Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 10

In 1960 Philippe Aries published his seminal study L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime. This book, first published in English in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, has been the key reference point for the debate on whether the concept of childhood is an invention of the modern period. Aries’s argument was essentially that in the Middle Ages in Europe there was no concept of children as a separate category of people requiring special or distinctive treatment from adults. He argued that as soon as children left the dependent state of early childhood they were treated like small adults, were immersed in all aspects of social and working life and were not accorded any special protection, rights or responsibilities. His sources, mostly analyses of images of children in medieval portraiture, depicted children as small versions of adults. In these pictures, Aries claims, children are invariably wearing the same clothes as adults, without any of the stylized features – chubbiness, large eyes, body–head ratios, smiling faces, small hands – that later artists used to depict children as different kinds of people from adults. Aries infers from this difference in how children are depicted that in the earlier period there was no such thing as childhood.

Historians have taken issue both with the limited sources that Aries relies on and the inferences that he draws from these sources (Vann 1982; Pollock 1983). Portraiture was expensive and the people who commissioned portraits of their families or themselves were a small elite whose attitudes to childhood and, for the children, experience of childhood were likely to be very different from those of the general population. Portraits are also highly stylized and use special conventions, so that how children are portrayed in these paintings cannot necessarily be taken as an indication of children’s experience of everyday life or their representation in more popular media.

Despite the lively debate about Aries’s work, the central contention of Centuries of Childhood, namely that the attitudes, sensibilities and experiences that we now think of as immanent to childhood are an invention of the modern period, is widely accepted by historians and social scientists. In their introduction to the important collection of papers on historical research into American childhood, Hawes and Hiner comment that ‘Aries has been justly criticised for his selective and sometimes uncritical use of evidence, but no one has successfully challenged his essential point that childhood is not an immutable stage of life, free from the influence of historical change’ (Hawes and Hiner 1985: 3).

Aries’s interest was in the impacts of modernity on social life. Already implicit in the establishment of Centuries of Childhood as a kind of foundational text for the history of childhood is the idea of modernity as a non-global time. The modern world, or modernity, in this discourse does not simply mean contemporary life; it specifically refers to the shifts in relations between the state and the people of a territory, the invention of the citizen and of the public life of the state/politics and the private life of the family/children (Aries 2003; Chakrabarty 1993). The ways in which modernity in this sense, and the childhoods it ushered in, were played out were of course different in the imperial heartlands and in the colonial territories (Balagopalan 2018).

Even within that territory that could loosely be called ‘the modern world’, that is to say the metropole and its colonial territories, differences in the organization of the state, of labour and family life make it difficult to argue for a global history of childhood; and moreover these two constructs (metropole and colony) do not begin to cover the multiplicity of planetary childhood from the fifteenth century. The central focus of Latin American history of (or, at least, including) childhood has been on family structures, with Freyre’s 1933 (1963) account of family life on a sixteenth-century Brazilian sugar plantation remaining a keystone of the literature. His ‘vivid portrait made it clear the Portuguese family [and the plantation it was organized around] was the dominant institution in Brazil for colonization, government, education, maintenance of order and economic investment’ (Kuznesof 2005: 862).

The emerging literature on African child labour (Swai 1979; Chirwa 1993; Hansen 1990) shows how important this labour was to the processes of capital accumulation for white farmers and the (colonial) state in East and Southern Africa. Beverley Grier’s 2006 Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe was the first book-length study of the history of child labour in an African country. Grier’s seminal contribution to the historiography of African childhood shows how African children ‘struggled to shape the circumstances of their own lives and . . . , in the process, helped to shape the history of the colony’ (2006: 2).

An organizing theme of Grier’s book is that childhood in Zimbabwe was a racialized concept that meant that the lives of Black children and white children and expectations placed on them by the colonial state, white farmers and their families were entirely shaped by racist ideology. In the areas of significant white settlement childhood was ‘racially based, with the childhood of settlers being organized in radically different ways from the childhood of Africans’ (Grier 2006: 18). This theme is also at the heart of Owen White’s study of the children of African–European parents, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa 1895–1960. This is also one of the few histories of African childhood that does not take either school or work as its main focus (although it discusses both). It explores instead how the French state responded to African–European children or what they called ‘the Métis problem’ through strategies of separating in school, work and family métissage children from both African and European populations. Surprisingly, given the obsession during Apartheid rule with establishing degrees of Europeanness/ Africanness, there is no comparable history for South Africa.

The meanings of childhood and children’s experiences are inseparable from the ways that colonial rule was established over African territory. The colonial state and white settler capital utilized ‘[t]he belief that children should contribute to the material reproduction of their households [which] was a core aspect of the construction of childhood among the Shona and Ndebele people’ (Grier 2006: 29) at the end of the nineteenth century. This belief has to be situated in a context of labour-intensive agricultural production that meant all household members had to contribute their labour to the maintenance of the household. Children were no exception, and whilst boys and girls mostly took on different tasks, all children had to work. Colonization changed the organization of agricultural production and alongside it African concepts of childhood, particularly in relation to work and school (Grier 2006: 33–68). Ironically, as Africans started to seek out school education for their children in the belief that this might erode the material and status differences between themselves and the white settlers, the colonial state banned white children from work and made school compulsory for them but not for African children.

Jon Saari’s (1990) Legacies of Childhood: Growing up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890–1920 is a study of how Chinese concepts of becoming human inflected concepts of childhood and attitudes towards children and parenting practices. He weaves Chinese ideas about becoming human together with a history of the lives of privileged young men in turn-of-the-century China. A much broader picture of Chinese childhood is to be found in Ping-Chen Hsiung’s A Tender Voyage (2005). Hsiung draws on twelfth-century sources to show that paediatric health care was well developed in China from a very early period and locates this as an indicator of the high cultural value attached to children. In an apparent, and rather surprising, echo of a Western binary between Romantic and Puritan concepts of childhood, Hsiung identifies within the Confucian tradition a neo-Confucian model that emphasized control, discipline and punishment and the Wang-ming school of awakening the child through education and self-reflection.

Hugh Cunningham’s (1995) Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 shows how middle-class childhood was generalized to the wider, working-class populations of industrial Europe. From about 1750, Cunningham argues, there was a great increase in state intervention in children’s lives, beginning with the gradual regulation of child labour in the nineteenth century and the introduction of compulsory schooling making school a common experience of childhood by the end of the nineteenth century. Colin Heywood’s widely cited A History of Childhood (2001) about children’s lives in North America and Europe contends that childhood (or the ‘concept of childhood’) is not a modern invention but that what people expect of children (‘conceptions of childhood’) has changed in response to wider changes in society, especially in the shift from agricultural to industrial economies. Heywood refutes the view, advanced most famously by de Mause (1988), that parents were abusive or neglectful of their children in the past. He argues that parental practices such as swaddling that might seem, from a contemporary viewpoint, abusive were motivated by care and concern. Linda Pollock’s Forgotten Children (1983) also finds evidence from diary sources that a concept of childhood is not a modern invention and that harsh treatment of children was not normative in the four centuries of her study (from 1500 to 1900). Heywood charts the fall in child mortality and the improvements in children’s health, the expansion of schooling and increases in state intervention, but stresses the persistence of inequalities between classes, regions and ethnic groups so as ‘to avoid an air of triumphalism’ (Heywood 2001: 145; 2018).

Joseph Hawes and Ray Hiner published their edited collection on the history of American childhood in 1985. Taken together, the chapters in this book tell a now familiar story in which children’s lives become less harsh, more sheltered and possibly more cherished as the centuries unfold. However, this picture is complicated by the acknowledgement of how race, class, gender and geography impacted on children’s lives and on expectations of childhood held by both children and adults.

A decade after the publication of American Childhood Hawes and Hiner edited Twayne’s History of American Childhood series, which has published books on child-rearing in the period from the Revolution to the Civil War (Reinier 1996), on how the Civil War and industrialization shaped the experience of childhood (Clement 1997), on the impact of Progressive Era reforms on children (Macleod 1998), and on how children experienced the interwar years (Hawes 1997).

Reiner uses archival sources to trace what she argues is a shift in child-rearing from authoritarian, patriarchal discipline to the management and guidance of ‘malleable’ children. This shift in ideals of child-rearing was uneven in its impact, and Reiner shows that poor and enslaved children’s labour provided the capital accumulation on which middle-class children’s education and consumption depended. Clement’s study also picks up this theme of the differentiation of childhood. Her main argument is that industrialization and Civil War sharpened differences between the experience of working-class and middle-class children and between African American and European American children. Sallee’s The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South (2004) also points to how the emerging concept of protected childhood was used to deepen racialized exclusion in campaigns that mobilized support for the abolition of child labour around the idea that it undermined white power and childhood for white children to be working.

Macleod’s study continues the chronology of American childhood, covering the period 1890–1920. Macleod’s claim is that the hardening of class differences in experiences of childhood did not diminish in the Progressive Reform era. Indeed, he contends that the ideal of a protected childhood stigmatized parents who were unable to protect their children, as well as those children who resisted increased protection because it diminished their freedom.

The unevenness of the shift to protected or sheltered childhoods draws attention to the need for multiple histories that describe and illuminate how the experience of childhood has been shaped by race, class, gender and region. There is a small body of work on the history of African American, immigrant and working-class childhoods, as well as references to their experiences in general histories. Wilma King’s African American Childhoods (2005) is a useful collection of essays on different aspects of African American childhood from slavery through to the civil rights era. It explores different aspects of children’s lives in this period, including slavery, education and violence. Many of the chapters focus on minority experiences of African American childhood – there are chapters on African American slave-owners and on African American families categorized as Native American for school attendance. While this is very interesting, there is yet to be a comprehensive history of the experience of the majority of African American children in any era of American history. Steven Mintz has a chapter in his Huck’s Raft on growing up in bondage. In Growing up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race, Jennifer Ritterhouse (2006) examines how the determination of most white adults to maintain racial inequality after the Civil War shaped the childhood experiences and sensibilities of Black and white children.

Ritterhouse’s book makes extensive use of archival interviews and biographies of adults looking back on their childhood. This illustrates some of the problems with constructing histories of childhood: children leave few written records, and those that do tend to be children of elite groups. Despite the limitations of the sources and the focus on relations between Black and white children, Growing up Jim Crow rounds out the experience of African American childhood after emancipation. A growing literature on children’s involvement in the desegregation of schools and the civil rights movement has also added to our understanding of childhood and the agency that children bring to bear on their lives in very difficult circumstances (King 2005: 155–68; de Schweinitz 2004).

In each of these diverse regions societies recognized childhood as a distinct phase in the life cycle, and children as a different kind of people from adults. A historical narrative of general improvement in children’s lives secured through a combination of state intervention, philanthropic concern and economic growth is evident in North America and, less decisively, in Europe. In both these regions, however, this story of progress went hand in hand with an increased differentiation of children’s lives by class, ethnicity and region. In Africa and Latin America there is no comparable narrative about the constant improvement of children’s lives and increasingly benign experience of childhood. The differentiation of childhood experience evident in North American and European histories is deeper and broader in the Global South, and a protected, nurturing childhood has been available only to a minority of elite and white settler children. In the absence of a narrative of progress there is considerable continuity between the history of childhood in these two regions and the sociology of African and Asian childhood, small though that literature is. In both history and sociology we find a preoccupation with children’s social problems – in particular in relation to work and family life.

These national and regional histories can be brought together to construct a global history of childhood if that is underpinned by the recognition of the globalizing forces of racial capitalism and its uneven and socially differentiated impacts from the late fifteenth century through to the present day.