SHCY Bulletin

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Comments for Panel on the Critical Historiography of Childhood

Jennifer Ritterhouse, Utah State University

I want to thank Jim Block and Harvey Graff for organizing this panel and inviting me to participate in it. I'd like to address the question of whether historians of children and childhood need a theory of child development from the perspective of my own experience trying to write about black and white children's racial learning in the Jim Crow South. Let me begin by saying that I did not set out to write about children. Instead, I found myself in the unusual situation of having an interest that was easier, rather than harder, to study in relation to children--a very different story, I think, than that of most people who attempt historical work on children and childhood.

That interest was in racial "etiquette," the widely understood conventions that guided day-to-day encounters between blacks and whites before, during, and after the period of legal segregation. From my reading in southern and African American history, I could tell that both contemporaries and historians had some understanding of what the etiquette entailed and why. But trying to study racial etiquette was like trying to find salt in the sea--it's everywhere but still hard to put your finger on. I quickly learned that one place where racial etiquette often appeared in a distilled form was the autobiographies of blacks and nonconformist whites, both of whom tended to describe how they learned the code of behavior expected of them in their segregated society. I initially intended to focus a chapter of my dissertation on these kinds of autobiographical stories. I ended up supplementing autobiography with other kinds of sources and making children's racial learning the subject of my entire book, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race.

Which brings me to my main point: that as historians we are dependent on sources, which are rarely as plentiful or as revealing, especially for the study of children, as we would like. I think I am actually rather lucky to have backed into my work on children's racial learning because, had I set out with more knowledge of theories of child development or the social science literature on race awareness in children, I think I would have considered my project completely impossible. No historian can go back in time and ask a child to draw a picture or participate in an experiment, yet I found that even the relatively rare diaries, letters and other sources produced by children in the past were not very helpful because, by the time children were old enough to know how to write, they had already learned the racial conventions of their society and seldom had any reason to comment on them. Race and racial etiquette had become for them, as for the adults around them, salt in the sea. Retrospective sources such as autobiography and oral history were the best I was going to find, in the sense that they at least offered some insights into the subjective experience of growing up black or white. But these kinds of sources were by no means transparent windows even into the minds of the adults who produced them, much less the minds of the children those adults once were. Thus, in Growing Up Jim Crow, I tried to take a thoughtful as well as a pragmatic approach to the use of retrospective sources in the study of children's experiences in the past.

Meanwhile, once it became clear that I was going to focus my entire project on children, I tried to get a handle on the existing scholarship in the history of childhood, and I also did some exploring in the extensive literature on children's understandings of race. I did not gain as much expertise in the latter as I would have liked, but I did find one new study that helped to validate my historian's approach to a subject that, as I've said, might have seemed off-limits if I had known more about the work of scholars in other disciplines. That book was Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin's The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). Trained as sociologists, Van Ausdale and Feagin provide a helpful overview of major theories of child development. Then they challenge the conventional wisdom, associated primarily with the work of Jean Piaget, that young children are too egocentric to think in racial terms. In contrast, Van Ausdale and Feagin offer the results of their own ethnographic, participant-observer study of a large multiracial preschool in the 1990s, where they regularly found children as young as three or four noticing racial differences and employing racial terms. Sometimes the children "did race" in positive ways that might have been encouraged by the school's multicultural curriculum. At other times, race became a weapon in what can only be described as power struggles over toys, art projects, and games. Van Ausdale and Feagin stress that one key reason the children allowed Van Ausdale to see them talking and acting in these ways is because she worked to divest herself of any adult authority in their eyes. Most child development research, on the other hand, examines children's behavior only in the presence of adults. This is a severe limitation, in Van Ausdale and Feagin's view, and certainly in my own research I saw evidence that children were very sensitive to adult expectations when it came to matters of race.

Reading The First R as I worked to turn my dissertation into a book provided welcome validation for my efforts to analyze the kind of evidence I had, which was almost entirely anecdotal. Many of the episodes Van Ausdale and Feagin recorded at the preschool are similar to the everyday social dramas I saw in autobiographical and oral history sources. Beyond this convenient fit, however, one could learn from Van Ausdale and Feagin's rejection of Piaget (and preference for the work of Lev Vigotsky) that the conventional wisdom in other disciplines, as in our own, is subject to change.

I think historians of children and childhood can learn useful things from child development theorists and other scholars, but I am skeptical of the notion that any historian needs "a theory" of child development going into his or her work. Neither the singularity of the word "a" nor the seeming rigidity of the word "theory" seems to me compatible with the nature of our discipline, which is so dependent on analyzing what we have for evidence rather than what we might wish we had. Moreover, while it would probably be valuable for historians to gain some sensitivity to the developmental frameworks operating, often unconsciously, in the minds of past actors as well as in our own, I worry that too much sensitivity might prove enervating. Like the poor, like people of color, like women, like gays and lesbians, the children of the past are a group of people who will remain "invisible" and "inarticulate" until historians find creative ways to study them. Our methods might be improved by a broader knowledge of the methods of other disciplines, but they will necessarily be pragmatic because of our disciplinary dependence on sources.

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