Society's Child: Identity, Clothing, and Style (review)

Society’s Child takes us back a ways, in historical time and, alas, in methodological time too. In historical time, it sweeps across centuries and cultures, touching every epoch that has figured focally in accounts of the last half-millennium of childhood in the West. In methodological time, it lapses into an old pots-and-pans social history that dwells on aimless details undisciplined by any shaping question or informing argument.

Rubinstein does not begin as fecklessly as she ends. At the outset, she declares childhood as much a cultural construction as a biological one and children’s clothes as revealing an indicator of children’s roles as anything we are likely to find in the written record. More than that, she sets such presumptions in the service of a provocative problem that she derives from an intriguing conjunction of phenomena. Observing that American children in the last quarter of the twentieth century have increasingly been conceived as precocious, abandoned by parents, assigned more homework younger, and held criminally responsible, and that during those years those children have increasingly been wearing miniature adult-style dress, she asks whether childhood has been disappearing in America and in the West.

But the promise of this beginning is squandered as soon as Rubinstein turns to her history itself. Though she has read widely in the secondary sources, her reading rarely serves any apparent purpose. Too often the works on which she depends are outdated. Too often she misses essential works. Even at her best, she relies on Ariesian axioms that have not been axiomatic in the scholarship for decades. At her worst, she serves up a sludge of disparate data that do not cumulate to any discernible or persuasive argument.

Her first historical chapter purports to deal with “the dynastic child” in the Italian Renaissance. Exactly as it does, it betrays its exclusive focus on the nobility. Other chapters deal excessively with the elite. This one limits itself entirely to the topmost tier. Other chapters do at least deal with elite children. This one addresses itself primarily to their parents. And even as a treatment of adults, it tangles itself in murky contradictions. In a way which is never explicated, “autonomy from lineal obligations” fostered “a framework in which progeny could carry on a father’s accomplishments” (p. 25).

Her second historical chapter, allegedly on children in the Golden Age in the Netherlands, is equally diverted to discussion of marriage and other adult matters and equally littered with bewildering contradictions. Marriage portraits were formal, but the couples were emotionally close. Home kept the world and its avarice at bay, but the portraits were expensive and served to display the wealth they signified. Rubinstein writes unceasingly of “the culture,” as though Holland was a homogeneous society, and ignores utterly her own evidence—to say nothing of Simon Schama’s brilliant evocation—of its ambivalences and internal conflicts.

Her third historical chapter, on “the public child” of early modern Europe, seems to embrace Ariès but ends by extending his account of medieval childhood to 1800 and thus missing altogether the import of his chronology. As in the preceding chapters, Rubinstein writes overwhelmingly of the aristocracy and minimally about females. As in the preceding chapters, she shows herself unconcerned for logical consistency. And as in the preceding chapters, she strews her account with howlers. A young duke was “brought up like all other children” (p. 49). The peasants “were often poor” (p. 50).

Her remaining chapters, on colonial America, nineteenth-century England, the United States to the Civil War and World War I, and then on successive generations in the US in the twentieth century, are similarly messy and maddening. On colonial America, she misses much of the best work, such as Karin Calvert’s and Barry Levy’s. She continues to confuse genteel elites with the whole of society—“boys in America wore lace collars” (p. 66)—and she confuses New England with the other two-thirds of British...