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  • Why the History of Childhood Matters
  • Steven Mintz (bio)

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"French refugee child painting." New York, New York Children's Colony, a school for refugee children. Photographer Marjorie Collins, October 1942. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USW3-009955-E.

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The history of childhood is often treated as a marginal, excessively sentimental, and under-theorized subject. It is frequently regarded as a subset of family history or as a minor aspect of cultural and intellectual history, focusing on adult ideas about children and artistic, cinematic, and literary representations of childhood. Yet, the history of childhood is anything but a trivial topic. Childhood, I shall argue, is the true missing link: connecting the personal and the public, the psychological and the sociological, the domestic and the state.

As a historian of the United States, this essay will draw on evidence from the US experience to underscore the significance of the history of childhood. Yet while the details would surely differ, I would like to suggest that this US-centric account of the ways that the history of childhood matters for a broad range of political and social issues has a broader purview. Because the implications of the history of childhood are highly context-specific, I hope that this essay will encourage readers to consider the relevance of the history of childhood for the specific places and times that they study.

Not only are children inextricably engaged in the central events in the history of the United States—from colonization and revolution to industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and war—but the history of childhood is bound up with key cultural, economic, historical, psychological, and sociological themes. An understanding of the history of childhood is essential, first of all, because the subject lies at the heart of many key historical themes, such as the growth of the state's police and administrative powers, the rise of modern bureaucratic institutions, the development of the welfare state, the triumph of the therapeutic, and the emergence of modern criminal jurisprudence. 1 Secondly, the history of childhood encourages us to rethink what we mean when we speak of agency, identity formation, generational consciousness, and subcultures and their relationship with mainstream culture. 2 Equally important, the history of childhood defamiliarizes the present and helps us understand the distinctiveness of contemporary society's value system and social arrangements. 3 [End Page 17]

Let us begin by looking at the relationship between the history of childhood and broad political and sociological themes. First, state formation. Many of the hottest contemporary domestic controversies in the United States, such as welfare and health care reform, school testing, charter schools, teenage sexuality, and Internet filtering, focus on children. Yet rarely do commentators realize that this preoccupation with children is not new. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the growth of the state's police and administrative powers in the United States was tied to changing definitions of childhood. Conflicts surroundings schooling, poverty, delinquency, factory labor, and criminal justice inevitably centered on children.

The establishment of nonsectarian public schools was justified largely on the grounds that tax-funded schools were necessary to instill the values of citizenship and promote social mobility. 4 In the late nineteenth century, the concept of child protection provided the rationale for an expansion of the state authority to intervene in the family. 5 At the turn of the twentieth century, the newly established juvenile justice system was instrumental in pioneering such concepts as probation, parole, indeterminate sentencing, and compulsory medical and psychiatric treatment. 6 During the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, many seminal social welfare innovations originally arose as efforts to assist children. By 1919, thirty-nine states provided mothers' pensions to "deserving" single mothers with dependent children. Although the stipends were meager and the laws contained "suitable home" provisions that strictly regulated recipients' behavior, the pensions represented a fundamental shift in philosophy, from charitable benevolence to welfare as an entitlement. 7 Grants-in-aid to states were a product of the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which provided federal funding of information and instruction on nutrition and hygiene, prenatal and child health clinics, and visiting nurses...

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