Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus

Preface

vi Children in English­Canadian Society adults strove to take public charge of the historicallyprivate process of grow­ ing up.2 Although he would be the last to entertain this notion, I do not believe it is too much to say that Neil Sutherland has been our own Aries, effectively laying the groundwork and opening up a field of study that, as the millennium commences, is flourishing. When Children in English­Canadian Society appeared in 1976, it was immediately recognized as a landmark text in many ways, beginning with the subject matter itself. Professor Sutherland's study, consequently, made an immediate impact within the fledgling subfields of the "new social history," history of education and history of the family. Using insights derived from analyses of class, gender and race that were really only beginning to challenge the "top­down" narrative so long typifying our histo­ riography, he demonstrated that the so­called "twentieth­century consensus" on childhood was fuelled by middle­class anxieties about the disorder felt to be inherent in the rough confines of emerging urban, working­class and immigrant communities. With his decided emphasis on the children who were the objects of so many reform campaigns, his work also broke through the institutional paradigm characterizing the history of education. At the same time, Children in English­Canadian Society was a clear departure from the heavily demographic and quantified family history that was then laying claim to a vibrant international field of research. Detailing the reconceptualization of childhood as life­stage and cultural experience, and the manner through which this was accomplished by means of family­focused reform initiatives in public health, family law and school­ ing, Professor Sutherland shows how a modernized childhood came to be seen as the nation's true path to a glorious future. A tremendous public faith in the possibilities of ameliorative reform and the continued progress repre­ sented by science and technology, along with new ideas about citizenship and new projects for nation­building, coalesced into an image of the modern Canadian child, healthy, morally upright, productive and "efficient"—moder­ nity's keyword. It is easy to understand the grip that such an image would have on the popular imagination. This was, after all, both "Canada's cen­ tury," and, as championed by Swedish activist Ellen Key—with much rhetor­ icai endorsement across the Western world—also "the century of the child." By 1920, Canadian childhood was a vastly different experience than it had been barely a half­century before. Neil Sutherland's tools for unearthing the details of this transformation are simple and effective: painstaking collation of evidence from an array of sources both public and private; attention to rhetoric, to image and symbol, long before discourse analysis became fash­ Foreword vii ionable; and a genuine empathy for the "enigmatic strangers" themselves, the barely discernible historical creatures who are always at the heart of his story.3 In his new preface to the 1978 edition, he was concerned to ask, "what success did these reformers have?" He surmised that, while childhood is by no means a static, abstract historical category, we of the present day tend to remain committed, "sometimes perhaps to the point of absurdity," to notions framed in the early years of this century. Returning to this question twenty years later, as the century waned, Professor Sutherland considered how Cana­ dian children had fared in "the century of the child."4 Although he acknowl­ edged that our "bewildering array of social problems" might appear to justify despair, his considerable knowledge about the lives of ordinary children in the past, and about the social measures taken to improve those lives, led him to conclude that great improvements in health, welfare and schooling have, in fact, been achieved. Yet these very real signs of progress have not been uni­ versal; they have affected children unevenly, varying, much as always, according to sex, ethnic group and class. Poverty, gender and racial discrimi­ nation, neglect and abuse, persist despite all efforts. What persists above all is the powerlessness of childhood, the contingency at its very base that makes children ever and always at the mercy of those who are stronger, whether adults, or as the recent tragic school massacres indicate, even their own schoolyard peers. He presents a serious challenge to us all: "If we failed to meet these goals in this century, should we not continue to try to reach them in the twenty­first?"5 We are pleased to reissue Children in...