SHCY Bulletin
Society for the History of Children and Youth
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No. 14 |
Fall 2009 |
Round Table on the Critical
Historiography of Childhood
Colin Heywood, University of Nottingham
I do find these six questions intriguing,
making us reflect on the yardsticks we use to assess our findings. They also
bring to light the way our approach to the history of young people has changed
over the last few decades, under the influence of a renewed interest in the
study of childhood and children among social scientists. [1] I am going to
start with Question 5. I am pretty certain that I did not have a theory of
child development in mind when, during the 1970s, I started to research the
history of child labour in nineteenth-century France. Or rather, I would have
taken for granted our modern Western version of a ‘protected’ childhood, which
sees children as innocent, vulnerable creatures who should be sheltered for as
long as possible from the harsh realities of adult life. Children, from this
perspective, have a right to schooling and time for play instead of pressure to
earn their living. [2] Hence, I was surely predisposed at the outset to favour
the reformers campaigning for child labour legislation, and to condemn out of
hand their opponents. [3] It follows that my answer to Question 1 would be that
historians will have a theory of childhood of some sort in mind, even if they
think they don’t, so it is better if they are conscious of it.
With a later project, on growing up in modern
France, it was necessary for me to get to grips with theories on the nature of
the child and on child development. I was conscious of having luminaries like
Jean-Jacques Rousseau breathing down my neck. In Emile, or on Education (1762), Rousseau organized his argument around successive stages in childhood and
adolescence as the basic framework for progression in a new system of
education. In this way, he justified a ‘negative’ education, as opposed to that
of the schools in eighteenth-century France, on the grounds that children were
slow to develop powers of reasoning. [4] The notion of linking the physical
development of children to their education, to help parents and teachers with
their expectations of what the young could learn at successive ages, was to
have a long history. Above all, the period running from the late nineteenth
century to the middle of the twentieth century brought a massive acceleration
of scholarly effort on refining the stages and sequences of ‘developmentalism.’
[5] One outcome of all this new knowledge during the late twentieth century was
a debate over whether childhood was a universal or a culturally-constructed
stage of life. This is largely a matter of divergence between disciplines.
On the one side, a biologist can confidently
state that as we evolve from other primates, we develop new stages of life. So,
according to Barry Bogin, ‘the majority of mammals progress from infancy to
adulthood seamlessly’ – (neat shades of the Ariès thesis there for the
historian!). [6] But Bogin goes on to assert that humans have evolved extra
time for the development of the brain and learning. He discerns five stages for
human development between birth and reproductive maturity, taking the form of
(1) infancy, (2) childhood, (3) juvenile, (4) adolescence, and (5) adulthood.
[7] He concludes that ‘there seems to be a pan-human ability to perceive the
five stages of human postnatal development and respond appropriately to each.’
[8] Rousseau, as it happens, set out five stages to human development –
and evidently such frameworks are ‘good to think.’ Developmental psychologists,
until recently at least, have also had a prominent role in proposing a natural
path to maturity as an adult. If we were to accept all this, the answer to
Question 1 would be relatively straightforward for historians. However, such a
framework is open to the charge of ‘biological reductionism.’ We are aware, for
example, that there were many variations on the way these stages were perceived
in the past, notably the four stages based on the four humours, or the seven
ages linked to, say, the seven days of creation. Hence, on the other side of
the debate, the sociologist Allison James could assert that childhood is ‘a
social and cultural, rather than a universal phenomenon.’ [9] Historians are
likely to find this latter type of argument more fruitful as a starting point
for their research, rather than the inherently ahistorical approach of the
biologist. It allows them to range freely over past societies investigating the
different ways that people thought about the early years of life. This does not
mean ignoring the ‘biological facts,’ but rather discovering how people in the
past interpreted them. [10]
For my purposes as a historian, therefore, I
never contemplated using the stages in childhood outlined by biologists or
other scientists such as developmental psychologists – the specific
target of social constructionists – as a template for ‘growing up’ in
France during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead I poked around in the ‘dustbin
of history’, as the sociologists would have it, to see what ‘presociological’
ideas influenced people at that time. [11] I looked at past conceptions of
childhood such as the supposedly ‘natural’ evil or innocence of the young, as
depicted by philosophers, priests, poets, painters and novelists. However, what
really interested me was how French people attempted to make sense of their own
childhoods. [12] Much of my primary source material took the form of ‘ego
documents’: letters, diaries, childhood reminiscences and autobiographies,
where authors set down their thoughts on their own feelings and actions. I
therefore turned to the various rites de
passage that marked an individual’s journey from the cradle to the grave in
village society before industrialization (baptism, first communion, and so
forth) as a framework for my autobiographical material. These were important,
we may assume, as a way of helping people to cope with important transitions in
their life. I also noted changes that came to these rites during the nineteenth
century, such as leaving school and doing military service. Finally, I also
thought in terms of an individual life course, borrowing once more from
sociology, to set beside the relatively fixed life cycle of the traditional
popular culture. [13] Here the individual could identify their own turning points
in life, introduced randomly from outside or a matter of their own strategic
choices. In this way I sought, as a historian, to focus on childhood in a
particular period and place.
Notes
1. Here one might cite as particularly
influential on historians Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New
York: Basic Books, 1985); Allison James and Alan Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood:
Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Construction of Childhood (London:
Falmer Press, 1990); and Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 1996).
2. See, for example, Harry Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society
1880-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 9-15; Steven
Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American
Childhood (Cambridge MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University, 2004), pp. 75-93; and Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History (New York and London: Routledge, 2006),
pp. 54-64.
3. Colin Heywood, Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France: Work, Health and Education
among the ‘Classes Populaires’ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988).
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile,
or on Education (1762), transl.
Allan Bloom (London: Penguin, 1991). See also Maurice Cranston, The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
1754-62 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
5. André Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), pp. 2,9.
6. Barry Bogin, ‘Evolutionary and Biological
Aspects of Childhood’, in Biological
Perspectives on Children, ed. Catherine Panter-Brick (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), pp. 10-44 (p. 17).
9. Allison James, ‘From the Child’s Point of
View: Issues in the Social
Construction of Childhood’, in Panter-Brick, Biological Perspectives, pp. 45-65 (p. 45).
10. Note that specifying a link between the
biological and the social dimensions to childhood remains problematical for
social scientists.
11. Allison James, Chris Jenks and Alan Prout
(eds), Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1998), p. 9.
12. Colin Heywood, Growing Up in France: From the Ancien Regime to the Third Republic (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
13. Alan Bryman, Bill Bytheway, Patricia
Allatt and Teresa Keil (eds), Rethinking
the Lifecycle (Hounsmills: Macmillan, 1987).
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