Politicizing Youth: Childhood Studies on Social Change

In American public memory, the terms youth and politics may elicit nostalgic imagery of idealistic adolescent campaigners, politicians holding babies, or even children under the Oval Office desk, but historically their intersection has also been the site of considerable controversy. In 2009, to note a relatively recent example, President Barack Obama announced his plans to deliver his first live, televised, back-to-school speech to American public school classrooms. This announcement generated a firestorm of parental outrage and media attention. Using slogans such as “school and politics don’t mix,” many parents articulated fears of a political—and, in some cases, socialist—indoctrination of their children, and several conservative media outlets dubbed the proposed day of the speech a “national skip day.”¹ In response, the Obama administration released an advance transcript of the speech, which emphasized responsibility and hard work, but this did little to quell the controversy. Although many public schools broadcast coverage of the speech, some administrators gave students and teachers the choice to opt out, and others blocked it altogether.²

While the media frenzy over Obama’s back-to-school speech may seem rather unusual, it was certainly not the first time in recent years in which the intersection of “youth” and “politics” has generated controversy. From the widely discussed teenage pregnancy of Bristol Palin, daughter of vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, to Michelle Obama’s highly publicized campaign on childhood obesity, issues of childhood and adolescence have repeatedly taken center stage in national dialogue and debate. Yet, perhaps reflecting a degree of cultural amnesia, few recalled that Obama was not the first president to receive political criticism for a public school address: on October 1, 1991, President George H. W. Bush delivered a similar back-to-school speech, which likewise generated controversy, but from Democrats in Congress rather than conservative parents and media pundits.³ Recent scholarship in childhood and adolescent studies by Michelle Ann Abate, Cathy Cohen, Anna Mae Duane, Hava Rachel Gordon, and Mary Niall Mitchell offers new insights into how the politicization of youth is, in fact, part of a broader American historical and cultural legacy.

Over the past decade, scholarship on the history of childhood has often examined the complex relationship between youth, nation-making, and historical change. Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Caroline Levander’s Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. Du Bois, and Stephen Mintz’s Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, to cite a few prominent examples, have persuasively challenged the widespread perception of children as passive agents in the development of American history, culture, and the modern nation-state.⁴ In addition to demonstrating how adult representations of children in literature, art, photography, media, and other cultural forms have instigated social change, they have also revealed how children, both living and represented, may function as historical actors. Additionally, one of the most important contributions of the history of childhood has been its interrogation of the historical development of the modern categories of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; Levander and others have traced the social construction...