentored Student  Research Conference at Brigham Young University where they won first prize in history for their combined presentation titled “Children Learning Gender: The Importance of Class and Kinship in England, 1700-1900.”

The opportunity to take the ideas from a course and explore them in several venues has proved invaluable to these students and in turn they have found fruitful ways of combining older scholarship on gender and kinship with new ideas about childhood and children.

Adam, Suzanne, and Ardis with Poster