Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space and the Material Culture of Childhood (review)

Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space and the Material Culture of Childhood is a cohesive and thought-provoking collection of essays that should be required reading for anyone interested in the lives of modern children. Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith have chosen fifteen essays (some of which came from the 2002 conference the pair organized at Berkeley) that take both a global and an interdisciplinary approach to the material and spatial worlds of children from the late-nineteenth century through the very recent past. The essays in this collection are organized into four thematic sections: “Child Saving and the Design of Modern Childhoods,” “The Choreography of Education and Play,” “Space, Power, and Inequality in Modern Childhoods,” and “Consumption, Commodification, and the Media: Material Culture and Contemporary Childhoods.” The editors met the challenge of weaving these diverse papers together into a cogent argument that the material worlds created for and by children are central to constructions of modernity. Drawing on the work of sociologists Helga Zeiher and Hartmut Zeiher on the “islanding of children,” this collection reveals that the islanding of children is a defining feature of modern life and one that is both nuanced and problematic. In his sweeping epilogue, historian John R. Gillis analyzes the significance of this phenomenon to adults, particularly adult males. He argues that “[i]slanding children is a way that adults have developed to cherish their angels and exorcise their demons” (317) and is not necessarily good for adults, children, or society.

Students often approach the history of childhood through the lens of their own experiences or normative notions of what childhood should or should not be. The breadth of Designing Modern Childhoods curtails this tendency. Both the geographic and topical diversity of the essays as well the range of methodologies employed by the authors make the potential of a global or at least comparative approach abundantly clear to the historian of childhood. The unifying theme of this collection, its careful attention to the relationship between children’s material worlds and definitions of modernity, helps the reader see commonalities and differences in unexpected places. The islanding metaphor may be most clear in the essays that present the different ways in which adults created spaces that defined and separated children and their needs from adults, as in David C. Sloane’s essay on the emergence of children’s hospitals and Anne-Marie Châtelet’s essay on open-air schools in Europe. Yet, this framework also allows the reader to understand the cultural space delineated by a media phenomenon like Yugioh, as described by Mizuko Ito, as a sort of island as well.

The collection includes a few essays that address older children, who fall within the definition of childhood offered by the editors (roughly between three and eighteen), but who push its upper boundary. In these cases, they do not seem to be islanded by adults. Instead, they seem to separate themselves from adult life and the spaces adults created for them. Harriot Beazley analyzes the spaces and survival strategies of teenage Indonesian street girls that set them apart from both street boys and mainstream culture. The essay examines the ways in which girls resisted islanding within their often-restrictive, sometimes violent family homes and created their own enclaves, in which they still faced oppression and exploitation. How might their resistance relate to their cultural status as children? Olav Christensen’s essay on snowboarder subculture in Norway raises a similar question. If the visible islands of childhood that dot the modern landscape help adults “think with children,” what cultural work might those spaces created by and for children nearing maturity do? That however, may be too much to ask of a collection that already stretches geographical bounds, ranges over a century of history, and employs a variety of methodologies.

The strength and variety of the essays that compromise Designing Modern Childhoods offer...