Introduction

The paired fantasies of childhood and empire that Giorgio Riello identifies in the painting Two Children in Asian Clothing, reveal potent imaginative linkages between ideas of childhood and the political and economic power of the State. Riello writes of wider geographies and intimate family affairs, of issues of patronage, trade, and wealth as well as of affection. Such questions of scale, and the relations between the child and the state run through the diverse essays collected in this issue.

“The purity of youth,” Riello notes of this painting, “allowed for a morally safe ground in which to position hybrid and invented identities.” The children of US missionaries to Hawai’i lived just such hybrid identities. Drawing on a wide range of sources from adult editorials and memoirs to childhood letters, Joy Schulz details how the mixed allegiances of these missionary children in culture, language, and citizenship had significant political repercussions, ultimately resulting in their support of revolution and annexation for the islands. Martin Kalb’s study of der verwahrloste Junge, reveals that the public discourse surrounding the delinquent boy in post-WW II Munich radically exaggerated the threat posed by youth. The discourse of moral panic, he argues, proved useful to local authorities in their efforts to assert control over the reordering of Munich society. Tracing the conditions that enable children to grow up to become political actors is, obviously, a very different thing from noting how ideas of youth can be employed to shape and effect political goals and policies. Ginger Frost’s meticulous probing of fifty-three court cases disputing the custody arrangements for illegitimate children in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England, describes a complex middle-ground between individual agency and state authority, the potent role that law can play in adjudicating family life.

The cases Frost studies produce many quite surprising insights: it is startling to realize, for example, how much better mothers fare in custody disputes seeking to claim custody of illegitimate children than in those concerning children born within a marriage. Perhaps the most important thing demonstrated by these cases however is the proof they offer that these children were actively wanted, that mothers, fathers, relatives, non-related caregivers, and charities were willing to go to much expense and trouble to have these children in their care. Affection, as Riello calls it, swirls through most of the essays in this issue, where questions of law and power are often tied to love. The cluster of essays on child marriage that comprise the bulk of this issue, focus on how legal interventions shape families. Frost’s account of the contradictions inherent in a patriarchal legal system ruling on cases of illegitimacy have many echoes in the ways British and American Courts responded to underage marriages, and to the anxieties and rationales that shaped the Child Marriage Restraint Act in colonial India.

Marriage is, of course, an occasion not only for social and religious but also legal and state sanction of family intimacies. The four essay published here expand on papers presented together at the 2011 meeting of the Society for the History of Children and Youth. The connections and divergences between these different historical instances prove fascinating. All four essays—Johanna Rickman’s study of English petitions to annul child marriages upon maturity, Ishita Pande’s account of the issues that shaped the Child Marriage Restraint Act, and Nicholas Syrett’s and Julie Stein’s quite different accounts of the increasing number of twentieth-century US couples who chose to marry young—shift attention away from the ideas of childhood, and particularly girl-hood, innocence and vulnerability that have generally characterized the study of child marriage to raise quite different questions about childhood agency. Rickman and Syrett both show how cannily young people manipulated the legal system to garner the independence from parental control and access to sexual autonomy that they desired. Pande and Stein ask why child marriage became a controversial “problem” in these particular times and places, revealing the power of age as a category for historical analysis. These accounts suggest that a rigid attention to age, something that characterized marriage law in all...