Pricing The Priceless Child: A Wonderful Problematic

Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child stands as a latter-day sociological classic. It is a standard text and a must-read for anyone interested in grasping the emergence of what some may call “modern childhood,” particularly with regard to Global North or minority world childhoods. As is the case with many popularly cited texts, the original context, audience, and argument can fade and become invisible among the new agendas, fields, and modes of inquiry that new readers bring to bear on the material and argument. As well, the argumentation and presentation of evidence of important works like this one often become reduced to a singular restatement of the thesis.

For Pricing the Priceless Child, the thesis maintains that in the 1870–1930 period in US American society, a “profound transformation” in the social value of children took place whereby the “twentieth-century economically useless but emotionally priceless child displaced the nineteenth-century useful child.”¹ It is the thesis for which the book is most often cited and identified as a contribution to knowledge. Popularity, however, can have its pitfalls. It is not an exaggeration to say that many who cite Zelizer have not read Zelizer, or have not read Zelizer as thoroughly as the work deserves. Hence, many do not recognize, acknowledge, or account for the ways in which the history of children serves as a case study, an example, of larger theoretical contentions about the relationship between economic and social-cultural value and explanation.

Initially pitched to economic sociologists, Zelizer’s central argument sought to demonstrate that “cultural” aspects of social life exerted influence on processes many consider to be “purely” economic in nature. In so doing, she helped initiate a line of inquiry that has come to reject dichotomous approaches to the question of the relationship between culture and economy.² For those reading Pricing the Priceless Child through the lens of the emergent field of childhood studies over the recent decades, Zelizer’s theoretical challenge to myopic economistic thinking often gets lost or becomes secondary to the historical thesis about the changing social value of children. It is a rather useful work for those who desire to locate an identifiable period and dimension of historical change regarding the conceptualization of children. Indeed, Pricing the Priceless Child provides a strong case for just such a pinpoint historical pivot, so strong that, at times, the citation of the work in research texts or theoretical tracts appears ritualistic, even perfunctory. The timing and nature of this change, in other words, has become part of the “common sense” knowledge for various kinds of childhood studies (historical, sociological) and, in the process, perhaps has become dulled of some of its ability to offer insight.

In the space remaining, I offer something of a re-articulation of the import of Pricing the Priceless Child in light of the overarching theoretical issues Zelizer originally addressed with an eye on how this work may inform thinking about children’s consumption, children’s consumer culture, and their histories. The substantive issue guiding this foray into Pricing the Priceless Child may be put thusly: How is it that a text written over a quarter century ago that focuses on issues of child labor, child insurance, and black market babies in the US American context of the Progressive Era can be relevant to the historiography of children’s consumer culture and inform research and thinking beyond the American experience? After all, Zelizer barely touches upon consumption in her text, except as it is implied in the changing relationship between children and money in her discussion of child allowances.³ Yet, it is my contention that consumption stands as one of the key sites where children’s value and valuation play out both structurally and in everyday life, thereby positioning it centrally in the recent history of childhood.

A Problematic Beyond the “Problem”

Pricing the Priceless Child retains its conceptual vigor because it engages with a problematic, rather than merely trying to solve a singular problem. That is, it poses problems and questions in such a way that the issues which emerge...