A South African Perspective on the SHCY Conference,

Marquette University, Milwaukee, 4-7 August 2005

Sarah Duff

I think that I should begin this reflection on the recent SHCY conference at Marquette University, Milwaukee, by remarking on how much I enjoyed this gathering of historians of childhood and children; I have been to few conferences where the participants were so welcoming, enthusiastic, and keen to discuss and debate the issues raised by the panels and speakers. As the sole South African (indeed, African) representative, I found the interest in my research and paper -- and in the situation, generally, of the history of childhood and children in South Africa -- particularly stimulating. I left Milwaukee with a renewed desire to investigate both the lives of children, as well as the construction of the notion of childhood, in my country. What follows is a synthesis of the ideas and problems dealt with during the conference that appealed to me, and is, inevitably, coloured by the experience of unfamiliar surroundings and customs.

Of the sessions and roundtables that I attended, I was struck by the tendency to emphasise the history of children -- of individual or local experience -- rather than the history of childhood. The latter concern -- the exploration of the development of the concept of childhood (or, equally, of adolescence or youth) -- is best arrived at through the analysis of many examples of the particular and the specific, and it could be argued that the history of children allows us the best means of studying, and acknowledging, the extent to which unique cultural, social, educational, medical, recreational, economic, or political circumstances contribute to the creation of different childhoods. (Could we talk of a history of childhoods instead of childhood?) Yet, paradoxically, this interest in children -- in ontology, not epistemology -- also points to a broadening of our field. As was suggested at the conference, it is possible that the future of the history of children/childhood lies in the history of 'age': an analysis of a child's way of life also reveals his or her parents' -- and community's -- attitudes towards childrearing, play, or education. Of course, considering that most of our access to children's pasts is through documents produced by grown-ups, the history of children/childhood is as much one of adults/adulthood.

This simultaneous narrowing and broadening of interest within the sub-discipline was especially evident in, what was for me, the highlight of the conference: Paula Fass's plenary, 'The World is at Our Door: Why Historians of Children and Childhood Should Answer.' In her appeal to the delegates to consider children and childhood in global terms, Fass showed the importance of understanding that not only do (and did) children's lives and experiences differ radically from area to area (that what applies to Texas is not true, necessarily, for Moscow), but that the study of children and childhood is a useful and revealing means of analysing, among other things, government policies, adoption trends, migration, or charity work. As far as I remember, Fass did not deal explicitly with a question which I am asked whenever I attend a meeting of historians in South Africa: why study the history of children/childhood? She, did, though, suggest a number of reasons, one of them being that it opens up a new perspective on the past. In a sense, this is, almost literally, a new 'history from below'. Of course, one could add that an excellent motivation is that it is 'there' -- that it is an aspect of the past that, until recently, has gone unexplored. But could the history of children/childhood have a wider, or an educative, function?

In South Africa, 9 August is a public holiday that commemorates a 20 000-strong women's march to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest the extension of pass books to black women in 1956. As I write this, I am listening to a spirited debate on a local radio station about the significance of National Women's Day. Thus far, the discussion has followed two themes: do we need so many public holidays? And is it unfair to celebrate women and children (National Youth Day is on 16 June, to honour those killed during the 1976 student uprising), but to ignore South African men? While it would appear that everyone is in disagreement with the economists who propose halving our number of holidays, there is a great deal of divergence on the second issue. For gender historians, this shows up the extent to which men are no longer seen as the 'invisible' or de-gendered members of society. It is impossible to gauge whether the host and panellists on, and callers to, CapeTalk radio are responding to the trend in women's history to move towards a consideration of gender, but I think that there is some link here between debates in academia and those in the public domain. After all, as John Tosh reminds us, historians tend to write about those concerns that are uppermost in the thoughts of their societies -- that they respond to issues within their communities. [1]

I am not suggesting that we narrow our interests to that which is commonly deemed to be 'relevant', or that -- even worse -- we all become sociologists, but that historians of children/childhood are in a unique position to shed light on present-day children and childhood: we are able to explode those myths surrounding children and childhood -- that they possess a 'natural innocence', or that they need to have their 'natural badness' beaten out of them -- and simplistic victim/agent binaries that inform government policies and other major decisions about young people. For example, as a result of the South African government's slow response to the country's AIDS crisis, educating children and the youth about HIV and AIDS has, until very recently, been the responsibility of non-governmental organisations, which tend to seek funding from abroad. One of the major problems that these NGOs have come across is the reluctance among many foreign donors (and Americans in particular) to finance sex education for children -- in the belief that the 'innocence' of children is related fundamentally to their asexuality. Money is given more readily to hospices and homes for children orphaned by AIDS -- those more easily defined as 'victims' of the syndrome.

Indeed, western attitudes to Africa, Asia, and South America (to the non-west, essentially) can be related to ideas relating to childhood. As Stefan Tanaka commented during the roundtable session on teaching children's history and youth studies, the non-west has been -- and is -- frequently described in childlike terms. Agents of British imperialism in Africa during the late nineteenth century characterised their 'native' subjects as being as irrational, intellectually backward, and gullible as children. Similarly, present-day media representations of African famines or wars portray people in Sudan or Niger as either passive, innocent victims of circumstance, or unreasonable agents of destruction, always needing the 'mature' and grown-up west to solve their problems. We have a duty, I think, to participate in debates about children and childhood, as popularly- held beliefs about youth and the nature thereof have the potential to do enormous harm -- and good.

What I have attempted to do is to relate those arguments and trends that I found the most compelling at the SHCY conference. I hope that at our next meeting in Sweden that there will be a greater number of papers and presentations on non-American topics -- and that it will be attended by historians from all over the globe. In November, the University of Tours in France will be hosting a two-day conference on the history of childhood entitled 'Stories for children, histories of childhood' and is to be attended by scholars from all over the world -- among others, South Africa (me again), Nigeria, Iran, India, Australia, Puerto Rico, Brazil,  America, Spain, Britain, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Greece. Why this international interest? Is it simply because Tours is less expensive than Milwaukee? Or that it was advertised more widely? Could it be cultural chauvinism? I think by attempting to answer these questions that we will begin to understand what the position of the history of children/childhood is like globally -- and what the future holds for our field.