Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest (review)

There was a time when children were rarely seen and virtually never heard in current scholarship. No longer. For two generations, historians, sociologists, and, especially, anthropologists have taken children and young people seriously as influences on societies, cultures, and economies. The study of childhood, as perceived and cultivated by adults, has proved a useful means of tracking a society's understanding of itself. The effort has been particularly vigorous in United States history. Gaps remain, however. Riney-Kehrberg's new book sets out to close one of them, and she largely succeeds.

By the now-familiar pattern of change between the Civil War and the 1920s, children were steadily withdrawn from the workforce and set with increasing parental supervision along paths of maturity that respected their unique needs at each stage of development growth, including the newly conceived adolescence. That pattern, however, held most true for the expanding middle classes of towns, cities, and suburbs. Other studies have described youthful populations with different experiences—African-American children of freedmen and their descendants, the young urban poor of foreign origin, and children of the frontier. Midwestern farm country was another anomaly—relatively prosperous yet rural, absorbing many new trends yet living by older economic means. As Riney-Kehrberg describes it, growing up Midwestern was a kind of prolonged transition into modern American life.

The author moves through the main three arenas of children's work, play, and education, one chapter at a time. Children continued to participate critically in the family economy and to fashion their own amusements, even as more modern notions of child nurture intruded in education. In one chapter, Riney-Kehrberg considers the experiences of two young farm children who eventually became teachers themselves. Another draws on the records of Wisconsin's State Public School to delve into the darker side of Midwestern childhood among families economically strapped, broken by death or desertion, or otherwise unfortunate.

Poor and deprived children are documented only slightly less than other children. Riney-Kehrberg skillfully draws on firsthand testimony from children who wrote during childhood, but like others facing the task, she relies heavily on after-the-fact reminiscences and memoirs. These sources she mines with perception and common sense, looking for patterns of experience while necessarily correcting for a backward perspective that often spans decades. Surprisingly, she pays relatively little attention to differences in growing up male and female. Her overall perspective is one of cautious nostalgia. For all its later romanticizing, and despite the definite limitations and difficulties, growing up on Midwestern farms largely deserved its popular portrayal of cultivating healthy adults with a good sense of their capabilities.