SHCY Bulletin

Society for the History of Children and Youth

History and Theory, and Whose Side We Are On

Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania

So I'm looking at the current issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and it's hard not to notice how little there is there of children and youth.

The first article, on a colonial Virginia baptismal bowl, is about the young only insofar as Mason family infants were passive participants in rituals of refinement and ceremonies of status that concerned adults, not the newborn.  All the significances that Lauren Winner sees in the bowl are adult significances, revelatory of religious doctrines, emotional needs, and gentry prerogatives that would have been utterly opaque to the babies who were baptized in it.  And I do not even speak of the secular worldliness of the bowl's primary use as a wineglass cooler.

The next article, on child deathbed scenes in Anglo-American literature from the 17th century to the mid-19th, uses fictional representations of precocious converts to get at real anxieties and ambitions of real adults.  Exactly as Diana Pasulka says, the article is about the young only to the extent that their alleged dying scenes were literary tropes that conveyed changing cultural meanings.

The next article, on idealizations of youth in British child-rescue literature a century ago, is entirely about affluent adult images of that ideal and affluent adult analyses of the enemies of that ideal among the poor.  As Shurlee Swain admits openly, the essay is an inquiry into the origins of the concept of "the best interests of the child" that underlay much of the 20th century's child welfare law and practice.  Her business is with the ambiguities and hypocrisies of the politics of child-saving.

The next three articles, on seashore hospitals in the United States, Belgium, and Sweden at the turn of the 20th century, present intriguing comparisons of national character manifest in divergent dealings with the plague of tuberculosis among children.  The focus in all three pieces is on the reformers who built these asylums - their mentalities and motives, their beliefs about poverty and the poor, their attitudes toward urbanization and industrialization, their views of the role of the state in protecting children - and not on the youngsters who actually filled those sanatoriums.  As the editor of the essays in this section concedes, children's voices "are hard to hear" in them.

The last article, on the uses of ethnic attachment among indigenous people of the Arctic regions, asserts that affiliation with one's culture and awareness of one's ethnic history promote feelings of belonging which foster psychological resilience and well-being.  But Lisa Wexler does not argue that any of this is distinctive to the young.  As she says, the benefits of enhanced awareness of cultural identity obtain across all ages.  As she might have added, the task of transmitting that heritage is inescapably the province of the elders.

And this preoccupation with adults, among historians of childhood and youth, is not confined to the articles.  It appears equally in the book reviews.

The first review examines a book on the uses of personal narrative in the social sciences and history.  The reviewer does not disguise the book's definition of its subject as life stories told in the retrospect of adulthood or the extent to which that definition precludes narratives of children and adolescents.

The second discusses a collection on ritual in children's lives.  The reviewer dwells on what he calls the "larger" issues of cultural change evident in such rituals and on the ways in which adults adapt rituals to changing circumstances.

The third takes up a book challenging the secularization story in American history.  The reviewer struggles to tease out implications for children in an argument that is devoted entirely to the discourse of their parents. 

The fourth surveys a collection on queer youth cultures.  It is about youth.  It is the only thing of its kind in the entire issue of the journal.

The fifth and final review addresses a volume on Japanese-American beauty pageants.  Neither the book, apparently, nor the review, certainly, says anything about the young contestants themselves.  The focus of both is on the pageants as arenas of contestation among adult Japanese-Americans over nationalism, feminism, and racial purity in an increasingly multi-racial ethnic community.

Taken together, these articles and reviews expose our dirty little secret.  We may call ourselves historians of childhood and youth, but we do not deal with children as children.  The evidence of this issue of the journal is, to be sure, excessive.  Some of us, some of the time, do study the young in their own right.  But in our preponderant practice, we focus on how the elders treated their offspring and on what such treatment can tell us about the elders.  On the whole, children appear in our work as registers of adult views and values or as indices of adult ambivalences and aspirations.  We seek their significance as idealizations (or demonizations) that serve adult purposes and projects or reveal adult concerns and conflicts.

Developmental theorists do not do any of this.  Their theory is naively realistic.  It takes children and youth as (it thinks) it finds them.  It is in fact preoccupied with the young, for themselves rather than for what they reveal of their environing culture.

It is symptomatic of this preoccupation with actual children that all the developmental theorists of consequence - from Rousseau to Freud, from Gesell and Ilg to Erikson to Piaget and Kohlberg - have propounded sequences of stages, from earliest infancy to maturity.  They have all had a holistic interest in how character, or health, or intelligence, or cognitive functioning, or moral reasoning, or human completeness, emerges. Historians of childhood simply do not ask the questions that developmental theorists do.  Not in the current issue of our journal, and not more generally.  If we worry about stages of development at all, we cherry-pick: a single stage from the entire sequence, a single theory of that stage; something from Erikson, perhaps, if we are studying adolescence, or from Coles, if we are studying youth activism.  Rebecca de Schweinitz admits as much quite cheerfully.

Children are, for historians, means to an end, as Jennifer Ritterhouse says so disarmingly: a way, in her case, to get at the etiquette of day-to-day black-white relations in the Jim Crow South. 

Children are, for developmental psychologists, ends in themselves.  Experimentalists and theorists alike observe the behavior of the very young in laboratories deliberately designed to facilitate such observation.  Even if their specific studies are confined to a single developmental moment or issue, those studies are, tacitly if not explicitly, embedded in far larger theoretical-sequential ensembles.

Historians cannot get at children the way that developmental psychologists can.  We have no laboratories or other technologies of direct access to our subjects.  The data we do have are simply too scattered and fugitive to support the sorts of ingenious and systematic experiments and interpretations that developmentalists demand as a condition of research and writing in their field.

More than that, I doubt that historians would want to get at children that way even if they could.

Historians not only see the young refracted through adult accounts but also expect to see them through such uncertain prisms.  Historians expect to see everyone that way.  When they are attending to their craft, historians are not naive realists. Their business is, ineliminably, with the denials and displacements by which we mortals get through our days, and the prevarications and paradoxes that pervade our lives, and the ironies that condition our existence.

The very essence of the historical endeavor is antithetical to the theoretical enterprise.

Theorists seek some sphere of control of the vagaries of human life.  Insofar as they succeed, they enlarge our precarious purchase on our affairs.  Good theory helps us to do better in life, in the world.  It grounds the ancient and honorable Baconian ambition to relieve man's estate.

Historians do not do that.  Not at bottom, anyway.  They do not aspire to control - or to the predictions which are the measure and test of control - so much as to understanding.  And understanding does not increase our power over nature so much as it augments our appreciation of human diversity and thus militates against control.

Understanding enables us to grasp that our social worlds resist generalization and elude the universal predications of theory.  It reminds us that the rest of the world - in other times and other places, and by extension even in our own time and place - is not and was not as we ourselves and our own kind are now.  Understanding does not enhance our dominion.  It moves in a very different direction, toward humility, generosity, and caritas.

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