Histories of Childhood

Histories of ChildhoodAuthor(s): Hugh CunninghamSource: The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 1195-1208Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2651207 .

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Review Essay Histories of Childhood

HUGH CUNNINGHAM

MORE, PERHAPS, THAN ANY OTHER BRANCH OF HISTORY, the history of childhood has been shaped by the concerns of the world in which its historians live. If it is now a lively field, that is in large part because in the Western world in the late twentieth century there is considerable anxiety about how to bring up children, about the nature of children (angels or monsters?), about the forces, primarily commercialism, impinging on them, and about the rights and responsibilities that should be accorded to them. Historians themselves are subject to these anxieties and frequently acknowledge them as the inspiration for their work.1 But, in addition, they are also responding to demands from the public at large. Seeking understanding and guidance, people turn to the past, hoping that scholars may be able to tell them about children and childhood in history.

This stimulus to understanding the historical roots of contemporary anxieties in the West exists alongside but often in isolation from another incentive to historical research on childhood: the poverty in which many of the world's children live, frequently work, and all too often die. Can a historical perspective on the life chances of poor children in the past contribute to understanding the economic and other factors that shape the circumstances of poverty in which most of the world's children exist?

For those seeking guidance, the historiography is likely to impart confusion. Historians differ not only in their interpretation of the past but in their definition of the field of study, and in the kinds of questions they ask. One approach suggests that the most interesting and answerable question to ask about the past is not to do with the lives children lived but with the ideas surrounding childhood, and with the way "childhood" has in different cultures variably stood for innocence, hope, naivete, incapacity, or evil, or has embodied a nostalgia for times past. The emphasis here is firmly on the cultural construction of ideas to do with childhood.2 An extension of this approach is to look at how such cultural constructions impact on the lives of children. Often advocates of the rights of the child, and alert to the suppression of the voice of the child in the present as well as the past, such scholars are engaged both in a rescue operation and in an attempt to recast the way we look

1 See, for example, Philip Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse (New York, 1991). Greven acknowledges that his exploration of the physical abuse of children in the past stems from a wish to eliminate it in the future.

2 For this argument, and a rich exploration of its possibilities, see Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780-1930 (London, 1995).

1195



1196 Hugh Cunningham

at the world; they want to make us more aware of children as agents.3 At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who argue that biology largely determines how children develop, and indeed how adults relate to them, and find in the past evidence for this.4 In this approach, the history of childhood merges into a history of motherhood. Somewhere in between lie those who argue that the important thing to do is to write a history of children-flesh and blood human beings of a certain age.

Those whose starting point is the condition of poor children tend to place their studies within a "family strategy" approach. This field of study itself subdivides into many component parts, depending on whether its inspiration is anthropology or neo-classical economics. In the former, the emphasis is on kinship patterns and roles within the family and in relation to other families, in the latter on the ways in which families seek to maximize their economic well-being. Children are sometimes marginalized in family strategy studies-the emphasis is on adult decision-making and the norms of the adult world. But a family strategy approach has the potential to enable the historian to evaluate differences in the role of children across time and culture-and to do this at the level of the mass of society and not just the elite.

Differences of approach are reflected in the sources used. Those interested in concepts of childhood and in the day-to-day lives of children draw on advice literature, diaries and autobiographies, visual images of children, material culture, and a miscellany of written material. In the family strategy approach, the preferred sources are quantitative in nature, and the approach often incorporates a formal model of human and family behavior.

The multiplicity of approaches suggests that there will be no uncontested answers for anyone looking in history books for guidance to present-day problems. The issue is further complicated by the fact that "childhood" is not a terrain on which historians are the only or even the chief guide. Social scientists of many kinds- sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, demographers-can all claim to have distinctive approaches to the study of childhood, which historians ignore at their peril.5

This review of some recent work on the history of childhood will seek to take stock of where we are. A fundamental question is whether the approaches embodied in the different questions asked and in the different types of source material have anything to say to each other or whether they will continue to exist in hermetically sealed compartments. If they do, it will be suggested, our ability to address the anxieties that surround childhood, both in the West and globally, will be seriously diminished. We need to create space for dialogue between discourses that now tend to focus too exclusively on the cultural construction of ideas about childhood, on biological factors in the growing up of children, or on the roles of children in family economies.

3The most sophisticated and influential representation of this approach is Allison James and Alan Prout, eds., Construlcting and Reconstructing Childhood: Contenzpora;y Issutes in the Sociological Stuldy of Childhood (London, 1990).

4 See, for example, Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge, 1983); Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties That Bounzld: Peasanzt Families in Medieval England (New York, 1986), 10-11.

5For some guidance to the literature, see C. Philip Hwang, Michael E. Lamb, and Irving E. Sigel, eds., Inmages of Childhood (Mahwa, N.J., 1996).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1998



Histories of Childhood 1197

ALL HISTORIES OF CHILDHOOD can be placed in some relationship to the historiography of the subject. The vast majority are informed by what is easily the most famous book in that historiography, Philippe Aries' L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien regime (1960), translated as Centuries of Childhood (1962). It was Aries' achievement to convince nearly all his readers that childhood had a history: that, over time and in different cultures, both ideas about childhood and the experience of being a child had changed. Like all historians of the topic, he was drawn to it by his own experiences, in his case the sense of stifling, family-bound childhoods in mid-twentieth-century France. Had childhoods always been like this? The answer was firmly "no." Aries traced how the family and the school became the locus for children, and how they became excluded from the world of non-family adults. Nearly all subsequent historians of childhood have related to some part of Aries' agenda, for its scope was wide: he studied changes over time and in different cultures in the concepts of childhood, the adult treatment of children, and the experience of childhood.

Aries' influence remains profound nearly forty years after the publication of his book, particularly with respect to the study of medieval childhood. An at least partial mistranslation has galvanized medieval scholars into a mini-industry. The English version of Aries' book contains the famous statement that "in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist."6 The word "idea" was in fact a translation of the French sentiment, which conveys a very different meaning. But medieval scholars have, by and large, taken the English translation at face value and, moreover, assumed that Aries' statement was a slur on the Middle Ages: the outcome has been a body of literature, summed up and best represented in Shulamith Shahar's Childhood in the Middle Ages (1990), in which it is shown beyond any manner of doubt that there was a concept of childhood in the Middle Ages; indeed, in Shahar's account, the Middle Ages were rather more enlightened and progressive in their attitudes to childhood and treatment of children than later centuries. What this body of scholarship left open, however, was the precise nature of this medieval concept of childhood, and its chronological and geographical scope.

It is the great strength of James A. Schultz, in The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100-1350 (1995), that he breaks away from this obsession with defending the Middle Ages against an imagined slur by Aries.7 Schultz's study does not attempt to cover "the Middle Ages" as a whole either chronologically or geographically. He draws on extant Middle High German texts, many of them in fictional form, to argue not simply that there was a concept of childhood in Germany in this period but, more important, that this concept was radically different from the concepts dominant in the West since the Enlightenment. In the German High Middle Ages, people did not think that the way in which children were treated would affect how they turned out as adults (the characteristic modern assumption); they believed rather that the discerning eye could pick out from childish traits what the future adult would be like: childhood was important not in

6 Philippe Aries, Centursies of Childhood, Robert Baldick, trans. (London, 1962), 125. James A. Schultz, The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100-1350 (Philadel-

phia, 1995).





itself but for what it might tell you about the adult to be. Quite contrary to modern opinion, whether a child was treated well or badly would have little effect on its adult future. In this closely contextualized study of a defined body of texts, Schultz has opened up a refreshingly new range of questions about childhood in the Middle Ages. He has broken free from the thrall of the mistranslation of a word in Aries and is able to suggest that the concept of childhood he explores for the German High Middle Ages was in fact the dominant one in Europe until the eighteenth century: childhood was marked by its deficiencies more than by its attributes. At a time when there is a danger that the focus will be on the similarity of childhood across time and place, Schultz argues powerfully and eloquently for "the historicity of childhood": the lives that children lead reflect not simply their human biology but also the cultural assumptions of the time and place in which they live-continuity is not, as Linda Pollock's work has influentially suggested, the key theme in the history of childhood.8

The view that Aries wantonly impugned the beliefs about childhood of non- modern societies has by no means been confined to the Middle Ages or to Europe. Scholars of the ancient world, of medieval Islam, and of many other societies have set out to see whether an idea of childhood could be discerned within them.9 The triumphant conclusion has always been that it can. Although Aries is nowhere referred to in Anne Behnke Kinney's Chinese Views of Childhood (1995), his presence and that of other Western historians of childhood can always be felt.10 The essays cover the period from the Han Dynasty to the present. What emerges is a pattern of thinking about childhood with similarities to and differences from that discerned by Aries and others. Although the available sources do not allow for confident generalizations, there seems to have been a growing sentimentality about children within the elites of Chinese society. The most striking evidence for this comes from the mourning literature analyzed by Pei-yi Wu. "From the Tang to at least the fifteenth century," he claims, "children were more written about in China than in Europe.""1 The form of writing he investigates is necrology, writing about the dead. For those familiar with debates in Western historiography as to whether parents grieved for their dead children, the Chinese material will be of great interest. It provides evidence from the ninth century of grieving and mourning considerably beyond what ritual demanded, especially by fathers for daughters more than for sons. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under the influence of the Wang Yangming school of Neo-Confucianism, there emerged a veritable cult of the child and an articulation of sentiments that in the West had to await William Wordsworth: children were raised above adults in understanding. "If one loses the heart of the child," wrote Li Zhi (1527-1602), "then he loses his true heart."'12

This cult of the child has to be weighed against the considerable evidence of

8 Pollock, Forgotten Children. 9 See, for example, Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens (Baltimore, Md.,

1990); Avner Gil'adi, Children of Islam: Concepts of Childhood in Medieval Muslim Society (Basingstoke, 1992).

10 Anne Behnke Kinney, ed., Chinese Views of Childhood (Honolulu, 1995). 11 Pei-yi Wu, "Childhood Remembered: Parents and Children in China, 800 to 1700," in Kinney,

Chinese Views of Childhood, 137. 12 Kinney, Chinese Views of Childhood, 147.





infanticide, especially female infanticide, in China. Ann Waltner notes the difficulty of establishing any precise measure of its scale but does not doubt its prevalence. Her main explanation for this has to do with dowries. Girls were expensive. Upon marriage, their only acceptable destiny, they had to be dowered, the amount of the dowry being all the greater because of the desirability that the groom should be of higher social status than the bride. Moreover, once married, brides and their dowries belonged to the groom's family. Where ideas and practices of this kind were prevalent, no amount of official condemnation of infanticide (and there was plenty of it) was likely to have much impact. At an institutional level, one Chinese response, similar to that in the West, was to set up foundling hospitals from the seventeenth century onward.13

THE LEGACY OF ARI'ES, in provoking numerous attempts at rebuttal of what was assumed (wrongly) to be his prime thesis, has produced a body of scholarship that one may hope has now run its course; it is time, as Schultz argues, to shift the agenda. In other respects, however, Aries set a challenge that has proved to be too demanding for most historians. Aries assumed that it was possible, within the covers of one book, to write about concepts of childhood, about the way children have been treated by adults, and about the experience of being a child. Most subsequent historians have more cautiously confined themselves to one of these tasks. They have, in addition, restricted themselves in the range of evidence they study. Aries drew on a wide range of evidence and has been much criticized for failing to subject it to proper scrutiny. In particular, it has been said that he "read" images too literally.14 Such criticisms have induced caution among historians, and only now is non-written evidence beginning to make a renewed and welcome impact. Three examples may be taken as indications of a new confidence in the use of non-written sources.

First, on Aries' own ground, the pictorial representation of children, Andrew Martindale has argued that, "around 1300, images of children became more lively, more human, and more probable." In a carefully contextualized study, he highlights the work of Simone Martini and his altar piece in Siena, which depicts a saint's involvement in miracles concerning children. Martindale explains these naturalistic images of children by relating them to a wider thirteenth-century acceptance of the importance of human experience and the human senses; all of this suggesting that the evaluation of childhood Aries was concerned to trace may have been on a rather different and earlier time scale than he had imagined.15

Second, still in the Middle Ages, Nicholas Orme has attempted to see whether Aries was right in thinking that children and adults shared the same culture. Drawing on archaeological finds, he examines the evidence of lead-tin alloy toys, which were capable of being mass-produced from about 1300, and links it with

13 Ann Waltner, "Infanticide and Dowry in Ming and Early Qing China," in Kinney, Chinese Views of Childhood.

14 See, for example, Pollock, Forgotten Children, 47; Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990), 95.

15 Andrew Martindale, "The Child in the Picture: A Medieval Perspective," in Diana Wood, ed., The Church and Childhood (Oxford, 1994), 197-232, quoting 197.





associated literary evidence. (In 1582, for example, the crown taxed imported ''puppets or babies for children.") Added to this is the evidence from games, calendar customs, and schoolbooks: together, it provides at least some evidence that children enjoyed a culture of their own.16

A final example is Karin Calvert's Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (1992). Aries' account of the evolution of attitudes toward childhood draws to a close in the late seventeenth century: it is as though at that point he can discern a clear road that leads to the mid-twentieth century. It is one of the strengths of Calvert's book that she delineates the twists and turns that were part of that evolution. In an earlier study, she showed how a comprehensive study of American portraiture revealed significant changes in the prominence given to children.17 The same theme is developed from a wider body of source material, including furniture and clothes, in her book: she argues a shift from "the inchoate adult: 1600 to 1750" to "the natural child: 1750 to 1830" to "the innocent child: 1830 to 1900." The most convincing of these shifts is the first: Calvert shows how, in every aspect of child-rearing in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the aim was to get the young child upright: swaddling clothes and walking stools both had this purpose. The implication was that childhood was a stage of life to be passed through as rapidly as possible. It was therefore a change of enormous significance when in the second half of the eighteenth century the advice given to parents was that children should be allowed to develop at their own pace; Calvert shows how this was accompanied by a discarding of old forms of furniture and clothes. It has long been an issue in the history of childhood how far the advice given by experts was acted on by parents: Calvert demonstrates from a study of the material culture of the home that in middle-class America, at least, the advice was heeded.

This renewal of use of non-written evidence, in particular of what comes under the term "material culture," is opening up many new possibilities for the study of the history of childhood. Curators of museums of childhood across the world, who must have been baffled at the failure of professional historians to give serious attention to their collections, may begin to expect a change. The material is abundant, much of it published in museum catalogues or books derived from collections.18 One sign of burgeoning interest in this field is the history of toys and dolls. Long of interest to antiquarians and collectors, it is now beginning to attract the attention of historians responding to contemporary concerns about the impact of commercialism on children and to the way in which gender is shaped. Miriam Formanek-Brunell in Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (1993) emphasizes how the manufacture of dolls became a male-dominated industry and how girls, as the consumers, were ambiv- alent about what was offered to them. Although a thoroughly scholarly book, it is difficult to read it as anything other than a decline from a pre-lapsarian past when,

16 Nicholas Orme, "The Culture of Children in Medieval England," Past and Present 148 (August 1995): 48-88.

17 Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston, 1992); Calvert, "Children in American Family Portraiture, 1670-1810," William and Maiy Quarterly, 3d ser., 39 (January 1982): 87-113.

18 See, for example, Anthony Burton, Children s Pleasures: Books, Toys anid Games from the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood (London, 1996).





antebellum, dolls were homemade and their use taught skills valuable in the domestic economy, to a world where female manufacturers lost out in their battle against the mechanization of dolls by males, and where dolls came to embody the desired preparation for motherhood.19 Gary Cross in Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (1997) is determined to break away from this approach, telling today's parents that fantasy toys have a history dating back to the early twentieth century, and that, in the 1930s, toys, especially for boys, were liberated from adult concerns about instilling proper values and began to appeal directly to the child's imagination-and to the child as consumer. But, in the conclusion, he reveals his own unhappiness about these developments, and hopes that children, through their toys, may "recover an imagination more rooted in the real world."20

These studies of the material culture of childhood in the past contribute both to the understanding of concepts of childhood in the past and to the real life experiences of children: we begin to know the material world in which they lived. But children's lives were shaped by more than what surrounded them, and a fuller understanding of what it was like to be a child in any culture requires a broader approach. The sources for such a study are likely to be greatest for recent periods of history where written documents can be integrated with personal testimony, whether autobiographical or gathered by oral historians. Anna Davin's Growing Up Poor. Home, School and Street in London 1870-1914 (1996) indicates what can be achieved in a properly contextualized study.21 The context is partly geographical- the homes and streets of late nineteenth-century London are brought alive for us-but also chronological, for the period from 1870 to 1914 is seen by many historians of different countries as one in which the state began to take a markedly more prominent role in the regulation of family life and in which a definition of childhood as properly a period of dependence became dominant.22 One key issue underlying Davin's book is how far working-class families and children in particular were aware of this intrusion and how they responded to it. The main intervention was the introduction of compulsory schooling: this not only had its effects on the management of the family economy but also gave the state the opportunity to try to impose middle-class standards of speech, dress, deportment, and "civilization." It is Davin's contention that the burden of this fell on girls: they were more likely than boys to be kept at home to help with domestic chores, so that they missed out on educational opportunities; what schooling they did have placed huge emphasis on needlework, depriving them of access to some of the more academic subjects; and the pressure to conform to new gender stereotypes of neatness was more compelling. In short, whereas the new conditions of childhood relieved boys from

19 Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play Houise: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (New Haven, Conn., 1993).

20 Gary Cross, Kids' Stuiff: Toys and the Chaniging World of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 238.

21 Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, Schlool and Street in Londonl 1870-1914 (London, 1996). For a complementary study, also with much to contribute to the history of childhood, see Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Ouitcast London 1870-1918 (Oxford, 1993).

22 This theme is pervasive in the essays in Roger Cooter, ed., In the Name of the Child: Health and Welfare, 1880-1940 (London, 1992).





some of the labor they had previously had to endure, for girls it tended to bring further burdens.

It would be easy to assume that, within the experience of childhood, girls have always drawn the short straw-that there is, in almost any society one can think of, a set of practices and assumptions resulting in differentiated and subordinate treatment of girls. Calvert's study, drawing on clothes and hairstyles, shows that the issue is more complicated. Until the late eighteenth century, girls' clothes and hairstyles were scaled-down versions of those of adult women. From about 1770, girls began to wear muslin frocks that were quite distinct from the elaborate clothing of adult women, and they wore their hair short in a manner scarcely distinguishable from that of boys. Boys' dress, however, from the age of about three, when they were breeched, remained distinctively masculine. A change-came in the 1830s and 1840s, when both girls and boys from the ages of three to seven began to wear ankle-length pantaloons and half-length petticoats; this, combined with short hair, drew attention to what boys and girls had in common-their childishness- rather than what divided them. In the later nineteenth century, gender was again emphasized, a process that culminated in the adoption of color coding for children's clothes (blue for boys and pink for girls) shortly before World War II. These trends in the outward appearance of children were matched by similar ones in adult responses to the display of emotion in children.23 Studies of this kind by Davin, Calvert, and other scholars have opened up the issue of gender in childhood as history, as something that changes over time; other contributions cans surely be expected.

THE BOOKS I HAVE CONSIDERED SO FAR have all been influenced to some extent by Aries. But there are limitations to the legacy from Aries. The questions he asked and the sources on which he drew directed attention to the upper and middle classes. Those who have followed in his footsteps, either to support or rebut him, have equally concentrated on those classes. In sophisticated hands and with adequate documentation, as we have seen in the case of Davin's book, it is possible to find out about the experiences of childhood outside the privileged classes. But not many people have been able to do it, and we cannot be satisfied with the historiography of childhood while its focus is so exclusively the lives and thoughts of the well-to-do.

The potential benefit of a family strategy approach to the history of childhood is that it will enable us to gain some understanding of the experience of childhood and attitudes toward childhood in that majority of the population that is beyond the reach of the approach and sources characteristic of Aries and his followers. "Family strategy" is a term whose difficulties need to be recognized. It has been used in widely different ways, sometimes implying conscious choice by families or, often implicitly, one or more family members, whereas in other hands the strategy can be

23 Peter N. Stearns and Timothy Haggerty, "The Role of Fear: Transitions in American Emotional Standards for Children, 1850-1950," AHR 96 (February 1991): 63-94; Peter N. Stearns, "Girls, Boys, and Emotions: Redefinitions and Historical Change," Journal of American History 80 (June 1993): 36-74.





unconscious, observable only to the outsider.24 Two recent books enable us to take stock of how successful it is proving to be in the analysis of childhood among the poor. The essays in John Henderson and Richard Wall, Poor Women and Children in the European Past (1994), draw largely on the sources of institutions (foundling hospitals and orphanages) to try to reconstruct what led people to abandon children to them.25 This approach of course leaves us somewhat in the dark about that majority of the population who did not at any point in time abandon children to institutions; nevertheless, the proportion who did, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is sufficiently high to ensure that the conclusions reached will give considerable insight into how families weighed their responsibilities. The chief conclusion is not a surprising one, although it needs emphasis in view of a common supposition that the opposite was the case: children were a burden on the family economy. B. Seebohm Rowntree's famous analysis of the life cycle (1901), in which he showed how the poverty level of a family was adversely affected in ratio to the number of young children, proves to have been valid not only for late nineteenth- century York but for most societies in early modern and modern Europe.

The essays center on issues of concern to demographic and family historians: does the famous north/south divide between nuclear and complex family structure still hold? Can the "nuclear hardship" argument-that nuclear families were less likely than complex ones to be able to rely on their kin in times of hardship and more likely to turn to the collectivity-retain validity in view of the vast number of institutions for the care of children in the south of Europe? Pier Paolo Viazzo valuably notes how the nuclear hardship theory has largely concentrated on treatment of the elderly.26 Bring children into the picture and a different set of issues and conclusions emerges, focusing on bastardy and abandonment. There has been something of a division of labor, with historians in northern Europe studying bastardy while those in southern Europe have researched abandonment. The assumption has tended to be that foundling hospitals were the south's Catholic way of coping with illegitimacy. In fact, they had, as the essays show, rather more complex functions.

Philip Gavitt shows how in fifteenth-century Florence many of the babies abandoned were the offspring of well-to-do men and their slaves or servants-the illegitimacy/abandonment link holds. But in the Basque region in the early modern period, the situation was quite different: a high rate of illegitimacy coexisted with

24 The historical literature on family strategy is extensive. More recent studies on the economic role of children have been much influenced by Michael R. Haines, "Industrial Work and the Family Life Cycle, 1889-1890," Research in Economic History 4 (1979): 289-356; and Claudia Goldin, "Family Strategies and the Family Economy in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Role of Secondary Workers," in Theodore Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981). Robert V. Robinson, "Family Economic Strategies in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Indianapolis," Journal of Family History 20 (Winter 1995): 1-22, is an influential recent contribution. Wider questions on "family strategy" are addressed in contributions in Historical Methods 20 (Summer 1987): 113-25; and in Graham Crow, "The Use of the Concept of 'Strategy' in Recent Sociological Literature"; and D. H. J. Morgan, "Strategies and Sociologists: A Comment on Crow," both in Sociology 23 (February 1989): 1-29.

25 John Henderson and Richard Wall, eds., Poor Women and Children in the European Past (London, 1994).

26 Paolo Viazzo, "Family Structures and the Early Phase in the Individual Life Cycle: A Southern European Perspective," in Henderson and Wall, Poor Women and Children.




1204 Hutgh Cunningham

a low rate of abandonment. It was, ironically, when the illegitimacy rate declined in the eighteenth century that abandonment increased, largely, it seems, because responsibility for the care of illegitimate children passed from fathers (who were more likely to have resources to care for them) to mothers.27

In the eighteenth century, both illegitimacy and abandonment increased but not, as one might have expected, in step with one another. Much of the increase in abandonment was fueled by legitimate children. In Florence, for example, in 1792-1794, 72 percent of those admitted to the Foundling Hospital were legitimate, and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the percentage of the legitimate among those abandoned ranged between 40 and 70 percent. Volker Hunecke's work on Milan in the 1840s, translated into English here for the first time, provides the most telling evidence.28 About one-third of all legitimate births were abandoned, a tradition having grown up that not more than two children should be kept at home at any one time. The intention, and the norm, was to reclaim the child when economic conditions in the family eased. In Florence, Milan, and many other cities, foundling hospitals created to rescue the illegitimate became used by families at pressure points in the family life cycle, or at times of general economic stress, to relieve themselves of their legitimate children. Nor was it only babies who were abandoned. Eugenio Sonnino examines orphanages for girls in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Rome, showing how the loss of one parent could well imply the admission of a child to institutional care in its early teens.29 In many parts of Europe,30 there grew up an economy of abandonment in which rural areas supplied wet-nurses for babies abandoned in the cities and then themselves contributed to the level of abandonment by ridding themselves of their own offspring in order to feed (at least until the next pregnancy) the other babies of the foundling hospitals. A system created by philanthropists for one purpose became diverted by its "customers" to serve a quite different one. Where the facilities for abandonment were limited or contained, as in Florence's neighbor Bologna, people must have coped in other ways with the pressures of the life cycle.

The records of institutions for the care of children are a rich source; they can sometimes include or be linked to demographic and other evidence. Together, they provide overwhelming evidence that families adopted strategies for their own survival and well-being dependent on the availability of facilities that could be molded to their use. Furthermore, the extent of abandonment is such that it raises fundamental questions about the value, both emotional and economic, placed on children.

27 Philip Gavitt, "'Perce non avea chi la ghovernasse': Cultural Values, Family Resources and Abandonment in the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici, 1467-85," in Henderson and Wall, Poor Women and Children.

28 Volker Hunecke, "The Abandonment of Legitimate Children in Nineteenth-Century Milan and the European Context," in Henderson and Wall, Poor Women and Children.

29 Eugenio Sonnino, "Between the Home and the Hospice: The Plight and Fate of Girl Orphans in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Rome," in Henderson and Wall, Poor Women and Children; see also Lola Valverde, "Illegitimacy and the Abandonment of Children in the Basque Country, 1550-1800," in Henderson and Wall.

30 See, for example, David L. Ransel, Mothers of Misety: Child Abandonment in Ruissia (Princeton, N.J., 1988); James R. Lehning, "Family Life and Wetnursing in a French Village," Jourlal of Interdisciplinzaty Histoty 12 (Spring 1982): 645-56.





By comparison, as is demonstrated in the essays in Richard L. Rudolph, The European Peasant Family and Society: Historical Studies (1995), historians of the European peasant family are relatively deprived-or, perhaps, it should be said that they deprive themselves, for peasant families, though one would not guess it from these essays, were often linked into urban/rural networks that made them part of the economies of abandonment.31 The focus of the essays is on the relationship between land ownership or use and family formation and on the impact of proto-industrialization. Children feature in it as the outcome of decisions about how best to preserve or enhance family fortunes. As Stanley Engerman puts it, "Individuals may choose between more goods for themselves, more children, and more leisure."32 If they had children, it is implied, it was because of their perceived economic usefulness, as in proto-industrialization, or as an insurance against old age. If they did not, as in the Alpine region of Austria, which had the highest age of marriage and the highest proportion never married in Europe, then again it was an economically driven decision reinforced by cultural norms. There were huge variations across Europe in age of marriage, levels of celibacy and of illegitimacy, numbers of children born to a family, and destiny of children according to birth order and gender. Scholars have spent much effort and displayed considerable ingenuity in trying to plot and to provide explanations for these variations. Since the emphasis of this approach is on decision-making within constraints, it is the decision-makers (the adults) and the constraints (climate, inheritance systems, family forms, opportunities for migration) on which attention is focused. Children are only the outcome of those decisions: thus, by implication, the key factor in the history of childhood is the powerlessness of children. But it is legitimate to wonder whether the focus on decision-making may not over-rationalize human activity: it is one of the, advantages of using some of the foundling hospital records that one can find in the tokens and messages attached to the abandoned child some evidence of the human processes beneath those sets of data that most easily lend themselves to statistical enquiry.

It is perhaps significant that the only essay in Rudolph's collection to give extended treatment to childhood is not on the peasant family at all but on families in the Rouen textile industry during the nineteenth century; there, the emphasis is not on the families' decisions but on the responses of Rouen manufacturers to proposals for changes in the law on child labor. Gay Gullickson describes the emergence by the 1870s of a set of ideas that not only considered that young children should be kept out of the work force but also that women should be restricted in their participation so they could play their "proper" roles as mothers. The issue, Gullickson suggests, had arisen from the new need for child care where paid labor happened in factories from which children were barred; in proto-industry or in agriculture, such issues did not arise.33

The contrast between these two books suggests that the polarity drawn at the

31 Richard L. Rudolph, ed., The Eutropean Peasanit Family and Society: Historical Stuidies (Liverpool, 1995).

32 Stanley L. Engerman, "Family and Economy: Some Comparative Perspectives," in Rudolph, EulrXopean Peasant Family, 236.

33 Gay Gullickson, "Womanhood and Motherhood: The Rouen Manufacturing Community, Women Workers, and the French Factory Acts," in Rudolph, Eutropean Peasant Family.





beginning of this essay between approaches influenced by Aries and those by family strategy may be oversimplified, and in particular that there are different emphases within the family strategy approach. This surely is to be welcomed and should encourage some meeting of minds. Historians in the Aries tradition may well find the material in some of the essays in Rudolph's volume rebarbative, but they are likely to find the approach in Poor Women and Children in the European Past accessible and interesting. A family strategy approach, adopted with sensitivity, can enormously expand the range of histories of childhood.

These two family strategy studies have concentrated on Western societies. It is becoming increasingly apparent that a history of childhood, taking its cue from the late twentieth century, must be a global history. A key ingredient of this would be an exploration of divergent patterns in the experience of childhood in different cultures in the past century and a half. The trend in the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was for the length of childhood to be extended. There was no one formal measure that brought this about, although there can be little doubt that the introduction and enforcement of compulsory schooling was the central issue. As the age of leaving school rose to reach fourteen in the early twentieth century and up to sixteen later on, so childhood seemed to be extended. Alongside this were numerous measures intended to separate out childhood as a distinct phase of life-a separate system of justice, a higher age at which marriage was permissible, a ban on access to such substances as alcohol and tobacco. It was easier to legislate for full-time compulsory schooling than to impose it'. as Davin shows, both working-class parents and many magistrates believed that contributions to the family economy should take precedence over schooling. Nevertheless, over a period of about thirty years, the school habit became accepted.

One of the central arguments in the recent focus on childhood in the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been that state and philan- thropic action, together with rising standards of living, succeeded in bringing about a common experience of childhood for all children. That development brought to a head what in the longue duree must be the most fundamental shift in the experience of childhood, from one where nearly all children expected to contribute to the family economy at an early age to one where they were a net drain on that economy throughout their childhood and youth. The importance of this shift in the length and nature of childhood was brought out vividly in Viviana Zelizer's landmark study in the historiography of childhood. She showed how the valuation of children changed from one where they were valued according to their contributions to the family economy to one where they became productively useless but emotionally priceless-partly as a consequence of rising living standards but also because of the spread of new cultural norms respecting childhood.34 The more emotionally valuable they became, the longer in life they were likely to be perceived as children. Such a change opens up for inquiry differences over time and between cultures in the perceived length of and meanings attached to childhood.

Myron Weiner in The Child and the State in India (1991) aims to show why this

34Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York, 1985).





vital transition has not occurred in a particular non-Western culture.35 He is concerned to find out why child labor, described in telling detail, is so prevalent in present-day India. His analysis is historically informed; he argues that a comparison of experience in Europe, Asia, and Africa shows that it is not simply legislating for compulsory schooling but, more important, a willingness to enforce it, that can bring about this transition. In India, he argues, the willingness has been absent, and the consequence has been a higher level of child labor there than in many countries with lower per capita income. There is in India, he suggests, a culture at an elite level that accepts child labor, and until that culture changes no amount of laws or reports will have significant impact.

Weiner's approach represents one pole in a spectrum of attempts to understand what factors explain the prevalence or otherwise of child labor. At the other end lies the neo-classical family strategy approach: decisions about the deployment of family resources, it is argued, will arise out of an assessment of what will work best for the well-being of the family as a whole; child labor will diminish when a family has both the resources to invest in schooling (in terms of foregone income) and a perception that such investment will bring its own return.36 In between lie analyses that suggest the complexity of the processes that have transformed the relationships between children and their parents.37 It is a debate with some way yet to run, and whose importance it is difficult to exaggerate.

IT SEEMS LIKELY THAT THE ISSUES RAISED BY ARI'ES will continue to set part of the agenda for the history of childhood for the foreseeable future. From his stance in mid-twentieth-century bourgeois France, Aries sought to understand how a particular set of beliefs about childhood and practices of child-rearing had come into being. Both those beliefs and practices have changed substantially in the succeeding half-century, but that of course has not lessened our need to try to understand the present by reference to the past. It is that need which nourishes the impulse to research the history of childhood. It is reasonable to hope that, inspired by what has been achieved by Schultz, other scholars will seek to achieve precision in docu- menting the ideals of childhood held in different societies at different times. Schultz's own work and that of other scholars such as Carolyn Steedman indicates that the outcome of such inquiries may well be a renewed emphasis on the period of the Enlightenment as the point of transition to a world expecting adult lives to be shaped by childhood experience and, at the same time, looking to childhood as the repository of values held in high esteem. Taken together, they made children and childhood of central importance in the West, with all the consequences that followed: the evaluation of children in terms of emotion rather than economic

35Myron Weiner, The Child and the State in India: Child Labor and Education Policy in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, N.J., 1991).

36 An argument developed most forcefully in Clark Nardinelli, Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1990).

37 See Hugh Cunningham and Pier Paolo Viazzo, eds., Child Labour in Historical Perspective 1800-1985: Case Studies from Europe, Japan and Colombia (Florence, 1996); and, for a study that uses first-person testimony to chart the complexity of historical change, Harvey J. Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).





contribution to the family, the enhanced spending power of children and the pressure to consume that is targeted at them, the issue of the rights they should enjoy. This emphasis on how the child foreshadows the adult invites a focus on the gendering of childhood, an issue that is likely to be of central importance in forthcoming work, as it is in many of the books considered above. What one may with less confidence expect is a willingness to compare different cultures. Scholars of non-Western cultures writing about childhood nearly always make implicit or explicit reference to Western experience (though rarely abreast of the more recent historiography). Within the writing about childhood in the West, comparative study is rare, scholars often remaining locked within their own national literatures. Systematic comparison would be valuable.38

There are, in addition, issues not on Aries' agenda that demand attention. Taking our cue from the present, the most striking fact about childhood in the world today is the gulf in life experience separating the children of the wealthy from the children of the poor. Its most obvious manifestation is the division between children who are an expense to their parents throughout childhood and beyond, and those who, through work of some kind, contribute to their family economies. This is primarily a global geographical division, with child labor in the developing world a rising cause for concern. But it is a division that also exists within the developed world; research is revealing levels both of child poverty and of child labor once thought to be things of the past.39 It is the challenge of Weiner's book that he links this difference in the economic experience of children to the spread or otherwise of a set of ideas about childhood. These were issues that Aries ignored. In the circumstances of the late twentieth century, they demand to be addressed, and addressed in a way that brings together more effectively than is being done at present the different discourses and academic practices of cultural history, economic history (the globalization of the world economy and its effects on children are of fundamental importance), and family strategy studies. It is no mean task.

38 J. M. Hawes and N. R. Hiner, eds., Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective: An International Handbook and Research Guide (New York, 1991), contains valuable guides to the literature, country by country, but does not advance very far in the work of comparison.

39. See, for example, Michael Lavalette, Child Employment in the Capitalist Labourl Market (Aldershot, 1994).

Hugh Cunningham is a professor of Social History at the University of Kent at Canterbury. His work on the history of children and childhood includes The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Centuwy (1991) and Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (1995). He has co-edited with Joanna Innes Charity, Philanthropy and Reform: From the 1690s to 1850 (1998). Cunningham is currently following up issues in the history of child labor, first formulated in "The Employment and Unemployment of Children in England c. 1680-1851," Past and Present (1990), and in a volume published by UNICEF and co-edited with Pier Paolo Viazzo, Child Labour in Historical Perspective 1800-1985: Case Studies from Europe, Japan and Colom- bia (1996).




Histories of Childhood

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