Maza-The Kids Arent All Right

AHR Exchange
The Kids Aren’t All Right: Historians

and the Problem of Childhood
SARAH MAZA
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All children, except one, grow up.
—J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
THE HISTORY OF CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD is always on the rise and yet not quite risen. The
subfield emerged in the 1960s and ’70s as one star in the constellation that was the New
Social History, alongside pioneering work on subjects like women, the family, popular
culture, sex, and death. Those decades saw the publication of a cluster of notable studies
of child-rearing in the past, usually in the context of histories of the family, but by the
1980s, the topic’s cutting edge had become blunted.1 The intervening years have seen a
steady output of work on the subject and a decisive uptick in the early 2000s with the
founding in the United States of a scholarly society and its linked Journal of the History
of Childhood and Youth and the 2004 publication of a multivolume encyclopedia helmed
by longtime leader in the field Paula Fass.2 For all that, the history of childhood has never
broken out into the mainstream as one of those topics like the history of gender or race
that significantly recasts our understanding of “normal” history.3 While leading historical
In writing this article I benefited enormously from questions, challenges, and suggestions from audiences at
talks I gave at Yale, Cambridge, Northwestern, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Queen Mary Uni-
versity London, and UCLA. I also learned a lot from participants in the conference “Writing History through
Children,” held at Northwestern University in October 2018. For especially substantive critiques of earlier
drafts, I thank Deborah Cohen, Daniel Immerwahr, Susan Pearson, Sophia Rosenfeld, and Amy Stanley.
1
The notable works in this earliest generation of writing about children in the context of family life in-
clude the following: Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Rob-
ert Baldick (New York, 1962); David Hunt, Parents and Children in History: The Psychology of Family
Life in Early Modern France (New York, 1970); Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a
Seventeeth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge, 1970); John Demos, A
Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (Oxford, 1970); Lloyd deMause, ed., The History
of Childhood (New York, 1974); Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York,
1976); Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975); Lawrence Stone, The
Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1977); Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the
Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New
York, 1978). Notably, because of the structure of the historical profession at the time, all the early authors
in a field later heavily feminized were men.
2
Paula Fass, ed., Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood: In History and Society, 3 vols. (New
York, 2004). The Society for the History of Children and Youth holds biennial conferences.
3
See the blunt assessment by Julia Grant in a review essay discussing Fass’s Encyclopedia, “Children
versus Childhood: Writing Children into the Historical Record,” History of Education Quarterly 45, no. 3
(2005): 468–490, here 475: “Although children’s history is no longer new as compared to women’s his-
tory, it remains marginal.”
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical
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1261
1262 Sarah Maza
journals and major conferences regularly showcase roundtables on slavery, race, sexuality,
and empire, childhood hardly ever enjoys comparable high-profile attention. History
departments sometimes launch cross-field searches for scholars in intellectual or environ-
mental history, but never in the history of children.4 A symptom of the subject’s under-
the-radar quality is that the authors of introductions, prefaces, and survey articles so often
mention, in their first few sentences, Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood (1960; En-

glish translation 1962) not because the subfield has failed to move on decisively since Ar-
iès but because writers seem to assume that this is still the only book that will mean some-
thing to readers in other areas.5 This is an odd state of affairs considering that, as the
giggles induced by the title of a recent autobiography—Bruce Kaplan’s I Was a Child—
remind us, childhood is, along with death, one of the two universal human experiences.
We are faced, then, with the paradox of our discipline’s overall neglect of a cate-
gory coterminous with humanity itself.6 The purpose of this essay is not to make a com-
pensatory argument about the subject’s importance and the need for more work. Al-
though I would not disagree that the topic could use more attention, I am also skeptical
of arguments that posit that if we just increase the volume of scholarship on the history
of children, the problem of inattention to these particular historical actors will be
solved. The issues the subject raises for historians are less practical than theoretical:
writing the history of children is difficult not because we lack sources or willing schol-
ars but because of the nature of a group of people incommensurable with any other in
the field’s canon. At the same time, the conceptual problems facing historians who
write about the very young are illuminating in that they confront us with questions at
the core of all historical work about the nature of historical actors and agency. More-
over, an emergent body of recent scholarship seems to be putting childhood back in the
spotlight, albeit in a different way, pressing historical children into questions beyond
the child her- or himself about the cleavages and contests—between classes or
nations—within adult society, or about the nature of political rights and consent. The
success of some of these recent works suggests that, broadly speaking, histories involv-
ing children tend to be least conclusive, even if empirically rich, when they focus on
youngsters themselves, and most conceptually successful when they use children as a
4
Nara Milanich has described a parallel trajectory for the history of the family, another cutting-edge
topic in the early days of the New Social History that was subsequently marginalized and seems to be
enjoying a recent rebirth under very different forms: Nara Milanich, “Whither Family History? A Road
Map from Latin America,” American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (2007): 439–458.
5
See, for instance, Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (Lon-
don, 1995; 2005), 4. Ariès, Cunningham writes, “launched the debates on the history of children and
childhood which have lasted to the present day”; see also Hugh Cunningham, “Histories of Childhood,”
American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (1998): 1195–1208, here 1197 and ff.; Grant, “Children versus
Childhood: Writing Children into the Historical Record,” 471; Paula Fass, “The World Is at Our Door:
Why Historians of Children and Childhood Should Open Up,” Journal of the History of Childhood and
Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 11–31, here 13; Mary Niall Mitchell, “Children and Childhood,” William and
Mary Quarterly 68, no. 1 (2011): 173–177, here 173; Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth,
Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005), 2; David M. Pomfret, Youth
and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford, 2016), 5.
6
Most likely some of the reasons for this neglect have to do with gender bias: investment in children
is still strongly associated with women, and despite the prominence of male scholars of childhood like
Steven Mintz, Howard Chudacoff, and Hugh Cunningham, following Ariès himself, a large majority of
historians—and other scholars—of childhood are female. Of the 169 program members of the conference
of the Society for the History of Children and Youth held at Rutgers University in June 2017, around
32—names make it sometimes hard to tell—were male, or slightly less than 20 percent.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020

The Kids Aren’t All Right 1263
point of entry into another issue. While flesh-and-blood historical children can be elusive,
the child turns up everywhere as a multivalent symbol: signifying the past, the future, the
sacred, innocence, vulnerability, and life itself, the imagined child has a unique ability to
mobilize adults to act on their most emotionally urgent agendas. One of the many particu-
larities of children’s history is the split it encompasses between the ill-chronicled lives of
the very young and the abundant evidence of what children make adults do.

I will outline some of the problems that historians face in conceptualizing social his-
tories of children, including those inherent to the frequent claim that a central purpose
of the field is to locate child-generated sources and recapture the agency of the very
young. Agency is a more problematic concept for the young than for any other category
of human actors because children are incommensurable with other marginalized and
voiceless groups. The classic history-of-children genre also seems to be stagnating, pos-
sibly because it has proven so hard to completely slough off the Eurocentric moderniza-
tion template that drove the work of pioneers like Ariès and haunts the field to this day.
Conversely, though, the last fifteen years or so have seen an efflorescence of highly crea-
tive work featuring children in history, scholarship that makes an end run around issues
of agency and points instead to the many ways in which children, both real and imagined,
have been pressed into the service of adult agendas. A productive shift has been emerg-
ing from writing the history of children to writing history through children.
Much of the energy behind this new scholarship has come from interdisciplinary
ventures. Scholars trained in cultural studies like Robin Bernstein and Sabine Frühstück
have proposed solving the problem of children’s agency by recasting it as performance,
showing the ways in which children are encouraged to act out their elders’ agendas
through games, toys, and reading practices. The child, that most emotionally and sym-
bolically charged of figures, features prominently in works of fiction as well as in pre-
scriptive and analytical texts; work by literary and intellectual historians such as Karen
Sánchez-Eppler and Gail Bederman has revealed not only how children are “good to
think with” but indeed how the imagined child can resolve cultural contradictions. An-
other fertile area of recent historical work related to childhood has involved questions
of law and rights. As a peculiar category of humans, vulnerable and dependent but
bearing the weight of society’s future, children confront their elders with fundamental
questions about what it means to be a rights-bearing individual. In sum, both real and
imagined children in history have served as nodal points for large social configurations.
Their mere existence raises crucial matters of social reproduction embedded in the con-
cept of (heterosexually based) kinship, and while entering the world stateless, they be-
come upon birth pawns in the adjudication and manipulation of citizenship. As histori-
ans like Nara Milanich, Emmanuelle Saada, and Tara Zahra have variously shown, the
child is the place where kinship becomes nation. A growing body of historical litera-
ture, then, has decisively challenged the lingering prejudice that a history that focuses
on children must be circumscribed to the private sphere, a safe subject for historians
with limited ambitions.7 On the contrary, this new and expanding vein of scholarship is
7
Anne Higonnet, an art historian, writes that her field “dismisses the subject of the child as being trivi-
al and sentimental, good only for second-rate minds and perhaps for women,” in Pictures of Innocence:
The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London, 1998), 13; although that diagnosis is twenty years
old and applies to another field, it is safe to suggest that some of the same prejudice lingers in the histori-
cal discipline.

1264 Sarah Maza
proving that in all sorts of different ways, very small people can hold the key to very
big questions.
A COMMON DIAGNOSIS OF THE DIFFICULTY of writing children’s history is that the task is
bedeviled by a lack of sources emanating from children themselves. On page 2 of the

first issue of the decade-old Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Martha
Saxton evokes the “unique difficulties” of the field: “The overwhelming majority of
children leave no records of themselves.” Several agenda-setting essays in the volume
take up the same theme. Peter Stearns points out that by dint of imagination, historians
have overcome the similar problems when writing the history of women and subaltern
groups, but, he continues, “I do not think we can expect this degree of success with
children.”8 Sources about children are not hard to find, as everyone acknowledges. The
records of institutions that organized the lives of the young, such as schools, orphan-
ages, and reform movements, are abundant—more than enough, for instance, to have
kept articles rolling into the distinguished History of Education Quarterly for more
than a half century. Many children’s historians, however, set as their holy grail the re-
covery of the voices of children themselves in the past.
The most obvious place to look for the experiences of children in the past is in the
memoirs of adults looking back on their earlier selves. Books on the social history of
children (especially those focused on more recent history) often proceed by combining
the institutional sources mentioned previously with a multitude of details gleaned from
the autobiographical accounts of contemporaries. Anna Davin’s Growing Up Poor
(1996), which describes the lives of working-class children in turn-of-the-century Lon-
don, for instance, uses both published memoirs and oral histories to recapture the expe-
riences of young people in this time and place. Looking back from the later twentieth
century, men and women who grew up poor in the English metropolis describe aspects
of their life that escaped even the most sympathetic observers: petty theft and racial
name-calling; the labor of boys who helped their fathers; and the constant, invisible,
and unpaid work of girls as their mothers’ domestic assistants.9 David Nasaw’s classic
Children of the City (1985) is a similar account of the lives of New York’s nonprivi-
leged kids between 1900 and 1920, based in part on memoirs including those of celeb-
rities like George Burns and Harpo Marx, who grew up on Gotham’s streets. Kate Si-
mon recalled long hours embroidering on her house’s stoop while getting her sex
education from the women’s conversations; Catharine Brody and Celia Blazek remem-
bered playing on the streets with different sorts of children who were never, because of
race or national origins, allowed to enter one anothers’ homes; Harry Golden evoked
the “universal” ritual of “cockalization” visited on Jewish boys whose gentile enemies
8
Martha Saxton, “Introduction,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 1–3,
here 2; Peter Stearns, “Challenges in the History of Childhood,” Journal of the History of Childhood and
Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 35–42, here 36; Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, “Hidden in Plain View: The
History of Children (and Childhood) in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of the History of Childhood
and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 43–49, here 43–44; Mary Jo Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analy-
sis: History, Agency and Narratives of Childhood,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no.
1 (2008): 114–124, here 117–118.
9
Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School, and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London, 1996),
chaps. 9–10.

threw them down and opened their pants so as to spit and urinate on their circumcised
penises.10 There is little reason to doubt the concrete information in these accounts, es-
pecially when multiple stories turn up similar detail, but to what extent does the narra-
tive of an adult remembering childhood convey the perspective and experience of a
child? And, more pointedly, in what circumstances, and why, does the child’s authentic
perspective actually matter? Books like Davin’s and Nasaw’s and so many other social

histories of children have accomplished the crucial first step in the history of marginal-
ized populations, by bringing children in the past out of the shadows, making them visi-
ble. It is the next step, connecting the margins to the center, that has often proven prob-
lematic.
Some of the most striking work on the history of childhood concerns the experience
of children in wartime. Historians may be drawn to the subject out of empathy for the
youngest victims of armed conflict, but it is also the case, as James Marten notes, that
wars generate unusual amounts of child-related and child-produced evidence.11 With
fathers at the front or families separated, correspondence to and from young girls and
boys increases dramatically. Since children experience war as an abnormal time in
ways ranging from deeply traumatic events (separations, violence, death) to more mun-
dane disruptions (rationing, absent fathers, canceled school), they are more likely to re-
member and record their experiences in letters, diaries, and drawings and to reenact the
strife around them in their play. Historians, at least those working on more recent times,
have been able to combine these sources with the abundant memoir evidence from
adults recalling their wartime childhoods to produce well-documented re-creations of
the child’s-eye view of armed conflict. Marten’s own book The Children’s Civil War
(1998) re-creates a range of experiences during the American Civil War, from war-
related toys and playground battles to forced uprooting and traumatized fathers, from
the partisan newspapers and fundraising efforts of middle-class children to the hunger
and violence visited on southern black children as they moved out of bondage.12 More
ambitious still is Nicholas Stargardt’s Witnesses of War (2005), a riveting account of
the lives of children under the Third Reich that brings to life in one volume the stories
of German, Polish, and Jewish child supporters and targets of the Nazi regime; the
book is remarkable in bringing together the stories of the children of both victims and
perpetrators. Much of Stargardt’s chronicle makes for painfully unforgettable reading:
very young Polish children reenacting the executions of their elders they had witnessed
and re-creating Gestapo interrogations complete with slaps, Jewish youngsters in the
Vilna ghetto playing hide-and-seek as practice for future roundups.13
While Marten and Stargardt draw on some evidence produced by children at the
time—diaries make for especially rewarding sources—no work on youth and war is as
systematically committed to the child’s perspective as Manon Pignot’s Allons enfants
de la patrie (2012), which chronicles French children’s experiences of World War I.
Determined to get as close as possible to the perspective of children, Pignot draws most
of her evidence from letters, diaries, and a remarkable trove of more than one thousand
10
David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (Garden City, N.Y., 1985), 29, 31, 34.
11
James Marten, “Childhood Studies and History: Catching a Culture in High Relief” in Anna Mae Duane,
ed., The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities (Athens, Ga., 2013), 52–67, here 60.
12
James Marten, The Children’s Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998).
13
Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (London, 2005), 114–115,
174–175.

1266 Sarah Maza
drawings on war themes produced by young people between 1914 and 1918. The book
effectively recaptures the fractured perspective of children, ignorant (often by design)
of the larger reality they were living through: death is experienced through the unusual
sight of their mothers weeping in public, the violence of war via encounters with
maimed and amputated acquaintances (a frequent theme in drawings), the occupation
in war zones through memories such as the enemy’s systematic killing of dogs. Pignot

considers in conclusion what it means to have an absent father “constructed” through
letters, and how adults and children experience the nature of wartime as different, tem-
porary for the former, “normal” for the youngest of the latter.14
These studies by Marten, Stargardt, and Pignot—there are many more on the same
theme—converge remarkably in the similar observations they offer about children’s ex-
perience of war in the modern West. All three note, for instance, that to those children
not directly affected by its most extreme effects, wartime can seem normal or even
thrilling. Since conflict with parents and siblings and us-against-them battles in the
schoolyard are routine features of children’s lives, the idea of adults fighting one an-
other is not necessarily surprising or upsetting to the young; suspension of school and
disruption of daily routines, the absence of strict fathers, even rushing to a shelter dur-
ing a nighttime air raid are all experiences that for children can be more exciting than
alarming. Cumulatively, then, these studies have a lot to offer by way of insights into
the meaning of war to a six- or twelve-year-old in a particular time and place. What
they also have in common, however, is their heavy focus on description rather than in-
terpretation: none of them clearly coalesce around a central theme or argument. The
introductions to Marten’s and Pignot’s works focus on issues of sources, while Star-
gardt takes a strong stance in his opening pages against passive victimhood as the de-
fault lens through which to view children’s wartime experiences. From there, the books
devolve into rich empirical accounts, but none of the three is framed around a central
argument: Marten and Stargardt offer no overall conclusions, and Pignot’s book ends
with a series of observations about different aspects of children’s experience.15
It is possible to ascribe this inconclusiveness to the sheer variety of lives each book
embraces: What sort of governing argument could possibly encompass the stories of an
upper-middle-class New England boy or girl and an enslaved black child, a Hitler
Youth and a concentration camp internee, a child in battle-torn northeastern France and
one growing up hundreds of miles from the front? But even works more focused on a
specific group of children, such as Davin’s and Nasaw’s, fail to offer arguments that de-
cisively engage with or alter the central narratives of their respective fields: the reader
emerges from them with a vivid sense of life at the edges of adult history but no clear
conception of how those margins might reshape the center.
The same goes for synthetic works, which either rest on broad generalities while
leaning heavily toward the descriptive or frame children’s history as an offshoot of
developments in the grown-up world. Hugh Cunningham’s short and authoritative
14
Manon Pignot, Allons enfants de la patrie: Génération Grande Guerre (Paris, 2012).
15
A related example of an account of childhood subjected to trauma is Wilma King’s Stolen Child-
hood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, Ind., 2011), the work of refer-
ence on that subject. King presents a wealth of information about the lives of enslaved African American
children that, like Stargardt’s, makes for gripping reading. Her book revolves around the theme captured
in its title, a moral-political point rather than a specific historical argument: that slavery deprived these
youths of their childhoods.

Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (1995) hooks its arguments
onto the familiar signposts of adult history: the enlightenment and romanticism that
brought us the innocent, malleable child, those aspects of Western modernity (nation-
states, industrialization, total war) that triggered the interventions into children’s lives
of welfare states, philanthropists, and human rights activists, the role of late-modern
capitalism in metamorphosing children from producers to consumers.16

Steven Mintz’s magisterial Huck’s Raft (2004), the work of reference on American
childhoods, covers a vast range of experiences through the full sweep of United States
history in a narrative punctuated with lively individual stories, from the child-rearing
customs of Native Americans to the consumer-child of the twenty-first century. In the
introduction to his book, a feat of synthetic research and writing, Mintz announces that
his intentions are to encompass diversity—which he certainly does—and to overturn a
series of “myths” about the history of American youth: that childhoods in the past were
carefree, that homes were a bastion of stability, that childhood is similar for all children,
and that the lives of youngsters have been either steadily improving or declining.17
For all the laudable efforts of a scholar like Mintz to resist totalizing views and opti-
mistic teleologies, some of the problem with the history-of-childhood survey genre is
its tight connection, dating back to Philippe Ariès, with narratives of Western moder-
nity. So powerful is the current commitment to the standards of nurture and protection
articulated in declarations of children’s rights—the right not to labor, for instance—that
deviations from such norms are usually thought of as premodern holdovers. In many
parts of the world, though, different forms of child-rearing have flourished simulta-
neously, sometimes in response to “modern” developments, confounding simple
traditional-versus-modern binaries. Nara Milanich’s research on nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Chilean childhoods, for instance, documents widespread patterns of
“child circulation” involving various forms of fostering, limited adoption, and child la-
bor, with adults serving as both employers and surrogate parents, practices impossible
to describe along simple binaries of exploitative versus nurturing or premodern versus
modern.18 The literature on non-Western childhoods, Milanich writes, is still bedeviled
by a tendency to describe child-rearing practices outside of Euro-America “not on their
own terms but as living tableaux of Europe’s past.”19 If Western overviews of the subjet
appear increasingly problematic, writing a global history of childhood seems even
more difficult.20
Even when anchored in traditional Western narratives, syntheses of the subject end
up illuminating one of the field’s major conundrums: the more children’s history cen-
16
Cunningham, Children and Childhood. The landmark book for the argument about capitalism is
Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, 1984).
17
Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 1–5.
18
For an excellent critical statement, see Nara Milanich, “Latin American Childhoods and the Concept
of Modernity” in Paula Fass, ed., The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (London,
2013), 491–508. For the more extended historical illustration, see Milanich’s Children of Fate: Child-
hood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930 (Durham, N.C., 2009), esp. chaps. 5 and 6.
19
Milanich, “Whither Family History? A Road Map from Latin America,” 449.
20
To date, all global histories of childhood have taken the form of edited volumes rather than single-
authored narratives. See Jennifer Helgren and Colleen A. Vasconcellos, eds., Girlhood: A Global History
(New Brunswick, N.J., 2010); Stephanie Olsen, ed., Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History:
National, Colonial and Global Perspectives (New York, 2015); Heidi Morrison, ed., The Global History
of Childhood Reader (London, 2016).

1268 Sarah Maza
ters on the lives of children themselves, the more it takes on an additive quality, comple-
menting but never disrupting the history of the adult world. To some, this conclusion will
come as no surprise: children obviously don’t make history. But those are fighting words
to many historians of childhood, eager as they are to endow children with the New Social
History’s canonical concept of agency. While agency has been variously challenged and
redefined by historians in this century, many of those who work on children still see it as

one of their central tasks to demonstrate that young people were more than just the
objects or victims of their elders’ programs.21 Calls to focus on the agency of the young
feature routinely in programmatic statements. Introductory discussions of the field of
children’s history often include comparisons with the history of women, a tempting anal-
ogy since both groups, the objects of patriarchal “coverture” and control, have had their
agency overlooked “because of the everydayness of their activities.” If the position of
children is so similar to that of women, it follows, the relevant historiography should
move, like that of women, from chronicles of victimhood and powerlessness to the recog-
nition that they too had the ability to “influence others or shape their own lives.”22
In practice, though, the analogy does not work; it is nearly impossible to find exam-
ples of children acting effectively on the world without stretching beyond recognition the
definition of autonomous action or that of childhood. In some cases, young people have
indeed seemed to wield power but only by enacting the will of others. Examples range
from child soldiers pressed into combat by their elders to child saints whose authority
flows from their immediate connection to the divine. Children’s political activities nearly
always amount to instances of mimicking parents in the case of the very young (via
games and other projects that reflect the ideologies of elders) or acting out family or com-
munity beliefs in the case of older kids: it takes nothing away from the courage of young
protagonists of the civil rights struggle, most notably those involved in school desegrega-
tion, to recognize that they were inspired and encouraged by the adults around them.23
Truly autonomous young rebels and activists do exist, of course, but usually when their
age or situation renders the child label questionable. Student protesters fall into this cate-
gory, and so do younger workers whose social location has moved them outside the fami-
ly orbit. The teenage apprentices in Robert Darnton’s famous essay “The Great Cat Mas-
sacre,” slyly manipulating symbols to humiliate their master, are examples of one such
group; so are the New York newsies, most aged eleven to fifteen, who in the summer of
1899 went on strike against newspaper price hikes that undermined their earnings and
forced publishing magnates Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst into a compromise; so
are high school students protesting apartheid in 1970s Soweto or gun violence in twenty-
first-century Florida.24 Just as adults in situations of dependency—menials, slaves, racial
“inferiors”—have often been infantilized, older children who attain autonomy through
21
The classic statements are by Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1
(2003): 113–124 and “State of the Field: Slavery,” accessed May 8, 2017, http://www.oah.org/meetings/
2004/johnson.html. For a more recent discussion, see Lynn M. Thomas, “Historicising Agency,” Gender
& History 28, no. 2 (2016): 324–339; the question of agency and the nonhuman is ably outlined in Paul
Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History,” Journal of American History
100, no. 1 (2013): 94–119, here 98–99.
22
Saxton, “Introduction,” 2; Hawes and Hiner, “Hidden in Plain View,” 46.
23
Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 306–309.
24
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New
York, 1984), chap. 2; Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play, chaps. 5, 12; Clive Glaser, Bo-
Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976 (Portsmouth, N.H., 2000).

wages and removal from the parental household become adultified. The fact that the lat-
ter, even when quite young, can exert recognizable historical agency, and that most
young people on the cusp of adulthood are indeed able to act on the world, does not solve
the more general problem as to whether preadolescent children can engage in activities
that significantly alter their environment.
When specialists ask whether children can have historical agency, they rarely answer

in the negative, so strong is the taboo against withholding that attribute from any category
of human, indeed even nonhuman, beings. At most, like Julia Grant, they will admit that
children are and have been social actors only in the weaker sense of being able to “expe-
rience, interact, and make meaning,” as opposed to the stronger definitions usually fa-
vored by historians that usually involve efforts to alter prevailing power arrangements.
As William Sewell has argued, all humans possess a capacity for agency, “for desiring,
for forming intentions, for acting creatively,” but the extent of that capacity differs greatly
according to their place in the social system.25 That even the youngest people can form
desires and exert their wills on the world is obvious to anyone who has had to wrangle a
toddler or butt heads with a preteen; equally obvious are the abilities of children to per-
form and create, and to alter their environments by disobeying, running away, engaging
in delinquency, or ensuring their own survival in various ways. Such instances of individ-
ual assertion, however, are a far cry from what Sewell describes as “an ability to coordi-
nate one’s actions with others and against others, to form collective projects, and to moni-
tor the simultaneous effects of one’s own and others’ activities.”26
Many historians of childhood have seen it as their mission to follow the path laid out
by historians of women and subaltern groups: instead of denying the existence of agency,
we need to think differently about what it is.27 One way of thinking differently about the
conundrum of children and historical agency is suggested by Mary Jo Maynes in a meth-
odological article drawing on her earlier research into the autobiographies of nineteenth-
century French and German workers. Maynes’s emphasis is not on children per se but on
childhood experience as remembered by adults. We need to find tools, she proposes, for
analyzing and describing historically the ways in which personal pasts shape individual
and collective agency; this entails looking for the means of exploring, in historical con-
text, the subjective dimensions of agency to which childhood experience is central.28
A brilliantly idiosyncratic example of such a project is Carolyn Kay Steedman’s
classic memoir-cum-history Landscape for a Good Woman (1987).29 In Landscape,
Steedman offers a dual account of her own life and her mother’s, a tale of frustrated
lower-middle-class experience in postwar South London that traces the intimate con-
struction of class identity in childhood. Steedman weaves the story of her own austere
25
William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 144.
26
Sewell, Logics of History, 145. Beverly Carolease Grier, for instance, makes the case that the child
workers in southern Africa she writes about deployed agency through various forms of flight, truancy,
and delinquency, an argument that invites discussion: Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colo-
nial Zimbabwe (Portsmouth, N.H., 2006).
27
Hawes and Hiner, “Hidden in Plain View,” 46; Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis,”
118.
28
Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis,” 115–117; see also Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the
Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), 2–4.
29
Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.,
1987).

1270 Sarah Maza
1950s lower-middle-class childhood (“Not bad enough to be worthy of attention”) to-

gether with that of a mother who from the age of eleven worked as a maid and then a
weaver, finally becoming a manicurist to posh London ladies; raising her daughters
alone, Steedman’s mother experienced her sense of permanent exile from the worlds
that mattered not as the requisite working-class anger and pride but as bitterness and
envy that translated into conservative political leanings.30 Steedman herself in turn un-

derstood her own childhood feelings of loss and exclusion through the prism of a ma-
ternal psychology shaped by historical forces. Whereas Mary Jo Maynes notes similar
experiences of envy and exclusion among nineteenth-century proletarian children lead-
ing to “an emergent critique of society,” Steedman describes a more complicated al-
chemy of psychology and class consciousness, a set of individual stories shaped by the
politics of a specific setting but irreducible to the generalities of class analysis.31 Even
as she highlights the way childhood is lived and remembered through the historical par-
ticularities of a time and place, Steedman ends on a defiant note, a refusal to let “what
has been made out on the borderlands . . . be absorbed into the central story.”32 What
makes our childhoods powerful in shaping our lives is something near impossible to
convey in the inevitably collective mode of history.
Both Maynes and Steedman argue that childhood is a labile category that exists not
just in the time of youth but as it is remembered and recast throughout an individual’s
life—as Steedman puts it, “the continually reworked and re-used personal history that
lies at the heart of each present.”33 Maynes similarly makes the case for approaching
historical agency through “life stories,” a strategy that confers central importance on
childhood both lived and remembered. Childhood experience functions, she writes,
“not just when it happens in real time, but, because of the dynamics of intersecting tem-
poralities and ongoing personality development, as a life-long phenomenon.”34
The problem with a theoretical approach that roots agency in life stories, however,
is that it operates best, as Steedman’s memoir suggests, in a realm of individual psy-
chology to which most historical approaches—save historical biography—are inhospi-
table: in its usual plural mode, historical writing tends to so flatten out group psycholo-
gies as to make them of questionable use. A possible exception is the body of historical
writing that approaches the past through the prism of generations, highlighting the way
in which certain age cohorts have been shaped by traumatic or vividly exciting experi-
ences—wars, genocides, rebellions and revolutions, rapid material change—and carried
these wounds and triumphs collectively forward in socially transformative fashion.
“Generation” does not, however, map exactly onto “childhood.” One the one hand,
many, if not all, generationally defining events, such as fighting in a war and participat-
ing in rebellious activity, are more typical of adolescence or young adulthood than of
childhood per se. On the other, generation extends over the entire course of a cohort’s
life span, blurring in the process the specific effects of childhood on subsequent lives.35
30
Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, 9, 23–37.
31
Maynes, Taking the Hard Road, 64–66.
32
Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, 144.
33
Ibid., 128.
34
Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis,” 120.
35
For a searching discussion by prominent historians who have used this analytical category, see
“AHR Conversation: Each Generation Writes Its Own History of Generations,” American Historical Re-
view 123, no. 5 (2018): 1505–1546.

If the idea of childhood as a sort of stealth force acting on adult agency leads into
theoretical conundrums, it also moves us closer to understanding the very specific prob-
lem involved in studying children as historical actors. Analogies with women’s history
seem irresistible to agenda setters in the field, judging by how often the phrase “age as
a category of historical analysis” (in reference to Joan Scott’s revolutionary article on
gender history) comes up in the essays that open the first issue of the Journal of the

History of Childhood and Youth (2008). Martha Saxton, Mary Jo Maynes, and Steven
Mintz all use the phrase, sometimes in the titles of their pieces, though there seems to
be little consensus as to its meaning beyond the generic call to study children’s histo-
ry.36 Julia Grant pinpoints the issue most explicitly by returning to Scott’s original
point: noting, in the early 1980s, the discrepancy between the high quality of empirical
work on women’s history and its marginality to the profession, Scott bemoans “the lim-
its of descriptive approaches that do not address dominant disciplinary concepts . . . in
terms that can shake their power and transform them.”37
Childhood has never achieved the discipline-shaking impact of gender, sexuality, or
race, for reasons that Hawes and Hiner ascribe to politics since children, they suggest,
don’t have the power to make claims for their own group and drive its political agenda,
and therefore its history, in the same way as women, gays, and racial minorities.38 The
real reason, however, behind the political impotence of children—and the resulting
marginalization of their histories—is not the same as it is for other subaltern popula-
tions. Children have never set collective agendas for themselves not because of illitera-
cy, internal diversity, lack of resources, or subjection—these have not stood in the way
of other groups—but because of their peculiar relationship to the future. What defines
childhood as a historical category is not age—a wildly variable marker of a group that
can include the not yet born and stretch into a third decade—but time: unlike any other
category of human identity, childhood is a vanishing act. Children are the only group
for whom future-directed activity makes no sense since it would mean struggling for a
time in which their defining identity will cease to exist: Gavroche may well take to the
barricades but not for his future as a child. The narrative of most other groups—the ad-
vent of nations, the liberation of the oppressed, silenced groups gaining their voices—
revolves around the fulfillment of identity; the story of childhood is that of its own dis-
appearance.39
The essentially evanescent nature of childhood means that children’s activity in the
past may best be conceptualized not as agency but as performance. As Robin Bernstein
suggests in her influential study of race and childhood in nineteenth-century America,
36
See also Rachel Leow, “Age as a Category of Gender Analysis: Servant Girls, Modern Girls, and
Gender in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 4 (November 2012): 975–990.
37
Joan Scott as quoted in Grant, “Children versus Childhood: Writing Children into the Historical Re-
cord,” 474–475.
38
Hawes and Hiner, “Hidden in Plain View,” 48.
39
The same can be said, of course, of any stage of human life, the most distinctive of which are child-
hood and senescence. Some historians have explored the history of old age: see, for instance, David
Troyansky, Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca,
1989), or Pat Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (Oxford, 2000). The
paucity of research on historical old age as compared to the abundance of scholarship on childhood is un-
derstandable, as children represent any given society’s future and are therefore invested with multiple
highly charged cultural and ideological messages. Children disappear by metamorphosing into the forsee-
able future, while the old, vanishing into social nothingness, ordinarily bear little social meaning beyond
the private bereavement of their kin.

1272 Sarah Maza
Racial Innocence (2011), childhood resembles performance in that both are fleeting
embodiments, both “paradoxically present only through their impending absence.”
Bernstein borrows from performance theorist Joseph Roach the concept of “surroga-
tion,” which captures the ways in which cultures self-create and reproduce by offering,
through the body of the performer, an effigy of what the community has lost. Children,
she notes, “often serve as effigies that substitute uncannily for other, presumably adult

bodies and thus produce a surplus of meaning.” Children, in other words, become
vehicles for the most urgent agendas of their elders not so much because they are as-
cribed qualities like innocence and vulnerability but because their essential task is per-
formance of the loss that gives meaning to human life.40
Her performative approach allows Bernstein to elaborate a theory of childhood
agency that overcomes some of the problems evoked previously. Neither autonomous
actors nor passive recipients of the top-down agendas of their elders, children seize on
the scripts offered by the adult world and act them out as “virtuoso performers.” In
1855, for instance, two groups of young Japanese boys play-fought each other as “Japa-
nese” and “Americans”; one of the “Japanese” accidentally killed an opponent with a
sharp bamboo rod. When the dead boy’s angry parents brought the matter to court, the
magistrates ruled in favor of the young killer on the grounds that his behavior sprang
from a patriotic impulse.41 Sabine Frühstück, whose study of combat play in modern
Japan includes this anecdote, notes the ubiquitousness of state- and school-sanctioned
war games in the Meiji period. Frühstück makes the predictable point that such play
conditioned young boys to war readiness, but also the more unusual argument that
adults seized on the very combat games they promoted to make the case that a state of
war was normal and inevitable, a “natural” human inclination.42 Children’s war games
in the Meiji period, in sum, naturalized war for their elders’ benefit. For Frühstück as
for Bernstein, children are neither empty vessels nor autonomous agents but actors
complicit in the making of culture, indeed in many cases necessary accomplices in con-
cealing or acting out social ideologies.
In a review of recent work in childhood studies, Corinne T. Field argues that the
dearth of evidence surrounding children in the past has recently led historians to look to
other disciplines such as literary theory, queer theory, and performance studies in order
to devise new ways of reading scant or problematic evidence, a point that Bernstein’s
work illustrates beautifully.43 In search of children’s role in the creation and perpetu-
ation of racial ideologies, Bernstein relies heavily on material culture in the form of
children’s books and toys—particularly dolls—for which she coins the term “scriptive
things.” Her method consists of relating the properties of the objects themselves (the
size and materials of a doll, for instance) to historical evidence about their use, asking,
“What historically located behaviors did this artifact invite? And what practices did it
discourage?”44 The materiality of objects proposes scripts—a Western book invites us
40
Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights
(New York, 2011), 22–25.
41
Sabine Frühstück, Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (Oak-
land, 2017), 21.
42
Frühstück, Playing War, see esp. 56–58 and chap. 2.
43
Corinne T. Field, “Why Little Thinkers Are a Big Deal: The Relevance of Childhood Studies to In-
tellectual History,” Modern Intellectual History 14, no. 1 (2017): 269–280.
44
Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 8; see also chap. 2.

to open it to the left and read from left to right—that people act out in varying degrees
of freedom.
Bernstein sometimes is able to draw on evidence of a child performing with a toy,
nowhere more memorably than in the 1893 autobiography of Frances Hodgson Burnett,
a child like so many others of her generation deeply affected by reading Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. Because of her love of the novel, Burnett was given a black rubber doll (“with a

hideous grin”), which she named Topsy and which she used to act out parts of the
novel. Using a white doll and her black one, she played out the novel’s famous scenes
between Little Eva and Topsy; the white doll frequently became the dying Eva, with
Burnett casting herself as Uncle Tom or “all the weeping slaves at once.” At least once,
she played at being Simon Legree, tying the black doll to a candelabra stand and whip-
ping it savagely, which, as the child noted, the doll seemed to enjoy since it never
ceased grinning. Burnett’s performance, Bernstein notes, responded both to the novel’s
script and to the materiality of the doll itself, since black dolls were made at the time of
resilient gutta-percha rubber that, unlike porcelain or wax, could withstand rough
play.45 While we may hesitate to call young Frances’s brutal play a form of agency, the
little girl was complicit, Bernstein suggests, in acting out and perpetuating the officially
discredited myth that African Americans (young “pickaninnies” especially) were insen-
sitive to pain.46 Toys could even speak to the sexual violence of slavery: the earliest
topsy-turvy dolls, probably made by slave women in a form that endured well into the
twentieth century, comprised a black female figure on one side and a white one on the
other (often named Topsy and Eva), inviting children to flip the skirt over so that the
head and torso of one doll appears where the legs and genitalia of the other should be.47
Bernstein, in sum, argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, racial
violence was channeled through the nursery, where middle-class children, thanks to
“scriptive things,” were invited to further it under the cloak of childhood “innocence.”
(Many similar acts of “virtuosity” can easily be found in other times and places:
Simone de Beauvoir recalled that in 1914, at age nine, she stomped on her sister’s
“made in Germany” celluloid doll to the proud amusement of her parents, who encour-
aged her patriotic “servility” by laughing that “Simone is such a chauvinist!”)48
A landmark contribution to the historical study of childhood, Racial Innocence was
written by an interdisciplinary scholar trained in African American and performance
studies. The essays published around the same time in a volume edited by literary
scholar Anna Mae Duane, The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities
(2013), similarly suggest that some of the most creative thinking about childhood
and culture is currently emerging from American studies programs and English
departments.49 In the volume’s introductory essay, Duane emphatically makes the case
that “rethinking childhood as a critical category . . . promises to overturn some of the
foundational structures of thought within the humanities itself.”50 For earlier genera-
45
Ibid., 69–70.
46
Ibid., chap. 1.
47
Ibid., 81–91.
48
Simone de Beauvoir, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Paris, 1958), 39.
49
Anna Mae Duane, ed., The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities (Athens, Ga.,
2013); see also Maude Hines, “Playing with Children: What the ‘Child’ Is Doing in American Studies,”
American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (March 2009): 151–161.
50
Duane, introduction to The Children’s Table, 1–14, here 5.

1274 Sarah Maza
tions of scholars inspired by Philippe Ariès, the imagined child was an end in itself,
their task one of tracing the construction of the child via norms and representations as
“sinful,” “innocent,” “priceless,” and so on. Duane’s introduction proposes that the cur-
rent generation’s agenda integrates and moves beyond those categories to ask what
childhood in the past signified beyond itself, and specifically how scholars’ understand-
ing of important concepts can be enriched or disrupted when approached via the figure

of the child.
The idea of the child has long been, as it still is, a singularly powerful motivator for
adults because of the emotional freight that children carry with respect to human time:
as Karen Sánchez-Eppler puts it, childhood packs an affective wallop because it is
“both archaeological and teleological,” recapitulating the past while pointing to the
future.51 As such, it has served, and still does, multiple agendas aimed at preserving an
imagined yesterday while shaping a fantasy of tomorrow. Just as the rights and happi-
ness of children born and unborn are regularly invoked today on either side of contro-
versial issues such as abortion and gay marriage, they were earlier around miscegena-
tion: in the United States, interracial marriage has been both denounced on behalf of
presumptively unhappy offspring and defended so as to save them from bastardy.52 In
France, demonstrations against a proposed law allowing gay marriage and adoption in
the spring of 2013 that drew hundreds of thousands included children costumed as the
young heroes of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Cosette and Gavroche, symbols of the
damage the law would inflict on “republican childhood.”53 From Anne Frank to Elián
González to Aylan Kurdi, childhood innocence and vulnerability, traits ascribed to the
young with especial force in Western culture starting in the late eighteenth century, are
prominently featured in campaigns against most forms of man-made evil: in modern
times, ideals of peace and human rights have been routinely “infantilized.”54 Countless
works of history have addressed political and institutional efforts at social engineering
aimed at children, from private philanthropy and reform campaigns to vast state pro-
grams.55 The welfare of the young, in short, can justify just about anything while speak-
ing to issues much larger than itself: childhood, as Robin Bernstein notes, frequently
“produces and manages adult power.”56
The interdisciplinary impetus behind childhood studies—even before the label was
51
Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
(Chicago, 2005), xxv–xxvi.
52
Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 1–4.
53
Camille Robcis, “Liberté, Égalité, Hétérosexualité: Race and Reproduction in the French Gay Mar-
riage Debates,” Constellations 22, no. 3 (2015): 447–461, here 448.
54
Liisa Malkki, “Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace” in Ilana Feldman and Miriam
Ticktin, eds., In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Durham, N.C., 2010),
68–86; Laura Suski, “Children, Suffering and Humanitarian Appeal,” in Richard Ashby Wilson and Rich-
ard D. Brown, eds., Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (Cambridge, 2009),
202–222.
55
Representative examples of this extensive literature include Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence,
and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge, 1993); Laura Downs,
Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France,
1880–1960 (Durham, N.C., 2002); Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood,
Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos (Athens, Ohio, 2014); Gabriel N. Rosenberg, The 4-H
Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (Philadelphia, 2016). A celebrated “culturalist” ap-
proach to the subject is Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Prince-
ton, 2004), esp. chap. 2.
56
Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 22.

coined—has yielded arresting studies of the ways in which adults have pressed the
power of the imagined child into the service of both practical and ideological agendas.
Cultural historians have shown children to be especially galvanic figures where issues
of race and sexuality are concerned: on the one hand, the very young bear the burden of
adult anxieties about reproduction and degeneration; on the other, their presumed sex-
ual innocence barely contains, and often reveals, its explosive opposite.57 Portrayals of

children, these studies propose, do not just “show”—they also “do.” Literary scholars
and cultural historians have made strong cases that stories about children, both real and
fictional, can have agential force, exploring in particular the ways in which tales of
childhood innocence have served as narrative cover and resolution to the more intracta-
ble contradictions in past societies.
Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s insightful study of the culture of childhood in nineteenth-
century America, Dependent States (2005), for instance, includes a chapter provocatively
titled “Temperance in the Bed of a Child.” Around a quarter of the three hundred or so
nineteenth-century temperance narratives Sánchez-Eppler examines include what will
strike the modern reader as a very disturbing story line: in response to repeated entreaties
from his young daughter, a profligate and sometimes violent alcoholic father suddenly
sees the evil of his ways and manifests his conversion by gratefully slipping into the little
girl’s bed and passionately kissing her. “How pure and fervent was the kiss laid instantly
upon his lips! . . . Now the sphere of his loving, innocent child seemed to have overcome,
at least for the time, the evil influences that were getting possession of his external
senses,” wrote the author of the 1854 Ten Nights in a Bar-Room.58
The recurrent plot of the little-girl-savior seems to invest the child with anomalous
power over the adult world, but in fact, Sánchez-Eppler argues, childhood innocence
restores order by resolving a seemingly insuperable contradiction. The child’s function in
these stories is a disciplinary one, she suggests: if the consumerist pleasure of alcohol
threatens to destroy the family, childhood sexuality, because it remains unacknowledged,
invests these little Marys, Phoebes, and Debbies with the strategic power to save and re-
build it. The hidden glue of incestuous desire within the family resolves the contradiction
between centrifugal consumerist urges and centripetal familial order, and fathers can rein-
tegrate the family without giving up the guilty pleasures of consumption. The power of
little girls in such tales, which at first seemed to upset hierarchies of age and gender, ends
up shoring up patriarchy by reintegrating the father to a rightful place where self-control
and the fulfillment of desire are no longer in conflict. Temperance novels were works of
propaganda, many of them produced under the aegis of the National Temperance Socie-
ty, which founded its own publishing house in 1865, one of whose explicit aims was to
reach drunkards through their children. As Sánchez-Eppler notes, however, all available
evidence suggests that these narratives were read by already temperate middle-class fami-
lies; beyond their ostensible didacticism, their meaning lies in a broader message
whereby the child serves as the “agent of discipline” in countering forces—money, immi-
gration—that threatened to tear apart a fragile commercial society.59
57
Literary critic James Kincaid pioneered the cultural history of child sexuality in his Child-Loving:
The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York, 1992) and Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child
Molesting (Durham, N.C., 1998).
58
Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States, chap. 2, quote from 69.
59
Ibid., 81–86.

1276 Sarah Maza
As Robin Bernstein points out, the innocence ascribed to children and women in
nineteenth-century Western culture is not a passive, empty category but an active state
of deflecting evil: a child is always innocent of something. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Little
Eva’s father remarks that “evil rolls off Eva’s mind like dew off a cabbage-leaf,—not a
drop sinks in.” Thanks to her “active” state of innocence, Eva can form intimate bonds
with a black child, Topsy, and a black man, Tom, without compromising her racial or

sexual purity.60 Little Eva provides the template for Bernstein’s overall argument about
the role of innocence—that of white, middle-class children—in ostensibly ignoring
while covertly reinforcing racial hierarchy and violence. Like the drunken fathers in
Sánchez-Eppler’s temperance stories, the sinful black child, Topsy, so morally and
physically hardened that she does not even register whippings, melts into goodness at
the touch of Eva’s hand, an act of physical intimacy mirrored in the daily interactions
between white children and their black (Gollywog) or “whiteface” (Raggedy Ann)
dolls. From Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond, the “innocence” of white
children’s stories and toys sustained racial hierarchy and violence by domesticating
them.
Historians have tracked the cultural “work” of imagined children in buttressing
norms or resolving contradictions through their representations in popular literature and
imagery. The effectiveness of the child extends, other studies have shown, beyond liter-
ary realms to the narratives that undergird scientific thought. Consider, for instance, the
function of childhood in the work of the pioneering American psychologist G. Stanley
Hall, as analyzed by Gail Bederman in Manliness and Civilization (1995).61 Hall shared
with many of his contemporaries in late nineteenth-century America sharp fears about
the decline of white, middle-class masculinity. While earlier generations had prized
male gentility, by the 1880s American writers frequently expressed the fear that over-
civilization—separation from nature, sedentary occupations—was sapping the minds
and bodies of upper-class men, many of whom, allegedly weakened by the feminizing
effects of modern culture, were prone to the nervous condition known as neurasthenia.
Yet Hall and others like him faced a tough paradox: true “civilization” was imagined as
a racial characteristic, an achievement available only to the white man, one that could
not be eschewed without risking a decline into the barbarity of lesser races whose unde-
niable masculine energy bespoke their inferiority. How, then, could one recapture that
primitive virile energy without compromising the civilizational achievements of the
white race?
G. Stanley Hall devised an influential answer to this problem by drawing on the
contemporary scientific literature on childhood development, especially Lamarckian re-
capitulation theory, which held that children as they grew relived the emotional and in-
tellectual evolution of their racial forebears: little black children started out as bright as
their white counterparts, but their cultural and psychic growth stalled at an earlier and
still infantile stage, which remained fixed in black adulthood, while white youngsters
continued to develop. Crucially, having recently passed through the earlier develop-
mental stages of their genetic ancestors, children were closer in touch than their elders
with the powerful emotions and passions of their savage forebears. Hall saw in child-
60
Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 41.
61
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United
States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, 1995), chap. 3.

hood education—but only in the training of boys, since girls were untainted by sav-
agery—a solution to the “neurasthenic paradox.” Rather than imposing only “civi-
lized,” virtuous emotions in young boys, he argued, educators should preserve and cul-
tivate their natural inclinations toward primitive violence: encouraged to fight, bully,
and fantasize about bloodshed, “boys could grow up strong enough to survive the
effeminizing tendencies of higher civilization.”62 Hall applied this same thinking to the

subject for which he is best remembered—adolescence. Whereas he counseled the care-
ful preservation of violence in little boys, he argued that the most precious impulses in
adolescence were sexual, and he advocated prolonging adolescence so that boys at this
liminal stage could fully experience, and bring into their adult manhood, the energy of
“adolescent races.” Like little girls in temperance fiction, little boys and teenagers in
the psychosocial theories of a leading thinker like Hall were imagined as key to the reso-
lution of major contradictions within the broader culture: far from a static emblem, the
figure of the child was understood in both cases as a culturally dynamic force. In Beder-
man’s analysis, for instance, it is precisely that which makes the child so tricky for social
historians, its embodiment of change and disappearance, that provided the solution to a
confounding cultural dilemma.
In sum, where social historians of childhood face challenges fitting their work into
standard historical narratives, cultural and intellectual historians have an easier time be-
cause of the ubiquitously crucial role of the imagined child to fantasies about the past
and future of the human race, as expressed in scientific, historical, or fictional narra-
tives. Children have been endlessly useful because of their perceived vulnerability to
those things that adults fear most—sex, miscegenation, degeneration, violence, death
—and are therefore central to narratives designed to hold such terrors at bay. Indeed, as
queer theorist Lee Edelman points out, any resistance to the totalizing imperative of
child promotion and protection (“We’re fighting for the children. Whose side are you
on?”) can only be understood in our society as a death wish.63
If the emerging interdisciplinary field of childhood studies draws much of its energy
from the work of literary and cultural historians, it also features prominently that of le-
gal and rights historians. A stated intellectual rationale for childhood studies is, in the
words of Corinne T. Field, that it “decenters the autonomous adult as the normative
subject of humanistic inquiry and pushes us to validate dependence, imperfection, and
malleability as central to the human condition.”64 A focus on children, in other words,
can position scholars to challenge the standard views of the liberal subject as autono-
mous and unattached, as Annette Ruth Appell points out, “not a child, not a parent,
most likely not a woman, and not poor.”65 In the areas of law and rights, the analogy
between gender and age has more explanatory force than it does in social history: just
as gender analysis allows us to track over time the dynamic through which masculine
and feminine work to define each other, the historical vagaries of the contrast between
adult and minor can illuminate the ways in which people in the past have understood
reason, autonomy, citizenship, consent, and rights.
62
Ibid., 101.
63
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C., 2004).
64
Field, “Why Little Thinkers Are a Big Deal,” 2.
65
Annette Ruth Appell, “The Prepolitical Child of Child-Centered Jurisprudence,” in Duane, The
Children’s Table, 19–37, here 21.

1278 Sarah Maza
While in ordinary speech we routinely conflate the categories of minor and child, le-
gal history forces scholars to distinguish between the temporal (age), the biological
(youth), the social (dependency), and the legal (minority): studies of premodern socie-
ties especially allow us to see how far from inevitable it is for those categories to coin-
cide or even overlap. Bianca Premo’s Children of the Father King (2005), for instance,
explores the legal and ideological complexities of childhood and minority in seven-

teenth- and eighteenth-century Lima, within a colony under the authority of a distant
royal father figure where Spanish legal norms encountered different categories of sub-
jects. The rules governing metropolitan laws were complex enough: All those under the
age of twenty-five were legally minors living under patria potestad, but minority was
subdivided though a bundle of secular and canon laws into different stages for entering
the social world. Seven-year-olds could be betrothed; ten-year-olds could leave wills
and six months later be convicted of a crime; a youth could be married at twelve (girls)
or fourteen (boys), profess holy vows at sixteen, become an attorney at eighteen and a
judge at twenty, all while remaining legally subject to their father’s authority unless
emancipated by status or paternal fiat. As the Spaniards conquered the Americas, they
imposed lifelong legal minority onto all their indigenous subjects, expressing thereby a
“generational” justification for colonial rule.66 In practice, the criminal courts dealing
with the offenses of minors in Lima widely varied their criteria of minority depending
complex considerations of age, status, race, and “honor”: indigenous youths, for in-
stance, were sometimes treated more leniently in the courts than their white counter-
parts on account of their “double minority.”67
Colonial and racially diverse societies throw into high relief the arbitrariness of le-
gal definitions of childhood. Gender and race can, in different situations, inflect norms
of maturity and accountability in any number of ways: in nineteenth-century America,
those who propounded civil rights for women and blacks couched their missions as
campaigns for “equal adulthood.”68 Unlike in colonial Lima, in the contemporary
United States race more often compounds than alleviates criminal responsibility: multi-
ple studies have shown that black youths face harsher sentencing than their white coun-
terparts because of assumptions that their violent behavior has propelled them into
adulthood. As Lucia Hodgson pithily puts it, “Children can lose their child status when
they do not act like children . . . a child is what a child does.”69 As Bernstein reminds
us, the coincidence between childhood and the young human body is far from neces-
sary.70 In many African societies, as historians like Beverly Grier explain, people
acheive a “social age,” remaining in or escaping youth-like dependency on the basis of
their place in the household or their ability to earn money; social maturity, in such con-
texts, matters as much as biological age.71
Even for racially homogeneous societies, examining legal norms and practices relat-
66
Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King, 21–34.
67
Ibid., chap. 4.
68
Corinne T. Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizen-
ship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2014).
69
Lucia Hodgson, “Childhood of the Race: A Critical Race Theory Intervention into Childhood Stud-
ies,” in Duane, The Children’s Table, 38–51, quote from 38.
70
Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 24–25.
71
Grier, Invisible Hands, 22–25, 47–50; Paul Ocobock, “Earning an Age: Migration and Maturity in
Colonial Kenya, 1895–1952,” African Economic History 44 (2016): 44–72.

ing to childhood and minority can be a strikingly effective way of explaining the overall
nature of authority and subjection. Holly Brewer’s important study By Birth or Consent
(2005) is one such project, a survey of the legal status of children in the early modern
Anglo-American world at the critical moment of transition from dynastic to contractual
sociopolitical models. As in Spain, the laws in early modern England and colonial
America, Brewer shows, granted legal personhood to very young children. In sixteenth-

and seventeenth-century England, eight-year-olds could marry, four-year-olds could
make wills, youngsters under the age of ten could inherit vast fortunes; in America,
children of any age could bind themselves into apprenticeship; in both countries, child
testimony at trials was allowable, and youngsters under ten could be put to death for se-
rious crimes. These were not, as the judicial sources show, abstract norms. In 1629 an
eight-year-old boy in Britain was hanged for arson, and in 1692 Salem a four-year-old
spent months in jail on suspicion of witchcraft; in the same century in England,
thirteen-year-old Christopher Monck won a by-election in Devon, and Richard Mo-
lyneux was voted into Parliament at age twelve; as late as 1811 in Philadelphia, two-
year-old Phoebe Stuart legally “signed” a document consenting to her own indenture.72
Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, most public roles and forms of le-
gal personhood for children receded both in law and in practice; over time, the idea of
toddlers being betrothed, prepubescent children married, and youths not yet in their
teens serving on juries went from normal to mostly unacceptable.
Brewer’s point is not, of course, that children “had power” and then lost it, espe-
cially since many forms of the public and legal personhood granted to youngsters were
limited to those from prominent and propertied families. Rather, the question of the le-
gal rights of children in this context is a way of charting the rise of “consent” as a cen-
tral operating principle in Western law, politics, and culture. Brewer locates early signs
of this shift in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates around the age of bap-
tism, with radical Protestants stressing the need for individual, active choice for church
membership, and some insisting on adult baptism; contractual theorists like Algernon
Sidney and John Locke (both of whom came from Dissenting backgrounds) famously
rejected a logic of patriarchy and its infantilization of subjects, instead grounding the
polity in reasoned consent.73 In his much-cited 1784 “What Is Enlightenment?” Immanu-
el Kant capped this process by defining “Enlightenment” as the will to reject self-
imposed intellectual dependency and immaturity.
Prior to this massive cultural shift, authority was based on birthright in the form of
lineage, status, and property: until the eighteenth century, voting, electability, judicial
testimony, and jury service were mostly predicated on the independence and authority
afforded by fortune and rank rather than age and capacity (which was why nobody saw
anything wrong with a child monarch). In the judicial realm, guilt was tied to the nature
of the offense rather than to discernment and motivation, so much so that early modern
court records only in passing made note of the fact that the defendant was “a child,”
usually without noting his or her exact age. This major legal-cultural shift was uneven
and protracted: in 1784 in Virginia, twelve-year-old Susannah Brown was raped by her
adult schoolmaster Peter Hopwood, who then pressured her into marrying him; when
72
Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005), 1, 26–27, 181–187.
73
Ibid., chaps. 2–3.

1280 Sarah Maza
the story came to light, Hopwood could not be prosecuted for rape because Susannah
was legally too young to testify against him, though old enough to consent to mar-
riage.74
Brewer’s work has important implications for children’s history, since it suggests
that the sharp division in modern Western culture between adult and child is not a con-
sequence of romanticism’s recasting of the young as innocent and helpless; on the con-

trary, the idealization of children, similar to that of women, was in this reading the
by-product of broader religious and political transformations that grounded secular and
religious power in individual intellectual maturity and reasoned consent. Methodologi-
cally, By Birth or Consent offers an excellent example of the ways in which the histori-
cally evolving boundary between childhood and adulthood can illuminate larger ques-
tions of authority and subjection.
In the same vein as Brewer’s inquiry into childhood and the rise of “consent” are
historical studies of children’s rights. Indeed, the two are closely connected. Since chil-
dren in the modern West were deemed incapable of legal participation in public life,
they were not afforded rights but relegated instead—like women initially—to the pri-
vate authority of heads of household. Within the emergent concept of human rights in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of children’s rights was not in the least
self-evident from the start given the close connection between rights and citizenship.
Legal scholars have long been aware that children illuminate the issue of rights not by
analogy with other disempowered groups but in opposition to them. While the rights of
every other group were couched in the vocabulary of liberal individualism—integrity,
agency, independence—the rights of the child were, over time, defined as precisely the
opposite, as the right not to be self-sufficient. The child’s basic right was defined start-
ing in the nineteenth century as that of protected dependency, or, as a precedent-
making American case put it in 1838, “The right of children is not to liberty but to
custody.”75
Susan J. Pearson’s incisive study The Rights of the Defenseless (2011) rescues the
history of children’s rights in America from a Whiggish narrative of inevitability by
highlighting the peculiar circumstance that this concept evolved initially out of cam-
paigns for animal rights. The original poster child for children’s rights was little Mary
Ellen Wilson, whom Methodist social worker Etta Wheeler sought to rescue from her
abusive family in 1873. When she asked about saving Mary Ellen from her foster
parents’ mistreatment, Wheeler was told that charities could do no such thing legally;
the volunteer was sent as a last recourse to the American Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals, whose lawyer eventually secured a writ to remove the child from
her home. Only in the wake of the much-publicized Wilson case did ASPCA leaders
found a new separate organization, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Children, and while over the next decades anticruelty societies proliferated, many of
them were jointly devoted to both animals and children.76
The point of Pearson’s narrative is not that Gilded Age American philanthropists
74
Ibid., 150–152.
75
Michael Grossberg, “Children’s Legal Rights? A Historical Look at a Legal Paradox,” in Roberta
Wollons, ed., Children at Risk in America: History, Concepts, and Public Policy (Albany, 1993),
111–140, quote from 117.
76
Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age
America (Chicago, 2011), 1–4.

cared more about animals than about children but that the animal-protection precedent
was necessary for the idea of children’s rights to become conceivable. Mistreated chil-
dren, animals, and, for that matter, the enslaved, had been objects of compassion since
the advent of “humanitarian” sensibility in the later eighteenth century, but “sympathy”
did not entail rights. Intervening in families on behalf of abused or neglected children
required a new language, different from the classic liberal investment of rights in rea-

son, independence, and property, or even from more progressive equations of rights
with self-ownership, as in the case of women. Attention to the plight of animals and
children broke the automatic connection in postrevolutionary thought between rights and
autonomy. Because of the tight grip of families over their young (what Pearson calls the
“logic of coverture”), the animal precedent was necessary for reformers to conceive of
the defense of another category of sentient, suffering, but mostly inarticulate creatures.
Animals, in sum, allowed reformers to begin to conceive of rights as divorced from rea-
son, speech, and adult autonomy, making it possible to imagine young children as rights-
bearing creatures too.77 In Pearson’s telling, the emergence of children’s rights does not
complete some “long march of progress” toward the inclusion of ever more vulnerable
categories; rather, it marked a fundamental and productive rupture with revolutionary-era
ideologies that coupled rights with independence.
The work of scholars like Pearson and Brewer does not fall, strictly speaking, under
the rubric of history of children. Rather, these historians use children as a way of find-
ing fresh approaches to classic issues in the historical repertoire—questions about the
nature of status, rights, and consent that are closely linked to questions of political in-
clusion: this is not the history of children but history through children. It also does not
make sense to posit a stark division between books that deal with flesh-and-blood
youngsters on the one hand and studies of abstract ideas, laws, and representations on
the other; if this scholarship amounts to a new genre, it seems fortunately to be side-
stepping the sorts of bruising fights between historians “of gender” and “of women”
that plagued those fields in the 1990s.78 Premo and Brewer, in particular, offer plenty
of evidence of the impact of laws on actual young people. Studies that come at histori-
cal questions through the stories of children are not in the least necessarily devoid of
the bodies and voices of real children in the past; they differ from traditional children’s
history, though, in that the child, while centrally implicated in the story, is not its ulti-
mate object.
Historians can track large questions through little people because children have so
frequently been pressed into service by social leaders and engineers as the building
blocks for various agendas. Classrooms are the most obvious place to look for efforts
to carry out such programs, but because most schools in the past were enclosed and
highly regimented microcosms, it has proven surprisingly difficult for historians to get
past pedagogic programming and top-down teacher-pupil relations to recover the nitty-
gritty of struggles within and around schools. It has been paradoxically easier, in many
cases, to track social and political dynamics involving children in wider-open contexts
where different parties compete to establish power and meaning.
77
Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless; see esp. 98–109.
78
See the classic debates on the subject between Linda Gordon and Joan Scott in Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 4 (1990): 848–860; and between Scott and Laura Lee Downs in
Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 2 (1993): 414–451.

1282 Sarah Maza
While the framework for such studies has usually been national, Tara Zahra has
worked transnationally in her influential studies of childhood in the making and remak-
ing of nations in war-torn twentieth-century Europe. Her 2011 The Lost Children, most
notably, tells the story of the reconstruction of the continent after World War II via
efforts and programs on behalf of some of the millions of youngsters displaced or or-
phaned by the war.79 Postwar democracies and their agents—states, international organi-

zations, aid societies—identified hostility to the family as the central crime of both
Nazism and Communism, the forced separation of children from parents as the quintes-
sential wartime trauma, and familialism as the foundation of a new Europe. After 1945,
national governments, relief agencies, and the United Nations promoted the campaign
to bring sundered families back together as what one American psychiatrist called a
“Psychological Marshall Plan.”80 Some efforts were highly symbolic, such as the search
for the 105 “lost children” of the Czech village of Lidice who had been placed in
German families after their kin were murdered. In other cases, nations wanted the real
bodies of children to replenish their depleted population, as when the French offered
repatriation to the children of Franco-German unions. Family reunification was even
invoked in aid of ethnic cleansing, as when the Czechs expelled German children from
their country, while postwar American authorities sometimes accepted children but
rejected their less “assimilable” parents.
Ultimately, Zahra shows that while advocates for displaced children always invoked
the universalist language of children’s rights, they acted on very specific national agendas:
they labored to create linguistically and nationally homogeneous states in the name of the
“child’s best interests,” working through the youngest, most easily moldable, recruits. “By
privileging the young, European and American policymakers consistently cloaked racial
and national hierarchies . . . in a rhetoric of humanitarian assistance.” If the twentieth cen-
tury was tagged the “Century of the Child,” she concludes, “this was the product of chau-
vinism as much as humanitarianism.”81 Real children are very much present in Zahra’s ac-
count, often poignantly so: many youngsters resisted being reunited with parents they did
not know, begged to stay with their adopted families in Germany or Canada, even jumped
off trains or ran away to avoid being dragged to unfamiliar “homelands.”82 This is not,
however, a study of what children did but what they were made to do, in both practical and
symbolic terms, for their elders. Zahra does pay attention to the effects of social programs
on real youngsters, but her ultimate purpose is to show how adult actors have used what
she calls the “deceptively universal” figure of the child to enact highly partisan agendas.
In Zahra’s work, invoking the family as society’s foundational unit is a way of
empowering nationalist agendas by naturalizing them. In contrast to previous traditions
of family history devoted either to quantifiable data or to descriptive studies of family
life, a recent clutch of notable books in different fields deploys concepts of kinship and
filiation as central analytical categories. Nara Milanich’s Children of Fate (2009)
dwells on the consequences of the 1855 outlawing of paternity tests in Chile. “Child,”
79
Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge,
Mass., 2011); see also Zahra’s previous book, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for
Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, 2008), which concerns the struggle via children to
impose national cultures on a population largely indifferent to national identity.
80
Zahra, The Lost Children, chap. 3.
81
Ibid., 244.
82
Ibid., 205–211.

as she points out, can mean either “minor” or “progeny,” and the latter sense proved
crucial in the maintenance of class differences in Republican Chile.83 Since marriage in
nineteenth-century Chile required proof of parentage, large numbers illegitimate chil-
dren could not marry and came to form a kinless underclass. Kinship, as established
and recognized by the state, therefore served as the foundation of a two-class society in
which the wealthy had “family” and the poor did not. Filiation and kinship are also cen-

tral categories in Emmanuelle Saada’s 2012 study of mixed-race children in France’s
colonies, Empire’s Children.84 Unlike its Chilean counterpart, French law permitted pa-
ternity tests, allowing mixed-race children (métis) access to citizenship if they could
prove they were fathered by a Frenchman. Officials determined such citizenship based
on plausible proof of French blood along with signs of the father’s involvement in the
child’s life, especially when this included the “right” kinds of upbringing and educa-
tion. The laws governing métis children therefore constituted a major departure from
French Republican principles of jus solis, a striking exception to the official rejection of
racial categories as the basis for citizenship. Statutes and practices in the colonies, Viet-
nam especially, allowed for what Saada calls a “racism of expansion,” in effect permit-
ting French colonial men to father children into citizenship.
While Milanich’s and Saada’s works include real children, at their core is the more ab-
stract legal concept of the child as the being who, in connecting generations, functions as
the site of creation and reproduction of kin-based class in the Chilean case and racially
inflected citizenship in the French colonial one. The child as “progeny” can also determine
sexuality, as Camille Robcis shows in her 2013 The Law of Kinship.85 Looking into the
contemporary roots of French gender and sexual politics, Robcis identifies a late twentieth-
century trend she calls “familialism,” the unified rejection by intellectuals and politicans on
both the left and the right of gay parenthood and medically assisted reproduction. Tracing
these attitudes back to the deep influence of structuralist thinkers like Claude Lévi-Strauss
and Jacques Lacan, Robcis shows how their theories of transhistorical sexual difference as
constitutive of the social pervaded public discourse for decades, foreclosing even among
left-leaning elites the possibility of any but “natural” heterosexual filiation. These important
studies by Zahra, Milanich, Saada, and Robcis, mostly published in the last decade, add up
to a compelling new genre of scholarship that features the child-as-progeny—of war-torn
families, of illegitimate cross-race or cross-class relationships, of idealized heterosexual
parents—as one of the most powerful means of defining and building class, nation, and
sexuality.86 It is becoming ever harder, in the wake of such scholarship, to think of children
as disconnected from history’s conventionally defined “big issues.”
TAKING A HARD LOOK AT THE HISTORY OF CHILDREN and childhood forces us to grapple
with some of the most fundamental questions about why and how we write the history
83
Milanich, Children of Fate, 27.
84
Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 2012).
85
Camille Robcis, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Itha-
ca, 2013).
86
Saada’s study is the earliest, published originally in French in 2007. It may be significant that all
these authors are women.

1284 Sarah Maza
of all social categories. Historians focus on national, regional, sexual, ethnic, racial, and
other groups mostly for one or several of a small number of overlapping reasons: be-
cause they identify with them (or admire or revile them); to tell a story of advent or lib-
eration; to narrate the agency of the powerful or recover that of the powerless; or to
chronicle suffering within a larger tale of redemptive meaning. Since the 1960s, histo-
ries of subaltern groups have almost always revolved around power struggles and group

identity formation, but absent a collective death wish, the relationship between adults
and children cannot be conceived of as essentially antagonistic, and kids grow out of
their age-defined status within a few short years. As a result, children in history con-
found analytical categories such as identity, agency, and teleology, and chronicles of
the harm inflicted on them are inevitably pressed into adult agendas. The subfield has,
for decades, offered a feast of richly detailed descriptive histories, but because of the
conundrum described previously, these have fallen short of making the large claims on
central narratives to which some practitioners in the field aspire. The problem is not, it
should be stressed one final time, one of sources. As is the case for other illiterate and
disempowered groups, the voices and perspectives of children are available to patient
researchers, in the memoirs and accounts of adults; in the writing, drawings, and other
creations of children themselves; and in the archive of material culture. Such sources
have been fodder over many decades for rich empirical work. The perspective of children
in history is no less accessible than that of any other subaltern group, indeed more so in
the case of the offspring of elites; rather, the issue is whether and how the child’s subjec-
tivity as it can be tracked in such sources connects to broader historical questions.
Writing history through children—if not strictly of children—can be immensely
productive, as I hope some of the examples offered previously demonstrate. For one
thing, children are disturbing creatures—they are us and yet not us, socially helpless
but emotionally powerful, pristine magnets for every evil we can conjure up, and their
essential strangeness can be pressed into cultural history’s agenda of defamiliarization:
these dependent creatures presumed “innocent” of the sins of race, class, sex, and
power can illuminate past societies’ understandings of precisely those social fractures
their universal appeal is used to paper over. Indeed, an emphasis on the dark side of the
cultural work children have been made to do in the past can go a long way toward res-
cuing the subject of childhood in history from the aura of “cuteness” that has long
bedeviled it. Because of her exceptional mobilizing power, the imagined child offers
fertile ground for cultural analyses that focus not just on representations but also on the
actions that images and stories invite. But histories involving real children too can
change canonical historical narratives inasmuch as, in more modern times especially,
the very young have been essential pawns in the devising and implementation of social
and political programs that had tangible consequences on their lives. The story of what
people have done, or tried to do, with children, can be particularly illuminating in that
it offers ways for historians to bridge the world of private emotion to that of public poli-
cy.87 The contrast outlined in this essay is not between social and cultural history. Cer-
tainly, some historians such as Sánchez-Eppler, Frühstück, Bederman, and others have
87
See, for instance, Stephanie Olsen, “The History of Childhood and the Emotional Turn,” History
Compass, August 25 2017, accessed September 1, 2017, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hic3.
12410/abstract?campaign=wolearlyview, and Olsen, ed., Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern His-
tory.

put the tools of cultural analysis to brilliant use in explaining the historical role of the
imagined child. But with the waning of cultural history from the methodological fore-
front of the discipline over the last twenty years, the generation represented by scholars
like Brewer, Saada, Zahra, and Milanich has forged eclectic methodologies that com-
bine cultural, social, political, and legal history, penning narratives that include plenty
of accounts of the fates of real children. The debate proposed here is not about whether

we privilege the real or the imagined child, since children and childhood are no more
separable than the dancer and the dance. Rather, it is about comparing the analytical
possibilities of a history that mostly foregrounds children alone to one that highlights
the ways in which both the cultural-emotional power of the child and the destinies of
real children have been pressed into the service of adult agendas.
The innovative possibilities of history through children are especially enticing at
this moment in the history of the discipline. The overwhelming push for academic his-
torians to adopt transnational and global perspectives has led to concern that quantita-
tive, top-down metahistories inhospitable to fine-grained social and cultural work will
come to dominate the profession.88 Although many historians have found creative ways
around the micro-macro conundrum, it is still widely assumed that most of the creative
energy in the discipline currently comes from scholars working on geographically ex-
pansive topics. While that seems to be true, writing history through children offers his-
torians another path to disciplinary renewal: not by bounding across oceans but by con-
fronting the many ways in which, very close to home, the uncanny power of the child
has pervaded adults’ understandings of their own identity and destiny, offering a pletho-
ra of strategies and justifications for the building of national, social, racial, and cultural
hierarchies.
88
See, for instance, Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York, 2014), chap. 2.
Sarah Maza is Jane Long Professor in the Arts and Sciences and Professor of
History at Northwestern University. Her most recent books are Thinking about
History (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and Violette Nozière: A Story of Mur-
der in 1930s Paris (University of California Press, 2011).

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020

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