Growing Up: The History of Childhood in Global Context

Lecture 2

Lecture 2 Childhood Amid Modernization and Globalization A few initial vignettes on modern childhood and youth. Every modern society, and ultimately the world as a whole, has experienced vigorous debates about the justifiability of children’s work, and about social versus familial rights to determine this work. Tradition and a great deal of ongoing need argued for work. Modernity pushed for education and often cited childish innocence and vulnerability as key arguments against work, seen as harmful to children and costly to the future prospects of individuals and society at large. The discussion could display some silly proportions, which suggested how challenging the idea of this particular innovation was. In France in the 1830s, where the debate raged prior to the first law limiting child labor in 1841, factory owners argued against confining the work of children under age twelve to eight hours, because it would not mesh with the work day for adults. Almost no one was yet brash enough to argue that young children’s work should be abolished outright, so the question of harmonizing child with adult patterns seemed serious enough. A reformer, J. J. Bourcart, pointed out that two shifts of children could be organized, at seven to eight hours each, thus gaining a real change, including some chance for a bit of education , without disrupting the adult factory schedules. Manufacturers greeted this idea as an imaginative gem: Just think of making 39 child work different from adult work! What a stroke of genius! And so, at least in principle, some of the most forward looking in their number began to agree to the idea of reform.1 In Germany, around the 1880s, unskilled workers were often ridiculed by their more skilled and experienced colleagues because they did not seem to know how to stop having children, thus making their economic lives harder than they already were. Skilled workers, in contrast, knew about what they revealingly called “Parisian devices”—condoms—that began to dissociate sex from procreation at a time when having the traditional number of children was making no sense. This was the same period in which one unskilled worker, Moritz Bromme, reported how his discontented wife paced through their crowded, one-room apartment, looking at their seven kids and muttering about how she wished some of them would die.2 When Japan adopted mass education in 1872, following Western models and building on its own recent tradition of extensive schooling, it found that other new ideas about children came along with this innovation, some of course also imported from the West. Soon, Japanese experts were contending that parents needed advice and guidance in order to deal properly with children —instinct and tradition were not enough, for children were tender flowers that needed special protection; that special playgrounds should be built to organize children’s activities, which otherwise would fall short of developmental goals; and that other institutions, like special laws and courts for juveniles, were essential to reflect the special needs and vulnerabilities attached to childhood, even childhood gone astray. One major change, in other words, seemed to generate a larger recasting of ideas of what childhood was all about.3 40 Growing Up 1 Colin Heywood, Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France: Work, Health, and Education among the “Classes Populaires” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); J. J. Bourcart, De travail des jeunes ouvriers (Paris, 1840). 2 Moritz Bromme, Lebensgeschichte eines modernen Fabrikarbieters (Leipzig, 1905). See also Peter N. Stearns, Lives of Labor: Work in a Maturing Industrial Society (London: Holmes & Meier, 1975). 3 Brian Platt, “ Japanese Childhood, Modern Childhood,” Journal of Social History 38 (Summer 2005): forthcoming. 4 Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 5 Jennifer Cole, “The Jaombilo of Toamasina (Madagascar): Globalization, Agency, and the Transformation of Youthful Gender Relations,” Journal of Social Childhood Amid Modernization and Globalization 41 During the later nineteenth century, doctors in a number of industrializing societies in western Europe and North America began to identify an apparently new disease among young, largely middle class women: the refusal to eat adequately that is called anorexia nervosa. There is some debate about how new this disease was: possibly extreme religious fasting among young women in earlier societies may have been a variant of the same disorder. But modern anorexia seems to have spread initially as an implicit protest against some of the stresses and constraints...