NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

"At the Crossroads of Children's Studies and American Studies:

Intersections, Possibilities, Challenges"

Social History and the History of Childhood

Paula S. Fass

Social history needs the history of children and childhood. I say this not because children should be viewed as yet another social category to be examined – a kind of final frontier that exhausts the categories—but precisely because childhood is not like other social categories. Unlike other group identities that can become active vehicles for change (something to which early social history was committed), many children--infants and young children especially--do not have this potential to be self-conscious actors. And even more than other social groups of ordinary people, children have few collectable sources through which we can hear and observe them in their own terms. Instead, we are usually dependent on the observations of others, and these observations are often partial and incomplete. Finally, unlike many other social groups, children are not importantly identifiable by their national containers. By this I mean that the most interesting things about them are rarely their nationality.

In all of these ways, children and childhood force social historians to think and research outside of the limited boxes they initially created for themselves, and this is a good thing. Let me address these matters sequentially and suggest how the history of children liberates social historians and American studies scholars influenced by social history, and allows them (us) to address some of the problems that resulted from our initial methodological and epistemological limitations.

1) Children can but often do not create changes consciously. This is a big issue and I can only nibble around the edges here. The conceit that drove early social history—that we could locate change in the bottom—was not entirely misplaced since it opened our picture of the past and freed our imaginations. We began to see history in more complex ways as lived experience and recognized that the sources for change can be multiple. At the same time, our commitments were both wildly optimistic and restrictive at the same time. Social history tried to make all potential social groups into active agents of history and this vision was never effectively realized. But, the idea that only serious makers of history are worthy subjects of historical inquiry is simply wrong-headed. So was the notion that all human action is agential. Some of the most important kinds of human activities are defensive, preservative, un-self-consciously conservative. Studying children and their history makes this obvious and removes the onus from all of us that required for too long that we demonstrate the agential nature of the subjects we study. That quest led too often to repetitive, predictable, and tendentious work. It was cultural history that helped to clarify this matter by showing us how all action is confined within the boundaries of the power exerted by words, meanings, and the many textual notations through which human activity is documented.

2) Children do, of course, leave many sources but many of these are not self-defining. They are often written by others, or collected by others toward a purpose, or they are not deeply revealing, such as forms of school work like penmanship lessons. In this sense, social historians are forced to admit that many of our best sources, those that are literate and complex, always require interpretation and force us to see the web of meanings created by those caught in historical time. We are hardly ever just self-defining. And there is no simple behavioral act. Nowhere is this clearer than in the foggy realm of children’s history where who children are is often predefined and just as often redefined over time through the intersection of their actions and those of their caretakers. Indeed, children’s identities are flexible and changing and the sources that document these changes (especially in the early years of childhood) are usually second-hand. Nevertheless, who children are and how they become who they are reflect the complex interplay between social prescriptions, adult descriptions, and children’s actions.

3) This brings me to my final point. Children are the least easily identified through national means. This does not mean that there are no national differences among children since there are many: birth rates, mortality rates, educational attainment measures, etc. It does mean that nationality is often the least meaningful to individual children--far less meaningful than other social identities. Children have literally to grow into their national identities and this is naturally one of the things we want to understand. The way they are raised is often local and sub-cultural or it is transnational more than it is national, although we do have national policies in these matters, policies that over the past hundred years, and especially since World War II, have become urgent and consequential.

The fact that nationality is frequently not the primary issue in many realms of children’s history also means that studying children allows historians to move much more readily beyond and between ordinary national borders to ask comparative, even global questions, about children and childhood. In this regard, the launching of the new Journal of Transnational American Studies is very much to the point here.1 This is a very good thing at this particular moment of time and I think also for the foreseeable future. The history of childhood can allow social historians and Americanists an extremely effective angle on and entry into current global perspectives. I could say much more about this, but since I have done this already in our own Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth,2 I want only to emphasize that this global moment is especially important for children’s history and from the point of view of social history. It allows the social history of children to lead the way toward a more integrated and comprehensive history and to make children’s history an essential component of current developments in the historical profession.

Endnotes

1. The launching of the new journal was announced at the meeting of the American Studies Association in Albuquerque, New Mexico in October 2008 where this roundtable took place.

2. Paula S. Fass, “The World Is At Our Door: Why Historians of Children and Childhood Should Open Up,” Journal of the History of Children and Youth 1 (Winter 2008), 11-31.

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