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Histories of ChildhoodAuthor(s): Hugh Cunningham
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 1195-1208Published by: The University of Chicago 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 commercial-
ism, 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
understand-
ing
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 mpact of PhysicalAbuse (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
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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 arguethat 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
familystrategy 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 multiplicityof approachessuggests 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
nd
ReconstructingChildhood:Contenzpora;yssutes n the Sociological Stuldy f
Childhood
(London, 1990).
4
See,
for
example,
Linda A.
Pollock, Forgotten
Children:Parent-ChildRelations rom 1500
to
1900
(Cambridge, 1983); Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties That
Bounzld:easanzt amilies in MedievalEngland
(New York, 1986), 10-11.
5For some guidance to the literature, see C. Philip Hwang, Michael E. Lamb, and Irving E. Sigel,
eds., Inmagesof
Childhood
(Mahwa, N.J., 1996).
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Historiesof Childhood 1197
ALL HISTORIES OF CHILDHOOD can be placed in some relationship to the
historiog-
raphy 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 scholarshipleft 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 Knowledgeof 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 characteristicmodern
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 Knowledgeof Childhood in the
German
MiddleAges, 1100-1350
(Philadel-
phia,
1995).
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1198 Hugh Cunningham
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.10The
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.
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Histories
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1199
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.14Such 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,
ForgottenChildren,47; Shulamith
Shahar, Childhood n the MiddleAges
(London, 1990), 95.
15
Andrew Martindale, The
Child in the Picture: A MedievalPerspective, in Diana Wood, ed.,
The
Churchand Childhood (Oxford, 1994), 197-232, quoting 197.
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1200 Hugh Cunningham
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 n the House: The Material Cultureof
Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (1992).
Aries'
account of the evolution of attitudes
towardchildhood 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
portraiturerevealed 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 thenaturalchild: 1750to 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.18One sign of burgeoning interest in this field is the history of toys and
dolls. Long
of interest to
antiquariansand 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 n the House: The MaterialCultureof EarlyChildhood,1600-1900 (Boston,
1992); Calvert, Children n American Family Portraiture, 1670-1810, Williamand Maiy
Quarterly,
d
ser.,
39
(January 1982):
87-113.
18
See,
for
example, Anthony Burton,
Children
Pleasures:
Books,
Toys
anidGames
from
the Bethnal
Green
Museum
of
Childhood
(London, 1996).
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Historiesof Childhood
1201
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 Worldof 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.22One
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 standardsof 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 Commercializationof American
Girlhood, 1830-1930 (New Haven, Conn., 1993).
20
Gary Cross, Kids'
Stuiff:
Toys and the
Chaniging
Worldof American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.,
1997), 238.
21
Anna Davin, GrowingUp Poor: Home, Schlooland Street
n
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 n OuitcastLondon 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).
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1202 Hugh
Cunningham
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
canssurely 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.
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Histories
of Childhood 1203
unconscious, observable
only to the outsider.24Two 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 n 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 bastardyand 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
ink
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 familystrategy 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 GroupExperience n
the Nineteenth
Century New York, 1981). Robert V.
Robinson, FamilyEconomic 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 contributionsin 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 n
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.
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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.28About 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
here
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;
ee
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 istoty
12
(Spring 1982): 645-56.
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Histories of Childhood 1205
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 f
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 marriageand 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 explanationsfor 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-rationalizehuman activity:
t 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 easanit
Family and Society:Historical
Stuidies Liverpool,
1995).
32
Stanley L. Engerman, Family
and Economy: Some Comparative
Perspectives,
in
Rudolph,
EulrXopeaneasant
Family, 236.
33
Gay
Gullickson, Womanhoodand Motherhood:
The Rouen Manufacturing
Community,Women
Workers,
and the French
Factory
Acts, in Rudolph, EutropeanPeasant
Family.
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HughCunningham
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 increasinglyapparent 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 magistratesbelieved 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
contribu-
tions 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.34The more
emotionally
valuable
they became,
the
longer
in life
they
were
likely
to
be
perceived
as children. Such a change opens up for inquirydifferences 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,
Pricingthe Priceless Child:
The
Changing
Social Value of Children(New York,
1985).
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Histories of Childhood 1207
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 n between lie analyses
that
suggest the complexity of
the
processes
that
have transformed the
relationships
between children and their parents.37It 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
partic-
ular 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 Childand the State in India: Child Laborand 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 rom
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).
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Hugh Cunningham
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 separatingthe childrenof 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.39It
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, eco-
nomic
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
ComparativePerspective: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
n the
CapitalistLabourl
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 WesternSociety 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).
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