Paula Fass Gave Presidential Address at SHCY Meeting

 

After the Saturday evening banquet, outgoing SHCY president Paula Fass challenged the audience in her presidential address, “Childhood and Memory.”  Fass urged historians of childhood to consider the important relationship between memory and children’s history. As someone who has just completed a memoir, Fass argued that the commitment to memory work and acute sensibilities regarding children have had intersecting courses of development while serious studies of memory and about childhood have developed in tandem historically.

 

In the eighteenth century, Fass argued Enlightenment thinkers began to explore both how memory and how childhood contributed to the constitution of the human, domains which Jean Jacques Rousseau, above all, brought together in his famous Confessions.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, new insights into the human psyche in Vienna and in the United States emerged just as scientists began to pay close attention to children and childhood.  In both realms of investigation there was a new effort to understand how distortions in these arenas influenced the human personality. Fass also included in her discussion the imaginative literature of the time where writers such as Marcel Proust and Henry Roth were newly attuned to these matters.   Finally, Fass urged historians of childhood to consider how their own contemporary enterprise—the outpouring of a serious interest in children’s history—comes at a moment when the memoir has come to the fore as a literary genre. Each questions grand narratives of the self and of society. And both, she suggests, are related to a “postmodern” view. In the memoir, a coherent historical vision is fragmented while in childhood studies, the unity of the personality, first proposed by the Enlightenment, is being subtly replaced. Thus, if the memoir proposes that the personal and fragmentary is more authentic than a unified historical narrative, the separateness and integrity of childhood is today seen as legitimate in itself, apart from its contribution to adulthood.

 

Pat Ryan, pensive during Fass's address; Karen Sanchez-Eppler posing question.