A Few Comments

The essays in this roundtable give us three compelling examples of why the history of children and childhood is such an illuminating way to examine the American or any past. Rebecca, Frances, Nick, and Jennifer trace a number of legal issues that informed the status and rights of various groups of American children in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. They ask how political, social, and economic transitions resulted in the creation of particular liminal legal spaces that held a number of children in contingent status while the United States legal system grappled with changing notions of race, childhood, and labor. Drawing on my studies of the history of child protection, I want to highlight a few common issues to suggest how such histories enable us to understand critical historical topics in new ways.¹

For instance, the authors unite in arguing that the years from the 1860s through the 1930s was a period of challenged hierarchies, traditions, and social mores that proved to be a critical one for the nation and its youth. Their assertion utilizes one of our most fundamental forms of analysis—periodization—on one of the most studied eras in the American past. Just what sets these years apart as a distinctive era for the young? Their responses demonstrate that these were years in Europe and North America when fundamentally new understandings of the young encouraged an ever more refined conception of children as separate and distinct individuals with their own needs and interests and a conception of childhood as a special time for study, growth, and play. The new age consciousness made the distinction between being a child and an adult more and more significant and continues into our time in ways that warrant calling it a modern conception of childhood. Analyzing how contests over this new yet time-bound construct helped spur the creation of liminal legal spaces for particular children reveals the impact of age on the distinctiveness of an era.

For instance, though most accounts of the construction of modern childhood in America elide the Civil War, Frances and Rebecca suggest that the war forced a renegotiation of the relationship between parents, children, and the state over the duties sons owed their families and their country as well as their competence to fulfill those roles. The diverse ages of the youthful soldiers and the range of parental claims for their services suggest that war may have played an unrecognized part in the emergence of systematic age segmentation in the postwar era as youths began to be reconceptualized into adolescents as part of generational changes. Nick and Jennifer raise a different issue: Which children got to have a modern childhood? Apparently not mixed race children deemed legally illegitimate. Yet in using these star-crossed children as trumps in their battle against anti-miscegenation laws, adult activists recognized the power of the new construct, as did many others then and since. Their legal instrumentalism helped create and retain the dependency at the heart of modern conceptions of childhood as it did with other subordinated groups in the era. Jennifer's ironic stories of young professional actors performing an idealized childhood that they could not live compels us to think about the role of fantasy in creating legal policies and practices and its effect on legal actors like Jackie Coogan, whose performances as a vulnerable child may have undercut his legal claims because it reinforced the bright line between children and adults.

Rights and rights consciousness also play a role in each essay since both emerged as critical legal dimensions of modern childhood (and for many other marginalized groups). In this era, age became the basis for a distinctive set of rights for the young, stressed children's needs far more than their autonomy, and found expression in a series of dualities like Protective over Participatory or Welfare over Liberty. Some implications are evident in the way that claims made by and for children in their liminal spaces reveal law to be an arena of conflict, not a fixed body of rules.

Frances and Rebecca write about boys running off to war...