The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890-1920 (review)

The Age of the Child is a landmark in the historical study of American childhood. David Macleod is too modest to trumpet the immensity of his accomplishment, but his synthesis will inform our understanding for a long time to come.

Macleod’s achievement is especially impressive because it does not depend on methodological or conceptual novelty. Its strengths are the solid strengths of social history. Not least among them are a magisterial command of the materials, an appreciation of the rich variety of American society, and a realization that a society of such ethnic and ecological diversity will not sustain the soaring simplifications of abstract theory.

With sympathy, shrewdness, and a sure sense of proportion, Macleod illuminates the disparate experiences of farm children, small town youth, and city boys and girls of every sort. With grace, economy, and an unfailing instinct for the things that matter, he integrates his analyses of social structure and of personal feeling, his interpretations of the material culture of the many and the reform ideas of the few. The Age of the Child sets a myriad of telling details in suggestive contexts, and the details and their contexts sum to some surprising conclusions.

Like others whose work he synthesizes, Macleod sees in the Progressive era a clash between competing ideals of “sheltered childhood” and “the familiy economy.” Self-styled child savers campaigned to prolong youthful dependency into early adulthood; more traditional parents determined to set their children to productive labor at a much earlier age.

Unlike those others, however, Macleod knows better than to tell their stale tale of the triumph of the reformers.

Instead, he shows that sheltered childhood was not, as we have so often assumed, the prevalent condition of the young. Protracted youth was the privilege—in truth, only the project—of a particular class in a particular place. Affluent cosmopolitans in the cities of the Northeast constituted a very small proportion of the population. The preponderant mass of city-dwellers were in the working-class wards, the ethnic neighborhoods, and the slums, and the preponderant masses of Americans were not in the cities or the Northeast at all. Few among those masses could afford to shelter their young, and few actually wanted to.

Macleod never ignores the elite advice to which historians have attended so assiduously. He knows well enough that it anticipated familial changes to come. But he never mistakes such advice for the practice of the people of the period, either. He is at his most informative in elucidating child-rearing values of farm and small-town parents and the experiences of farm and small-town youth in the last decades in which most Americans lived in such settings. He is at his most evocative in exposing the stark limits of the reach of the reformers. His resonant demonstration that most Americans were simply untouched by the advice that dominated the media of the day—and historical accounts since—invites a reconsideration of the Progressive era much more generally.

The Age of the Child is organized by a simple schematic that does not remotely register the richness of its analysis. Macleod sets successive life-stages—infancy and early childhood, later childhood, and adolescence—on the vast and various grid of America. He examines each stage as it was experienced by boys and by girls of the comfortable middle classes and the laboring poor, of this region and that, of this ethnicity and that, of this religion and that, of this ecological niche and that. The freshness and power of his architectonic does not depend on its design so much as on the fluency of its execution.

Macleod is at his very best in his treatment of infancy and early childhood. He covers everything, from the masturbation that agitated the childcare advisers to the early mortality that haunted almost everyone. And as he discusses debates over diet or apparently antiquarian details about dolls, he develops with...