A Child Comes of Age: Viviana Zelizer: Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children: A Retrospective

“Baby journeying,” December 10, 1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division LC-USZ62-54093

I have many smart and dedicated colleagues who live by the rule that one should never assign one’s favorite books for undergraduate classes. This doesn’t spring from intellectual “miserliness,” an unwillingness to share the very best with students. Neither is it based on the fear that students will loathe the work or tear it apart. It stems, I believe, from the disturbing prospect that they will simply react with passive indifference to a much-admired piece of scholarship. I can certainly appreciate that sentiment, and it was therefore with some apprehension that a few years ago I chose to assign Viviana Zelizer’s wonderful study, Pricing the Priceless Child, to students in my freshman seminar on the history of childhood in the Western world.

I need not have worried. Students came to class beaming with enthusiasm. “I loved this book,” announced one of them even before she took off her coat and sat down. “I completely got it,” another added. Even one of the quiet guys sitting in the back of the classroom chimed in. “I told my mom about it,” he said. “I think she will like it.” I am not sure whether it was the same student who later noted in the class evaluation that Pricing the Priceless Child was his/her “favorite reading” and that “I got my mom and my aunt to read it.” Obviously, the book seemed as fresh and thought-provoking to my students as it had to me when I first read it many years ago.

While teaching this class I realized that the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Pricing the Priceless Child was just around the corner. Originally published by Basic Books in 1985 and reissued by Princeton University Press in 1994, the book has by now been read, and appreciated, by many cohorts of historians, sociologists, economists, legal scholars, and education specialists, along with countless numbers of students, teachers, and members of the general public. It has influenced multiple academic disciplines, and it has become an intellectual cornerstone, a “must-read” book for anyone interested in the history of children and childhood. Surely, these accomplishments are worthy of acknowledgement and celebration.

Because of its rich tradition of encouraging interdisciplinary scholarship and discussion, the Social Science History Association (SSHA) seemed a logical academic setting for such a celebration. As co-chairs of the SSHA Network on Children and Childhood, Emily Bruce of the University of Minnesota and I therefore set out to organize a retrospective in honor of Viviana Zelizer and Pricing the Priceless Child to take place at the 2011 annual meeting of the organization. That process was in itself a pleasure: Everyone we approached graciously accepted our invitation to take part in the panel, expressing their appreciation of Zelizer’s work both as scholars and as teachers. The papers that appear below were first presented at that event, and we are grateful to the authors for their willingness to participate and their permission to publish their contributions.

In accordance with conference etiquette, we had to put strict limits on the lengths of each presentation. These papers are therefore relatively short, and several of them are quite informal. However, they capture from a variety of perspectives the intellectual history and legacy of Pricing the Priceless Child, the reflections the book continues to promote, the questions it raises for current scholarship, and the value of its insights for contemporary audiences, including students in college classes. We open this retrospective with Viviana Zelizer’s own reflections on the book, its history, and her current thinking about the issues it raises. We are subsequently treated to the deliberations of historian Paula Fass, who discusses the impact of the book on the field of childhood history. The two following contributions, by historian Michael Katz and then sociologist Daniel Cook, each provide discussions of the historical and theoretical implications of the...