HY 388: The Family in Modern Ireland

Readings in the history of childhood and the family

Dr. Moira Maguire

 NB: This is not a comprehensive bibliography but rather is intended to give students an idea of the kind of scholarship that has been published in Europe and the U.S.

General histories

Anderson, Michael. Approaches to the history of the Western family 1500-1914. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Arensberg, C.M. and S.T. Kimball. Family and Community in Ireland. Cambridge, MA, 1968.

Ariès, Philip. Centuries of childhood. London: Jonathan Cape, 1962.

Burton, Anthony, “Looking forward from Ariès? Pictorial and material evidence for the history of childhood and family life,” Continuity and Change vol. 4, no. 2 (August 1989): 203.

Cunningham, Hugh. Children and childhood in Western society since 1500. London: Longman, 1995.

Goldthorpe, J.E. Family life in Western societies: a historical sociology of family relationships in Britain and North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Hendrick, Harry. Children, childhood and English society, 1880-1990. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Hopkins, Eric. Childhood transformed: working-class children in nineteenth century England. Manchester University Press, 1994.

Jordan, Thomas E. Victorian childhood: themes and variations. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Pierce, D.K. Victorian and Edwardian children from old photographs. London: Batsford, 1980.

Pollock, Linda. Forgotten children: parent-child relations from 1500-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Walvin, James. A child’s world: a social history of English childhood 1800-1914. Penguin, 1982.

The family and the State

Bock, Gisela and Pat Thane. Maternity and Gender Politics: Women and the Rise of the Welfare State 1880-1950s. London: Routledge, 1991.

Condon, Janette, “The patriotic children’s treat: Irish nationalism and children in culture at the twilight of Empire,” Irish Studies Review vol. 8, no. 2 (2000): 167-178.

Cousins, Mel, “The introduction of children’s allowances in Ireland 1939-1944,” Irish Economic and Social History vol. 26 (1999): 35-53.

Fletcher, Anthony and Stephen Hussey. Childhood in question: children, parents and the state. New York: Manchester University Press, 1999.

Koven, Seth  and Sonya Michel, eds. Mothers of a New World. Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.

Pedersen, Susan. Family, dependence, and the origins of the welfare state: Britain and France 1914-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Scarre, G. Children, parents, and the state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Weistman, John. “School meals and milk in England and Wales 1906-1945,” Medical History, vol. 41, no. 1 (1997): 6-29.

Motherhood

Clear, Catriona. Women of the house. Women’s household work in Ireland 1922-1961. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000.

Ross, Ellen. Love and toil: motherhood in outcast London 1870-1918. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Ross, Ellen. “Survival networks: women’s neighbourhood sharing in London before World War I,” History Workshop Journal, 15 (Spring 1983): 4-27.

Yeo, Eileen Janes, “The creation of ‘motherhood’ and women’s responses in Britain and France, 1750-1914,” Women’s History Review, vol. 8, no. 2 (1999): 201-218.

Fatherhood

Abrams, Lynn, “There was nobody like my daddy: fathers, the family, and the marginalisation of men in modern Scotland,” Scottish Historical Review, vol. 78, no. 2 (1999): 219-242.

Gillis, John. “Marginalization of fatherhood in Western countries,” Childhood, vol. 7, no. 2 (2000): 225-238.

LaRossa, Ralph. The modernization of fatherhood: a social and political history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Poor/working-class childhood and family life

Burke, Helen. The People and the poor law in 19th century Ireland. Dublin: Women’s Education Bureau, 1987.

Clear, Catriona. Growing up poor: the homeless young in nineteenth-century Ireland. Galway: Galway Labour History Society, 1993.

Cunningham, Hugh. The children of the poor: representations of childhood. London: Blackwell, 1991.

Davin, Anna, “Loaves and fishes: food in poor households in late nineteenth century London,” History Workshop Journal, vol. 41 (1996): 167-192.

Davin, Anna. Growing up poor: home, school and street in London, 1870-1914. Concord, MA: Rivers Oram, 1996.

Heywood, Colin. Childhood in nineteenth-century France: work, health, and education among the classes populaires. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Humphries, S. Hooligans or rebels? An oral history of working-class childhood. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981.

Johnston, M. Dublin childhoods. Galway: Galway Labour History Society, 1993.

McDonald, Helen, “Boarding out and the Scottish Poor Law, 1845-1914,” Scottish Historical Review, vol. 75, no. 2 (1996): 197-220.

Milne, Keith. The Irish charter schools 1730-1830. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997.

O’Connor, John. The workhouses of Ireland. The fate of Ireland’s poor. Dublin: Anvil Books, 1995.

Robins, Joseph. The lost children: a study of charity children in Ireland 1700-1900. Dublin: Institute for Public Affairs, 1980.

Stadum, Beverly. Poor women and their families. Hard working charity cases 1900-1930. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

Childhood migration/emigration/adoption

Bean, Philip. Lost children of the empire. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990.

Carp, E. Wayne. Family matters: secrecy and disclosure in the history of adoption. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Gager, Kristin Elizabeth. Blood ties and fictive ties: adoption and family life in early modern France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Gallman, Matthew. Receiving Erin’s children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish famine migration, 1845-1855. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Gish, Clay. “Rescuing the ‘waifs and strays’ of the city: The Western emigration program of the Children’s Aid Society,” Journal of Social History, vol. 33, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 121-141.

Gordon, Linda. The great Arizona orphan abduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Malcolm, Elizabeth, “’The house of strident shadows’: the asylum, the family and emigration in post-famine rural Ireland,” in Medicine, disease and the state in Ireland 1650-1940, ed. Elizabeth Malcolm and Greta Jones. Cork: Cork University Press, 1999.

Milotte, Mike. Banished babies: the secret history of Ireland’s baby export business. Dublin: New Island Books, 1997.

Pugh, Gill. Unlocking the past: the impact of access to Barnardos childcare records. Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999.

Wagner, Gillian. Children of the empire. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982.

Autobiographies/narratives of childhood

Blain, Angeline Kearns, Stealing sunlight: growing up in Irishtown. Dublin: A.& A. Farmar, 2000.

Cowen, P. Dungeons deep. Dublin: Marion Printing, 1960.

Doyle, Paddy. The god squad. Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1988.

Drennan, Mary Phil. You may talk now. Cork: On Stream Publications, 1994.

Fahy, Bernadette. Freedom of angels. Surviving Goldenbridge Orphanage. Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 1999.

Flynn, Mannix. Nothing to say. Dublin: Ward River Press, 1983.

Galvin, P. Song for a raggy boy: a Cork childhood. Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1991.

MacGill, Patrick. Children of the dead end. Dingle, Co. Kerry: Brandon, 1983.

Matley, Mary. Always in the convent shadow. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1991.

McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir of Childhood. London: HarperCollins, 1996.

McGrath, Paul with Cathal Dervan. Ooh Aah Paul McGrath: the Black Pearl of Inchicore. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Co., 1994.

Nelson, G.K. Seen and not heard: memories of childhood in the early twentieth century. Dover, NH: Alan Sutton, 1993.

Noble, Christine. Bridge across my sorrows: the Christine Noble story. London: John Murray, 1994.

O’Connor, Frank. An Only Child. London: MacMillan, 1961.

Sheridan, Peter. 44: A Dublin Memoir. London: MacMillan, 1999.

Unmarried motherhood

Burke-Brogan, Patricia. Eclipsed. Galway: Salmon Publishing, 1994.

Fink, Janet, “Natural mothers, putative fathers, and innocent children,” Journal of Family History vol. 25, no. 2 (2000): 178-195.

Fuchs, Rachel. Poor and pregnant in Paris: strategies for survival in the nineteenth century. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Gordon, Linda. Pitied but not entitled: single mothers and the history of welfare 1890-1935. Maxwell MacMillan, 1994.

Goulding, June. The Light in the Window. Dublin: Poolbeg, 1998.

Kirke, Deirdre. “Unmarried Mothers: A Comparative Study,” Economic and Social Review vol. 10, no. 2 (January 1979): 157-167.

Richard, Maura. Single Issue. Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1998.

Viney, Michael. No Birthright: A Study of the Irish Unmarried Mother and Her Child. Dublin: Irish Times Press, 1964.

Infanticide/infant mortality

Behlmer, George, “Deadly motherhood: infanticide and medical opinion in mid-Victorian England,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 34 no. 4 (October 1979): 403.

Blaikie, Andrew. “Infant survival chances, unmarried motherhood and domestic arrangements in rural Scotland, 1845-1945,” Local Population Studies, vol. 60 (1998): 34-46.

Donovan, James M., “Infanticide and the Juries in France, 1825-1913,” Journal of Family History vol. 16 no. 2 (1991): 157-176).

Ferguson, Harry, “Surviving Irish childhood: child protection and the death of children in child abuse cases in Ireland since 1884,” in Harry Ferguson, Robbie Gilligan and Ruth Torode, eds. Surviving childhood adversity: issues for policy and practice. Dublin: TCD Social Studies Press, 1993.

Higginbotham, Ann., “Sin of the Age: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London,” in Victorian Scandals: Representations of Gender and Class, ed. Kristine Ottesen Garrigan. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992: 257-288.

Jackson, Mark. New-born child murder: women, illegitimacy and the courts in 18th century England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

O’Connor, Anne. Child Murderess and Dead Child Traditions: A Comparative Study. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1991.

Preston, Samuel and Michael Haines. Fatal years: child mortality in late nineteenth-century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Richter, Jeffrey S., “Infanticide, Child Abandonment, and Abortion in Imperial Germany,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 28, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 511-551.

Rose, Lionel. The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain 1800-1939. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.

Sauer, R. “Infanticide and abortion in nineteenth-century Britain,” Population Studies, vol. 32 (1978): 81-93.

Wheeler, Kenneth. “Infanticide in nineteenth-century Ohio,” Journal of Social History, vol. 31, no. 2 (1997): 407-418.

Wrightson, Keith. “Infanticide in European history,” Criminal Justice History (1982): 1-20.

Children/families and institutions

Arnold, Mavis and Heather Laskey. Children of the Poor Clares - the story of an Irish orphanage. Belfast: Appletree Press, 1985.

Barnes, Jane. Irish Industrial Schools, 1868-1908: Origins and Development. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989.

Crompton, Frank. Workhouse children: infant and child paupers under the Worcestershire Poor Law, 1780-1871. Dover, NH: Sutton, 1997.

Dos Guimaraes Sa, Isabel. “Child abandonment in Portugal: legislation and institutional care,” Continuity and Change, vol. 9, no. 1 (1994): 69-89.

Finnane, Mark. “Asylums, families, and the state,” History Workshop Journal, 20 (Autumn 1985): 134-148.

Finnane, Mark. Insanity and the insane in post-famine Ireland. London, 1981.

Ignatieff, Michael. “Total institutions and working classes: a review essay,” History Workshop Journal, 15 (Spring 1983): 167-173.

Melling, Joseph, Richard Adair and Bill Forsythe. “’A proper lunatic for two years’: pauper lunatic children in Victorian and Edwardian England. Child admissions to the Devon County Asylum 1845-1914”, Journal of Social History, vol. 31, no. 2 (1997): 371-406.

Raftery, Mary and Eoin O’Sullivan. Suffer the little children: the inside story of Ireland’s industrial schools. Dublin: New Island, 1999.

Stack, John, “Reformatory and industrial schools and the decline of child imprisonment in mid-Victorian Britain,” History of Education, vol. 23, no. 1 (1994): 59-73.

Stack, John. “The Catholics, the Irish delinquent and the origins of the reformatory schools in nineteenth-century England and Scotland,” Recusant History, vol. 23, no. 3 (1997): 372-388.

Wright, David, “Family strategies: the institutional confinement of ‘idiot’ children in Victorian England,” Journal of Family History, vol. 23, no. 2 (1998): 190-208.

Family violence/child abuse/child exploitation

Ashby, LeRoy. Endangered children: dependency, neglect and abuse in American history. Twayne, 1997.

Coldrey, Barry, “The sexual abuse of children: the historical perspective,” Studies vol. 85 (1996): 370-380.

Conley, C.A. “No pedestals: women and violence in late nineteenth-century Ireland,” Journal of Social History, vol. 28 no. 4 (1995): 801-818.

Cunningham, Hugh, “The decline of child labour: labour markets and family economies in Europe and North America since 1830,” Economic History Review, vol. 53, no. 3 (2000): 409-428.

Gordon, Linda. Heroes of their own lives: the politics and history of family violence: Boston 1880-1960. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Hammerton, James. Cruelty and companionship: conflict in nineteenth-century married life. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Pleck, Elizabeth. Domestic tyranny: the making of social policy against family violence from colonial times to the present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Rose, Lionel. The erosion of childhood: child oppression in Britain 1860-1918. London: Routledge, 1991.

Sangster, Joan, “Masking and unmasking the sexual abuse of children: perceptions of violence against children in ‘the Badlands’ of Ontario, 1916-1930,” Journal of Family History, vol. 25, no. 4 (October 2000): 500-526.

Steiner-Scott, Elizabeth. “To bounce a boot off her now and then…: domestic violence in post-famine Ireland,” in Women and Irish history: essays in honour of Margaret MacCurtain, ed. Maryann Valulius and Mary O’Dowd. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1997.

Juvenile delinquency

Feheney, J.M. “Delinquency among Irish-Catholic children in Victorian London,” Irish Historical Studies, vol. 23, no. 92 (1983): 319-329.

Nilan, Cat. “Hapless innocence and precocious perversity in the courtroom melodrama: representations of the child criminal in a Paris legal journal, 1830-48,” Journal of Family History, vol. 22, no. 3 (July 1997): 251-285.

Platt, A. The child-savers - the invention of delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Wegs, Robert. “Youth delinquency and ‘crime’: the perception and the reality,” Journal of Social History, vol. 23, no. 3 (1999): 603-622.

Children/families and war 

Mitchell, Margaret, “The effects of unemployment on the social condition of women and children in the 1930s”, History Workshop Journal  vol. 19 (Spring 1985): 105.

Tuttle, William Jr. ‘Daddy’s gone to war’: the Second World War in the lives of America’s children. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Weiner, Emmy. Through the eyes of innocents: children witness WWII. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999.

Children and culture/leisure

Cross, Gary. Kids’ stuff: toys and the changing world of American childhood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Drotner, Kirsten. English children and their magazines, 1751-1945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Jacobson, Lisa. “Revitalizing the American home: children’s leisure and the revaluation of play, 1920-1940,” Journal of Social History, vol. 30, no. 3 (1997): 581-596.

Prater, Tammy, “(Uni)forming youth: Girl Guides and Boy Scouts in Britain, 1908-1939,” History Workshop Journal, 45 (Spring 1998): 103-134.

Snell, K.D.M. “The Sunday-school Movement in England and Wales. Child Labour, Denominational Control and Working-class Culture,” Past and Present, vol. 164 (1999): 122-168.

Tinkler, Penny. Constructing girlhood: popular magazines for girls growing up in England 1920-1950. Pennsylvania: Taylor and Francis, 1995.

Tinkler, Penny. “Sexuality and citizenship: the State and girls’ leisure provision in England, 1939-1945,” Women’s History Review, vol. 4, no. 2 (1995): 193-217.

Vallone, Lynne. Disciplines of virtue: girls’ culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Miscellaneous

Behlmer, George. Friends of the family: the English home and its guardians, 1850-1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Birdwell-Pheasant, Donna. “Irish households in the early twentieth century: culture, class, and historical contingency,” Journal of Family History, vol. 18, no. 1 (1993): 19-38.

Clement, Priscilla Ferguson. Growing pains: children in the Industrial Age, 1850-1890. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997.

Curtin, C. and T. Wilson. Ireland from below: social change and local communities. Galway: UCG Press, 1988.

Fitzpatrick, David. “Irish farming families before the First World War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 25 (1983): 339-374.

Fuchs, Rachel. Abandoned children, foundlings, and child welfare in nineteenth-century France. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

Guinnane, Timothy. “Coming of age in rural Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century,” Continuity and Change, vol. 5, no. 3 (1990): 443-472.

Jordan, Thomas E. Ireland’s children. Quality of life, stress, and child development in the famine era. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983.

Kennedy, Liam. “Bastardy and the Great Famine: Ireland 1845-1850,” Continuity and Change, vol. 14, no. 3 (1999): 429-452.

Kertzer, David. “Syphilis, foundlings, and wet nurses in nineteenth-century Italy,” Journal of Social History, vol. 23, no. 3 (1999): 589-602.