Histories of Childhood

Author(s): Hugh Cunningham

Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 1195-1208
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
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Review Essay

Histories of Childhood
HUGH CUNNINGHAM

MORE, PERHAPS, THAN ANY OTHER BRANCH OF HISTORY,

the history of childhood has

been shaped by the concerns of the world in which its historians live. If it is now a
lively field, that is in large part because in the Western world in the late twentieth
century there is considerable anxiety about how to bring up children, about the
nature of children (angels or monsters?), about the forces, primarily commercialism, impinging on them, and about the rights and responsibilities that should be
accorded to them. Historians themselves are subject to these anxieties and
frequently acknowledge them as the inspiration for their work.1 But, in addition,
they are also responding to demands from the public at large. Seeking understanding and guidance, people turn to the past, hoping that scholars may be able to tell
them about children and childhood in history.
This stimulus to understanding the historical roots of contemporary anxieties in
the West exists alongside but often in isolation from another incentive to historical
research on childhood: the poverty in which many of the world's children live,
frequently work, and all too often die. Can a historical perspective on the life
chances of poor children in the past contribute to understanding the economic and
other factors that shape the circumstances of poverty in which most of the world's
children exist?
For those seeking guidance, the historiography is likely to impart confusion.
Historians differ not only in their interpretation of the past but in their definition
of the field of study, and in the kinds of questions they ask. One approach suggests
that the most interesting and answerable question to ask about the past is not to do
with the lives children lived but with the ideas surroundingchildhood, and with the
way "childhood" has in different cultures variably stood for innocence, hope,
naivete, incapacity, or evil, or has embodied a nostalgia for times past. The
emphasis here is firmly on the cultural construction of ideas to do with childhood.2
An extension of this approach is to look at how such cultural constructions impact
on the lives of children. Often advocates of the rights of the child, and alert to the
suppression of the voice of the child in the present as well as the past, such scholars
are engaged both in a rescue operation and in an attempt to recast the way we look
1 See, for example, Philip Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the
PsychologicalImpact of PhysicalAbuse (New York, 1991). Greven acknowledges that his exploration of
the physical abuse of children in the past stems from a wish to eliminate it in the future.
2 For this argument, and a rich exploration of its possibilities, see Carolyn Steedman, Strange
Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority,1780-1930 (London, 1995).

1195
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Hugh Cunningham

at the world; they want to make us more aware of children as agents.3 At the
opposite end of the spectrum are those who argue that biology largely determines
how children develop, and indeed how adults relate to them, and find in the past
evidence for this.4 In this approach, the history of childhood merges into a history
of motherhood. Somewhere in between lie those who argue that the important thing
to do is to write a historyof children-flesh and blood human beings of a certain age.
Those whose starting point is the condition of poor children tend to place their
studies within a "familystrategy"approach. This field of study itself subdivides into
many component parts, depending on whether its inspiration is anthropology or
neo-classical economics. In the former, the emphasis is on kinship patterns and
roles within the family and in relation to other families, in the latter on the ways in
which families seek to maximize their economic well-being. Children are sometimes
marginalized in family strategy studies-the emphasis is on adult decision-making
and the norms of the adult world. But a family strategy approach has the potential
to enable the historian to evaluate differences in the role of children across time
and culture-and to do this at the level of the mass of society and not just the elite.
Differences of approach are reflected in the sources used. Those interested in
concepts of childhood and in the day-to-day lives of children draw on advice
literature, diaries and autobiographies, visual images of children, material culture,
and a miscellany of written material. In the family strategy approach, the preferred
sources are quantitative in nature, and the approach often incorporates a formal
model of human and family behavior.
The multiplicity of approaches suggests that there will be no uncontested answers
for anyone looking in history books for guidance to present-day problems. The issue
is further complicated by the fact that "childhood" is not a terrain on which
historians are the only or even the chief guide. Social scientists of many kindssociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, demographers-can all
claim to have distinctive approaches to the study of childhood, which historians
ignore at their peril.5
This review of some recent work on the history of childhood will seek to take
stock of where we are. A fundamental question is whether the approaches
embodied in the different questions asked and in the different types of source
material have anything to say to each other or whether they will continue to exist
in hermetically sealed compartments. If they do, it will be suggested, our ability to
address the anxieties that surround childhood, both in the West and globally, will
be seriously diminished. We need to create space for dialogue between discourses
that now tend to focus too exclusively on the cultural construction of ideas about
childhood, on biological factors in the growing up of children, or on the roles of
children in family economies.
3The most sophisticated and influential representation of this approach is Allison James and Alan

and ReconstructingChildhood:Contenzpora;yIssutesin the Sociological Stuldyof

Prout, eds., Construlcting
Childhood (London, 1990).
4 See, for example, Linda A. Pollock, ForgottenChildren:Parent-ChildRelationsfrom 1500 to 1900

(Cambridge, 1983); BarbaraA. Hanawalt, The Ties ThatBounzld:

PeasanztFamilies in MedievalEngland
(New York, 1986), 10-11.
5For some guidance to the literature, see C. Philip Hwang, Michael E. Lamb, and Irving E. Sigel,
eds., Inmagesof Childhood (Mahwa, N.J., 1996).

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can be placed in some relationship to the historiography of the subject. The vast majority are informed by what is easily the most
famous book in that historiography, Philippe Aries' L'enfant et la vie familiale sous
l'ancien regime (1960), translated as Centuriesof Childhood (1962). It was Aries'
achievement to convince nearly all his readers that childhood had a history:that,
over time and in different cultures, both ideas about childhood and the experience
of being a child had changed. Like all historians of the topic, he was drawn to it by
his own experiences, in his case the sense of stifling, family-bound childhoods in
mid-twentieth-century France. Had childhoods always been like this? The answer
was firmly "no." Aries traced how the family and the school became the locus for
children, and how they became excluded from the world of non-family adults.
Nearly all subsequent historians of childhood have related to some part of Aries'
agenda, for its scope was wide: he studied changes over time and in different
cultures in the concepts of childhood, the adult treatment of children, and the
experience of childhood.
Aries' influence remains profound nearly forty years after the publication of his
book, particularly with respect to the study of medieval childhood. An at least
partial mistranslation has galvanized medieval scholars into a mini-industry. The
English version of Aries' book contains the famous statement that "in medieval
society the idea of childhood did not exist."6 The word "idea" was in fact a
translation of the French sentiment, which conveys a very different meaning. But
medieval scholars have, by and large, taken the English translation at face value
and, moreover, assumed that Aries' statement was a slur on the Middle Ages: the
outcome has been a body of literature, summed up and best represented in
Shulamith Shahar's Childhood in the Middle Ages (1990), in which it is shown
beyond any manner of doubt that there was a concept of childhood in the Middle
Ages; indeed, in Shahar's account, the Middle Ages were rather more enlightened
and progressive in their attitudes to childhood and treatment of children than later
centuries. What this body of scholarship left open, however, was the precise nature
of this medieval concept of childhood, and its chronological and geographical
scope.
It is the great strength of James A. Schultz, in The Knowledgeof Childhood in the
German Middle Ages, 1100-1350 (1995), that he breaks away from this obsession
with defending the Middle Ages against an imagined slur by Aries.7 Schultz's study
does not attempt to cover "the Middle Ages" as a whole either chronologically or
geographically. He draws on extant Middle High German texts, many of them in
fictional form, to argue not simply that there was a concept of childhood in
Germany in this period but, more important, that this concept was radically
different from the concepts dominant in the West since the Enlightenment. In the
German High Middle Ages, people did not think that the way in which children
were treated would affect how they turned out as adults (the characteristic modern
assumption); they believed rather that the discerning eye could pick out from
childish traits what the future adult would be like: childhood was important not in
ALL HISTORIES OF CHILDHOOD

Philippe Aries, Centursies of Childhood, Robert Baldick, trans. (London, 1962), 125.

James A. Schultz, The Knowledgeof Childhood in the GermanMiddleAges, 1100-1350 (Philadelphia, 1995).

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itself but for what it might tell you about the adult to be. Quite contrary to modern
opinion, whether a child was treated well or badly would have little effect on its
adult future. In this closely contextualized study of a defined body of texts, Schultz
has opened up a refreshingly new range of questions about childhood in the Middle
Ages. He has broken free from the thrall of the mistranslation of a word in Aries
and is able to suggest that the concept of childhood he explores for the German
High Middle Ages was in fact the dominant one in Europe until the eighteenth
century: childhood was marked by its deficiencies more than by its attributes. At a
time when there is a danger that the focus will be on the similarity of childhood
across time and place, Schultz argues powerfully and eloquently for "the historicity
of childhood": the lives that children lead reflect not simply their human biology but
also the cultural assumptions of the time and place in which they live-continuity
is not, as Linda Pollock's work has influentially suggested, the key theme in the
history of childhood.8
The view that Aries wantonly impugned the beliefs about childhood of nonmodern societies has by no means been confined to the Middle Ages or to Europe.
Scholars of the ancient world, of medieval Islam, and of many other societies have
set out to see whether an idea of childhood could be discerned within them.9 The
triumphant conclusion has always been that it can. Although Aries is nowhere
referred to in Anne Behnke Kinney's Chinese Views of Childhood (1995), his
presence and that of other Western historians of childhood can alwaysbe felt.10The
essays cover the period from the Han Dynasty to the present. What emerges is a
pattern of thinking about childhood with similarities to and differences from that
discerned by Aries and others. Although the available sources do not allow for
confident generalizations, there seems to have been a growing sentimentality about
children within the elites of Chinese society. The most striking evidence for this
comes from the mourning literature analyzed by Pei-yi Wu. "From the Tang to at
least the fifteenth century," he claims, "childrenwere more written about in China
than in Europe.""1The form of writing he investigates is necrology, writing about
the dead. For those familiar with debates in Western historiography as to whether
parents grieved for their dead children, the Chinese material will be of great
interest. It provides evidence from the ninth century of grieving and mourning
considerably beyond what ritual demanded, especially by fathers for daughters
more than for sons. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under the influence
of the Wang Yangming school of Neo-Confucianism, there emerged a veritable cult
of the child and an articulation of sentiments that in the West had to await William
Wordsworth:children were raised above adults in understanding. "If one loses the
heart of the child," wrote Li Zhi (1527-1602), "then he loses his true heart."'12
This cult of the child has to be weighed against the considerable evidence of
8 Pollock, ForgottenChildren.
9 See, for example, Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens (Baltimore, Md.,
1990); Avner Gil'adi, Children of Islam: Concepts of Childhood in Medieval Muslim Society (Basingstoke,
1992).
10 Anne Behnke Kinney, ed., Chinese Views of Childhood (Honolulu, 1995).
11 Pei-yi Wu, "Childhood Remembered: Parents and Children in China, 800 to 1700," in Kinney,
Chinese Views of Childhood, 137.
12 Kinney, Chinese Views of Childhood, 147.

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Histories of Childhood

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

OF ARI'ES, in provoking numerous attempts at rebuttal of what was

assumed (wrongly) to be his prime thesis, has produced a body of scholarship that
one may hope has now run its course; it is time, as Schultz argues, to shift the
agenda. In other respects, however, Aries set a challenge that has proved to be too
demanding for most historians. Aries assumed that it was possible, within the covers
of one book, to write about concepts of childhood, about the way children have
been treated by adults, and about the experience of being a child. Most subsequent
historians have more cautiously confined themselves to one of these tasks. They
have, in addition, restricted themselves in the range of evidence they study. Aries
drew on a wide range of evidence and has been much criticized for failing to subject
it to proper scrutiny. In particular, it has been said that he "read" images too
literally.14Such criticisms have induced caution among historians, and only now is
non-written evidence beginning to make a renewed and welcome impact. Three
examples may be taken as indications of a new confidence in the use of non-written
sources.
First, on Aries' own ground, the pictorial representation of children, Andrew
Martindale has argued that, "around 1300, images of children became more lively,
more human, and more probable." In a carefully contextualized study, he highlights
the work of Simone Martini and his altar piece in Siena, which depicts a saint's
involvement in miracles concerning children. Martindale explains these naturalistic
images of children by relating them to a wider thirteenth-century acceptance of the
importance of human experience and the human senses; all of this suggesting that
the evaluation of childhood Aries was concerned to trace may have been on a rather
different and earlier time scale than he had imagined.15
Second, still in the Middle Ages, Nicholas Orme has attempted to see whether
Aries was right in thinking that children and adults shared the same culture.
Drawing on archaeological finds, he examines the evidence of lead-tin alloy toys,
which were capable of being mass-produced from about 1300, and links it with

THE LEGACY

13 Ann Waltner, "Infanticide and Dowry in Ming and Early Qing China," in Kinney, Chinese Views
of Childhood.
14 See, for example, Pollock, ForgottenChildren,47; Shulamith Shahar, Childhoodin the MiddleAges
(London, 1990), 95.
15 Andrew Martindale, "The Child in the Picture: A Medieval Perspective," in Diana Wood, ed., The
Churchand Childhood (Oxford, 1994), 197-232, quoting 197.

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associated literary evidence. (In 1582, for example, the crown taxed imported
''puppets or babies for children.") Added to this is the evidence from games,
calendar customs, and schoolbooks: together, it provides at least some evidence
that children enjoyed a culture of their own.16
A final example is Karin Calvert's Childrenin the House: The Material Cultureof
Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (1992). Aries' account of the evolution of attitudes
toward childhood draws to a close in the late seventeenth century: it is as though at
that point he can discern a clear road that leads to the mid-twentieth century. It is
one of the strengths of Calvert's book that she delineates the twists and turns that
were part of that evolution. In an earlier study, she showed how a comprehensive
study of American portraiture revealed significant changes in the prominence given
to children.17The same theme is developed from a wider body of source material,
including furniture and clothes, in her book: she argues a shift from "the inchoate
adult: 1600 to 1750" to "the natural child: 1750 to 1830" to "the innocent child: 1830
to 1900." The most convincing of these shifts is the first: Calvert shows how, in every
aspect of child-rearing in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the aim
was to get the young child upright: swaddling clothes and walking stools both had
this purpose. The implication was that childhood was a stage of life to be passed
through as rapidly as possible. It was therefore a change of enormous significance
when in the second half of the eighteenth century the advice given to parents was
that children should be allowed to develop at their own pace; Calvert shows how
this was accompanied by a discarding of old forms of furniture and clothes. It has
long been an issue in the history of childhood how far the advice given by experts
was acted on by parents: Calvert demonstrates from a study of the material culture
of the home that in middle-class America, at least, the advice was heeded.
This renewal of use of non-written evidence, in particular of what comes under
the term "material culture," is opening up many new possibilities for the study of
the history of childhood. Curators of museums of childhood across the world, who
must have been baffled at the failure of professional historians to give serious
attention to their collections, may begin to expect a change. The material is
abundant, much of it published in museum catalogues or books derived from
collections.18One sign of burgeoning interest in this field is the history of toys and
dolls. Long of interest to antiquarians and collectors, it is now beginning to attract
the attention of historians responding to contemporary concerns about the impact
of commercialism on children and to the way in which gender is shaped. Miriam
Formanek-Brunell in Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of
American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (1993) emphasizes how the manufacture of dolls
became a male-dominated industry and how girls, as the consumers, were ambivalent about what was offered to them. Although a thoroughly scholarly book, it is
difficult to read it as anything other than a decline from a pre-lapsarian past when,
16 Nicholas Orme, "The Culture of Children in Medieval England," Past and Present 148 (August
1995): 48-88.
17 Karin Calvert, Childrenin the House: The MaterialCultureof Early Childhood,1600-1900 (Boston,
1992); Calvert, "Childrenin American Family Portraiture, 1670-1810," Williamand Maiy Quarterly,3d
ser., 39 (January 1982): 87-113.
18 See, for example, Anthony Burton, Childrens Pleasures:Books, Toys anidGames from the Bethnal
Green Museum of Childhood (London, 1996).

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antebellum, dolls were homemade and their use taught skills valuable in the
domestic economy, to a world where female manufacturers lost out in their battle
against the mechanization of dolls by males, and where dolls came to embody the
desired preparation for motherhood.19 Gary Cross in Kids' Stuff: Toys and the
Changing Worldof American Childhood (1997) is determined to break away from
this approach, telling today's parents that fantasy toys have a history dating back to
the early twentieth century, and that, in the 1930s, toys, especially for boys, were
liberated from adult concerns about instilling proper values and began to appeal
directly to the child's imagination-and to the child as consumer. But, in the
conclusion, he reveals his own unhappiness about these developments, and hopes
that children, through their toys, may "recover an imagination more rooted in the
real world."20
These studies of the material culture of childhood in the past contribute both to
the understanding of concepts of childhood in the past and to the real life
experiences of children: we begin to know the material world in which they lived.
But children's lives were shaped by more than what surrounded them, and a fuller
understanding of what it was like to be a child in any culture requires a broader
approach. The sources for such a study are likely to be greatest for recent periods
of history where written documents can be integrated with personal testimony,
whether autobiographical or gathered by oral historians. Anna Davin's GrowingUp
Poor. Home, School and Street in London 1870-1914 (1996) indicates what can be
achieved in a properly contextualized study.21The context is partly geographicalthe homes and streets of late nineteenth-century London are brought alive for
us-but also chronological, for the period from 1870 to 1914 is seen by many
historians of different countries as one in which the state began to take a markedly
more prominent role in the regulation of family life and in which a definition of
childhood as properly a period of dependence became dominant.22One key issue
underlying Davin's book is how far working-class families and children in particular
were aware of this intrusion and how they responded to it. The main intervention
was the introduction of compulsory schooling: this not only had its effects on the
management of the family economy but also gave the state the opportunity to try to
impose middle-class standards of speech, dress, deportment, and "civilization."It is
Davin's contention that the burden of this fell on girls: they were more likely than
boys to be kept at home to help with domestic chores, so that they missed out on
educational opportunities; what schooling they did have placed huge emphasis on
needlework, depriving them of access to some of the more academic subjects; and
the pressure to conform to new gender stereotypes of neatness was more
compelling. In short, whereas the new conditions of childhood relieved boys from
19 Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play Houise:Dolls and the Commercializationof American
Girlhood, 1830-1930 (New Haven, Conn., 1993).
20 Gary Cross, Kids' Stuiff:Toys and the
ChanigingWorldof American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.,
1997), 238.
21 Anna Davin, GrowingUp Poor: Home, Schlooland Streetin Londonl1870-1914 (London, 1996). For
a complementary study, also with much to contribute to the history of childhood, see Ellen Ross, Love
and Toil: Motherhoodin OuitcastLondon 1870-1918 (Oxford, 1993).
22 This theme is pervasive in the essays in Roger Cooter, ed., In the Name of the Child: Health and
Welfare,1880-1940 (London, 1992).

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

have all been influenced to some extent by

Aries. But there are limitations to the legacy from Aries. The questions he asked
and the sources on which he drew directed attention to the upper and middle
classes. Those who have followed in his footsteps, either to support or rebut him,
have equally concentrated on those classes. In sophisticated hands and with
adequate documentation, as we have seen in the case of Davin's book, it is possible
to find out about the experiences of childhood outside the privileged classes. But
not many people have been able to do it, and we cannot be satisfied with the
historiography of childhood while its focus is so exclusively the lives and thoughts
of the well-to-do.
The potential benefit of a family strategy approach to the history of childhood is
that it will enable us to gain some understanding of the experience of childhood and
attitudes toward childhood in that majority of the population that is beyond the
reach of the approach and sources characteristic of Aries and his followers. "Family
strategy" is a term whose difficulties need to be recognized. It has been used in
widely different ways, sometimes implying conscious choice by families or, often
implicitly, one or more family members, whereas in other hands the strategy can be
THE BOOKS

HAVE CONSIDERED SO FAR

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

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Histories of Childhood

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unconscious, observable only to the outsider.24Two recent books enable us to take

stock of how successful it is proving to be in the analysis of childhood among the
poor. The essays in John Henderson and Richard Wall, Poor Womenand Children
in the European Past (1994), draw largely on the sources of institutions (foundling
hospitals and orphanages) to try to reconstruct what led people to abandon children
to them.25 This approach of course leaves us somewhat in the dark about that
majority of the population who did not at any point in time abandon children to
institutions; nevertheless, the proportion who did, particularlyin the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, is sufficiently high to ensure that the conclusions reached will
give considerable insight into how families weighed their responsibilities. The chief
conclusion is not a surprisingone, although it needs emphasis in view of a common
supposition that the opposite was the case: children were a burden on the family
economy. B. Seebohm Rowntree's famous analysis of the life cycle (1901), in which
he showed how the poverty level of a family was adversely affected in ratio to the
number of young children, proves to have been valid not only for late nineteenthcentury York but for most societies in early modern and modern Europe.
The essays center on issues of concern to demographic and family historians:
does the famous north/south divide between nuclear and complex family structure
still hold? Can the "nuclear hardship" argument-that nuclear families were less
likely than complex ones to be able to rely on their kin in times of hardship and
more likely to turn to the collectivity-retain validity in view of the vast number of
institutions for the care of children in the south of Europe? Pier Paolo Viazzo
valuably notes how the nuclear hardship theory has largely concentrated on
treatment of the elderly.26Bring children into the picture and a different set of
issues and conclusions emerges, focusing on bastardy and abandonment. There has
been something of a division of labor, with historians in northern Europe studying
bastardy while those in southern Europe have researched abandonment. The
assumption has tended to be that foundling hospitals were the south's Catholic way
of coping with illegitimacy. In fact, they had, as the essays show, rather more
complex functions.
Philip Gavitt shows how in fifteenth-century Florence many of the babies
abandoned were the offspring of well-to-do men and their slaves or servants-the
illegitimacy/abandonmentlink holds. But in the Basque region in the early modern
period, the situation was quite different: a high rate of illegitimacy coexisted with
24 The historical literature on family strategy is extensive. More recent studies on the economic role
of children have been much influenced by Michael R. Haines, "IndustrialWork and the Family Life
Cycle, 1889-1890," Research in Economic History 4 (1979): 289-356; and Claudia Goldin, "Family
Strategies and the Family Economy in the Late Nineteenth Century:The Role of Secondary Workers,"
in Theodore Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia:Work,Space, Family, and GroupExperiencein the Nineteenth
Century(New York, 1981). Robert V. Robinson, "FamilyEconomic Strategies in Nineteenth- and Early
Twentieth-Century Indianapolis,"Journal of Family History 20 (Winter 1995): 1-22, is an influential
recent contribution. Wider questions on "family strategy" are addressed in contributions in Historical
Methods 20 (Summer 1987): 113-25; and in Graham Crow, "The Use of the Concept of 'Strategy' in
Recent Sociological Literature";and D. H. J. Morgan, "Strategies and Sociologists: A Comment on
Crow," both in Sociology 23 (February 1989): 1-29.
25 John Henderson and Richard Wall, eds., Poor Womenand Childrenin the EuropeanPast (London,
1994).
26 Paolo Viazzo, "Family Structures and the Early Phase in the Individual Life Cycle: A Southern
European Perspective," in Henderson and Wall, Poor Womenand Children.

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a low rate of abandonment. It was, ironically, when the illegitimacy rate declined in
the eighteenth century that abandonment increased, largely, it seems, because
responsibility for the care of illegitimate children passed from fathers (who were
more likely to have resources to care for them) to mothers.27
In the eighteenth century, both illegitimacy and abandonment increased but not,
as one might have expected, in step with one another. Much of the increase in
abandonment was fueled by legitimate children. In Florence, for example, in
1792-1794, 72 percent of those admitted to the Foundling Hospital were legitimate,
and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the percentage of the
legitimate among those abandoned ranged between 40 and 70 percent. Volker
Hunecke's work on Milan in the 1840s, translated into English here for the first
time, provides the most telling evidence.28About one-third of all legitimate births
were abandoned, a tradition having grown up that not more than two children
should be kept at home at any one time. The intention, and the norm, was to
reclaim the child when economic conditions in the family eased. In Florence, Milan,
and many other cities, foundling hospitals created to rescue the illegitimate became
used by families at pressure points in the family life cycle, or at times of general
economic stress, to relieve themselves of their legitimate children. Nor was it only
babies who were abandoned. Eugenio Sonnino examines orphanages for girls in
seventeenth and eighteenth-century Rome, showing how the loss of one parent
could well imply the admission of a child to institutional care in its early teens.29In
many parts of Europe,30there grew up an economy of abandonment in which rural
areas supplied wet-nurses for babies abandoned in the cities and then themselves
contributed to the level of abandonment by ridding themselves of their own
offspring in order to feed (at least until the next pregnancy) the other babies of the
foundling hospitals. A system created by philanthropists for one purpose became
diverted by its "customers" to serve a quite different one. Where the facilities for
abandonment were limited or contained, as in Florence's neighbor Bologna, people
must have coped in other ways with the pressures of the life cycle.
The records of institutions for the care of children are a rich source; they can
sometimes include or be linked to demographic and other evidence. Together, they
provide overwhelming evidence that families adopted strategies for their own
survival and well-being dependent on the availability of facilities that could be
molded to their use. Furthermore, the extent of abandonment is such that it raises
fundamental questions about the value, both emotional and economic, placed on
children.
27 Philip Gavitt, "'Perce non avea chi la ghovernasse': Cultural Values, Family Resources and
Abandonment in the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici, 1467-85," in Henderson and Wall, Poor Women
and Children.
28 Volker Hunecke, "The Abandonment of Legitimate Children in Nineteenth-Century Milan and
the European Context," in Henderson and Wall, Poor Womenand Children.
29 Eugenio Sonnino, "Between the Home and the Hospice: The Plight and Fate of Girl Orphans in
Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-CenturyRome," in Henderson and Wall, Poor Womenand Children;see
also Lola Valverde, "Illegitimacy and the Abandonment of Children in the Basque Country,
1550-1800," in Henderson and Wall.
30 See, for example, David L. Ransel, Mothersof Misety: Child Abandonment in Ruissia(Princeton,
N.J., 1988); James R. Lehning, "Family Life and Wetnursing in a French Village," Jourlal of
Interdisciplinzaty
Histoty 12 (Spring 1982): 645-56.

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By comparison, as is demonstrated in the essays in Richard L. Rudolph, The

European Peasant Family and Society: Historical Studies (1995), historians of the

European peasant family are relatively deprived-or, perhaps, it should be said that
they deprive themselves, for peasant families, though one would not guess it from
these essays, were often linked into urban/ruralnetworks that made them part of
the economies of abandonment.31The focus of the essays is on the relationship
between land ownership or use and family formation and on the impact of
proto-industrialization. Children feature in it as the outcome of decisions about
how best to preserve or enhance family fortunes. As Stanley Engerman puts it,
"Individuals may choose between more goods for themselves, more children, and
more leisure."32If they had children, it is implied, it was because of their perceived
economic usefulness, as in proto-industrialization, or as an insurance against old
age. If they did not, as in the Alpine region of Austria, which had the highest age
of marriage and the highest proportion never married in Europe, then again it was
an economically driven decision reinforced by cultural norms. There were huge
variations across Europe in age of marriage, levels of celibacy and of illegitimacy,
numbers of children born to a family, and destiny of children according to birth
order and gender. Scholars have spent much effort and displayed considerable
ingenuity in trying to plot and to provide explanations for these variations. Since the
emphasis of this approach is on decision-making within constraints, it is the
decision-makers (the adults) and the constraints (climate, inheritance systems,
family forms, opportunities for migration) on which attention is focused. Children
are only the outcome of those decisions: thus, by implication, the key factor in the
history of childhood is the powerlessness of children. But it is legitimate to wonder
whether the focus on decision-making may not over-rationalize human activity:it is
one of the, advantages of using some of the foundling hospital records that one can
find in the tokens and messages attached to the abandoned child some evidence of
the human processes beneath those sets of data that most easily lend themselves to
statistical enquiry.
It is perhaps significant that the only essay in Rudolph's collection to give
extended treatment to childhood is not on the peasant family at all but on families
in the Rouen textile industry during the nineteenth century; there, the emphasis is
not on the families' decisions but on the responses of Rouen manufacturers to
proposals for changes in the law on child labor. Gay Gullickson describes the
emergence by the 1870s of a set of ideas that not only considered that young
children should be kept out of the work force but also that women should be
restricted in their participation so they could play their "proper"roles as mothers.
The issue, Gullickson suggests, had arisen from the new need for child care where
paid labor happened in factories from which children were barred; in proto-industry
or in agriculture, such issues did not arise.33
The contrast between these two books suggests that the polarity drawn at the
31 Richard L. Rudolph, ed., The EutropeanPeasanitFamily and Society:Historical Stuidies(Liverpool,
1995).
32 Stanley L. Engerman, "Family and Economy: Some Comparative Perspectives," in Rudolph,
EulrXopean
Peasant Family, 236.
33 Gay Gullickson, "Womanhood and Motherhood: The Rouen ManufacturingCommunity,Women
Workers, and the French Factory Acts," in Rudolph, EutropeanPeasant Family.

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beginning of this essay between approaches influenced by Aries and those by family
strategy may be oversimplified, and in particular that there are different emphases
within the family strategy approach. This surely is to be welcomed and should
encourage some meeting of minds. Historians in the Aries tradition may well find
the material in some of the essays in Rudolph's volume rebarbative, but they are
likely to find the approach in Poor Women and Children in the European Past
accessible and interesting. A family strategy approach, adopted with sensitivity, can
enormously expand the range of histories of childhood.
These two family strategy studies have concentrated on Western societies. It is
becoming increasingly apparent that a history of childhood, taking its cue from the
late twentieth century, must be a global history. A key ingredient of this would be
an exploration of divergent patterns in the experience of childhood in different
cultures in the past century and a half. The trend in the West in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries was for the length of childhood to be extended. There
was no one formal measure that brought this about, although there can be little
doubt that the introduction and enforcement of compulsory schooling was the
central issue. As the age of leaving school rose to reach fourteen in the early
twentieth century and up to sixteen later on, so childhood seemed to be extended.
Alongside this were numerous measures intended to separate out childhood as a
distinct phase of life-a separate system of justice, a higher age at which marriage
was permissible, a ban on access to such substances as alcohol and tobacco. It was
easier to legislate for full-time compulsory schooling than to impose it'. as Davin
shows, both working-classparents and many magistrates believed that contributions
to the family economy should take precedence over schooling. Nevertheless, over a
period of about thirty years, the school habit became accepted.
One of the central arguments in the recent focus on childhood in the West during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been that state and philanthropic action, together with rising standards of living, succeeded in bringing about
a common experience of childhood for all children. That development brought to
a head what in the longue duree must be the most fundamental shift in the
experience of childhood, from one where nearly all children expected to contribute
to the family economy at an early age to one where they were a net drain on that
economy throughout their childhood and youth. The importance of this shift in the
length and nature of childhood was brought out vividly in Viviana Zelizer's
landmark study in the historiography of childhood. She showed how the valuation
of children changed from one where they were valued according to their contributions to the family economy to one where they became productively useless but
emotionally priceless-partly as a consequence of rising living standards but also
because of the spread of new cultural norms respecting childhood.34 The more
emotionally valuable they became, the longer in life they were likely to be perceived
as children. Such a change opens up for inquiry differences over time and between
cultures in the perceived length of and meanings attached to childhood.
Myron Weiner in The Child and the State in India (1991) aims to show why this
34Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricingthe Priceless Child: The ChangingSocial Value of Children(New York,

1985).

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vital transition has not occurred in a particular non-Western culture.35 He is

concerned to find out why child labor, described in telling detail, is so prevalent in
present-day India. His analysis is historically informed; he argues that a comparison
of experience in Europe, Asia, and Africa shows that it is not simply legislating for
compulsory schooling but, more important, a willingness to enforce it, that can
bring about this transition. In India, he argues, the willingness has been absent, and
the consequence has been a higher level of child labor there than in many countries
with lower per capita income. There is in India, he suggests, a culture at an elite
level that accepts child labor, and until that culture changes no amount of laws or
reports will have significant impact.
Weiner's approach represents one pole in a spectrum of attempts to understand
what factors explain the prevalence or otherwise of child labor. At the other end lies
the neo-classical family strategy approach: decisions about the deployment of
family resources, it is argued, will arise out of an assessment of what will work best
for the well-being of the family as a whole; child labor will diminish when a family
has both the resources to invest in schooling (in terms of foregone income) and a
perception that such investment will bring its own return.36In between lie analyses
that suggest the complexity of the processes that have transformed the relationships
between children and their parents.37It is a debate with some way yet to run, and
whose importance it is difficult to exaggerate.

continue to set part of the

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

35Myron Weiner, The Child and the State in India: ChildLabor and EducationPolicy in Comparative
Perspective(Princeton, N.J., 1991).
36 An argument developed most forcefully in Clark Nardinelli, Child Labor and the Industrial
Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1990).
37 See Hugh Cunningham and Pier Paolo Viazzo, eds., Child Labour in Historical Perspective
1800-1985: Case Studiesfrom Europe,Japan and Colombia (Florence, 1996); and, for a study that uses
first-person testimony to chart the complexity of historical change, Harvey J. Graff, ConflictingPaths:
Growing Up in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

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Hugh Cunningham

contribution to the family, the enhanced spending power of children and the
pressure to consume that is targeted at them, the issue of the rights they should
enjoy. This emphasis on how the child foreshadows the adult invites a focus on the
gendering of childhood, an issue that is likely to be of central importance in
forthcoming work, as it is in many of the books considered above. What one may
with less confidence expect is a willingness to compare different cultures. Scholars
of non-Western cultures writing about childhood nearly always make implicit or
explicit reference to Western experience (though rarely abreast of the more recent
historiography). Within the writing about childhood in the West, comparative study
is rare, scholars often remaining locked within their own national literatures.
Systematic comparison would be valuable.38
There are, in addition, issues not on Aries' agenda that demand attention. Taking
our cue from the present, the most striking fact about childhood in the world today
is the gulf in life experience separating the children of the wealthy from the children
of the poor. Its most obvious manifestation is the division between children who are
an expense to their parents throughout childhood and beyond, and those who,
through work of some kind, contribute to their family economies. This is primarily
a global geographical division, with child labor in the developing world a rising
cause for concern. But it is a division that also exists within the developed world;
research is revealing levels both of child poverty and of child labor once thought to
be things of the past.39 It is the challenge of Weiner's book that he links this
difference in the economic experience of children to the spread or otherwise of a
set of ideas about childhood. These were issues that Aries ignored. In the
circumstances of the late twentieth century, they demand to be addressed, and
addressed in a way that brings together more effectively than is being done at
present the different discourses and academic practices of cultural history, economic history (the globalization of the world economy and its effects on children
are of fundamental importance), and family strategy studies. It is no mean task.
38 J. M. Hawes and N. R. Hiner, eds., Children in Historical and ComparativePerspective:An
International Handbook and Research Guide (New York, 1991), contains valuable guides to the
literature, country by country, but does not advance very far in the work of comparison.
39. See, for example, Michael Lavalette, ChildEmploymentin the CapitalistLabourl
Market(Aldershot,
1994).

Hugh Cunningham is a professor of Social History at the University of Kent at

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

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