Childhood and Memory

"Carlisle Substitutes on Bench, Carlisle Polo Grds." (1909). Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection, LC-DIG-ggbain-04333

[Begin Page 155]

During the past ten years, I have been thinking about both memory and childhood as I engaged in parallel, though not obviously intersecting, courses of writing. I thought that I would take the occasion of today's brief address to the Society for the History of Children and Youth to try to bring these subjects together. I do this not only because they have personal urgency, but because there has been a natural resonance between childhood and memory, and they can usefully illuminate each other historically. I am also eager to have us, as a community of scholars, think about how crucial memory is for the enterprise in which all of us are engaged and to consider how this presents certain limitations on our endeavors while allowing us to enter into some of the most dynamic and important conversations taking place in the profession.

I want to begin by describing three significant junctures in the history of childhood in the West that have also been critical points for thinking about memory: the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in France especially but elsewhere in the West as well; the late nineteenth—early twentieth century emphasis on the human psyche in central Europe with Freud's psychoanalytic work, but also in the United States where G. Stanley Hall and others were developing an American psychology; and the period since the 1970s in the United States, western Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. In this last period concerns about children and reflections on memory have propelled historians, among other scholars, to study both. As I will suggest, I do not believe that these are simply coincidental, and I hope to persuade you of their connection. At the very least, they have become historically intertwined over time. As a result, today we can hardly think of one without also considering the other. Finally, at the end of my essay I will suggest how the attention to children as repositories of important social memories is influencing the historical study of children today and how we as historians of childhood are participating in a particular reconstruction of history.

I

The Enlightenment provided a critical point in the development of modern perspectives on the human and on how it could be studied, and it introduced us to the significance of the child to this understanding. It was also, as historian Larry Wolff has brilliantly demonstrated, an important moment for philosophical reflections on memory and its role in uncovering man's potential. In an article published ten years ago, Wolff argued that several Enlightenment thinkers, notably David Hume, John Locke, and the Abbé de Condillac, began to delve into the constitution of human memory and made it a necessary part of their considerations of the coherence of personhood, something that would subsequently become central to Jean Jacques Rousseau's visions of the importance of the child.¹ I will not pretend to summarize Wolff's rich and complex argument here, except to say that Wolff makes clear that the child became the necessary site for the constitution of the memory that these eighteenth-century thinkers increasingly associated with human integrity. Perhaps the best way to grasp the fundamental issue at stake in this Enlightenment insight is for me to recall an observation made by my eight-year-old son on being told about the possibility of human replication at the time Dolly, the first cloned sheep, made her stunning media debut. When I assured him that humans too could be produced "exactly alike," he countered firmly that this was not true because the replicated bodies would have quite distinct and separate memories. This is not a story about Charlie's precocity, but rather a way of saying that our understanding of how memory constitutes individuality is so deeply embedded in our culture that even a child can see the link.

Wolff argues that by the time Rousseau tangled with the connection between memory and individuality, the special poignancy of memory...