The New Clubhouse

Joe Austin

The publication of three new encyclopedia projects on the history of children and youth in the last four years is yet another indication that this subfield has reached a significant institutional watermark. The high quality of these volumes testifies to the growth and rigor of the new scholarship on children and youth; they also suggest that there are enough undergraduate and graduate courses taught to make the volumes useful to libraries, as well as profitable for publishers. I recommend these volumes to every university library; individually, and as a group, these encyclopedias provide excellent starting points for research at every level.

I reviewed Fass's Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society for H-Net last summer. For those interested, the full review can be found here [http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=119881097066018]. In that review, I noted with favor that this three-volume work reflected one of the two major trajectories within the interdisciplinary subfield of child and youth studies, namely the trajectory that had evolved through social history during the 1970s and 1980s.

The two encyclopedias published by ABC-CLIO, Forman-Brunell's Girlhood in America and Clement and Reinier's Boyhood in America, are part of that publisher’s larger project on the American Family, which includes encyclopedias on four other topics. Unlike Children and Childhood, these reference works are exclusively focused on the United States. Like the encyclopedia that Fass edited, Girlhood and Boyhood demonstrate foundational allegiances to social history, but this is blended with the second research trajectory that has initiated the current (post-1990) interest in child and youth studies, which comes through cultural studies scholarship. Cultural studies has insisted on its interdisciplinary location, and while it would be a mistake to place too much emphasis on this fluid field’s past, its strong British and European sociology pedigree is worth noting. Although a new cultural studies organization was founded in the US in recent years [english.cmu.edu/events/csa/] as part of an international cultural studies movement [see http://www.cultstud.org], many US cultural studies scholars have taken up residence in American Studies programs. Both the Girlhood and the Boyhood volumes draw on American Studies approaches and topics, which places history on relatively equal ground with literary and cultural studies.

The influence of cultural studies is most clear in the Girlhood volumes that Forman-Brunell edited, which can be counted among the key publications in bringing the lives of young women to the forefront of contemporary scholarship as “girl studies.” [1] Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber’s often-reprinted 1975 article, “Girls and Subculture,” which critiqued the masculinist assumptions of the early research of British subcultural sociology and set out more appropriate alternatives for studying the lives of girls, still stands as a pivotal moment for this topic. [2] British youth subculture studies was among the first academic locations to take young women’s cultural lives seriously. As a result, Girlhood takes up topics that the other two encyclopedias do not; there are entries on punks, riot grrrls, surfer girls, teenyboppers, and zines that are much more influenced by cultural studies, which is more willing to ask about the (relatively) contemporary world than most social histories.

Similarly, there is a notable bent towards popular culture, ethnicity, and topics from recent everyday life (which are frequently taken up in American Studies) in the ABC-CLIO encyclopedias. For instance, there are entries on Barbie dolls in both Girlhood and Children and Childhood encyclopedias; however, only Girlhood contains an entry on body image and only Children and Childhood contains an entry on bundling. My point here is not to raise one of these volumes above the other (all three are excellent reference works), but rather to show that these volumes reveal, in some ways, the differing inter-disciplinary pathways that have brought us to this institutionalizing moment.

While these encyclopedias are extremely important as foundational research tools and as markers of the vitality and interest in the study of children and youth, the scholarly community engaged with these topics has to take another step, and open up debates if the momentum is to be sustained. There are several ways of proceeding; I will suggest only one.

Integrating the new scholarship in British and American sociology would be one way of proceeding. A number of recent anthologies have already marked out positions on the appropriate frameworks for studying the consumerism of children and youth, as well as the conceptual boundaries and limitations of the concept of subculture. [3] Sociological models and debates are in no way foreign to historians of children and youth. Paula Fass’ The Damned and the Beautiful, still in print after almost three decades, borrowed from Eisenstadt’s sociology of generations to frame its analysis. [4] And as Joe Hawes notes in his introduction to The Family in America (another of ABC-CLIO’s American Family encyclopedia projects), current thinking in family history is influenced by sociological and social psychological models. [5] The importance of family history within child and youth studies is well established.

Historians of children and youth can bring an important perspective to these debates. Among a list of other possible examples, I will simply note Bill Osgerby’s work, which blends history and subcultural studies to examine the emergence of 1950s teenage/youth cultures in the US and Britain, and concludes with challenges to both fields. [6] These debates can also provide new questions to historians. And this is our next challenge: What questions will sustain this institutional moment into the next decades? The Society of the History of Children and Youth, the H-Net discussion list, and the encyclopedias provide a solid institutional foundation. How will we bring child and youth studies into dialogues of wider relevance to the scholarly community? I suggest that a greater interdisciplinary engagement would be one way of extending our reach.

Notes

1. Forman-Brunell’s introductory essay contains an excellent bibliography on girl studies. I also recommend All About the Girl: Culture, Power, and Identity edited by Anita Harris (NY: Routledge, 2004) as a resource. Return

2. An excerpt from McRobbie and Garber’s article is reprinted in Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton, eds., The Subcultures Reader (NY: Routledge, 1997), p.112-120. Return

3. See, for instance, David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl, eds., The Post-Subcultures Reader (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2003); Andy Bennett, Mark Cieslik and Steven Miles, eds., Researching Youth (NY: Palgrave McMillan, 2003); Andy Bennett and Keith Kahn-Harris, eds., After Subculture (NY: Palgrave McMillan, 2004); also, see Harris, ed., All About the Girl, mentioned above. Return

4. Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977). Return

5. Joseph M. Hawes, “Introduction” in Joseph M. Hawes and Elizabeth F. Shores, editors in chief, The Family in America: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2001), p. xxx. Return

6. See Youth in Britain Since 1945 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998); Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth, and Leisure-Style in Modern America (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001); Youth Media (London: Routledge, 2004). Return

 

Joe Austin is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, a member of the Executive Committee of the SHCY, author of Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City (2001), and co-editor of Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-century America (1998).