Freedom To Play: We Made Our Own Fun (review)

Freedom To Play: We Made Our Own Fun is the most recent addition to the Wilfrid Laurier University Press series Studies in Childhood and Family in Canada.

Although the scope of this series is interdisciplinary, five out of the seven books published to date focus on the history of the family. And this sub-discipline needs a boost. After the first flush of pioneering research into the history of the family in Canada in the late 1970s - with the work of historians such as Neil Sutherland, Joy Parr, John Bullen, and Alison Prentice - the field of family, and most particularly childhood, history fell into the doldrums through the 1980s and 1990s. Recent years have seen a renewal in interest in the field, and childhood and family history are again appearing more regularly in Canadian journals and publishing houses.

The Wilfrid University Press series, under the general editorship of one of Canada's leading historians of the family, Cynthia Comacchio, is clearly an important part of this resurgence in interest. In 1999, the press published a translation of Denyse Baillargeon's remarkably detailed and insightful study of family life, Ménagères au temps de la crise (Montreal: Éditions du Remue-ménage, 1991), now titled Making Do: Women, Family and Home during the Great Depression.

In 2000, it republished Neil Sutherland's seminal Children in English Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth Century Consensus, originally published in 1976, with a new introduction by Cynthia Comacchio. In 2001, the press published the evocative and informative Love Strong as Death: Lucy Peel's Canadian Journal, 1833-1836, edited by Quebec historian J.I. Little. The journals document Lucy Peel's three-year sojourn with her husband, an officer with the British navy, in the Eastern Townships. A fourth book in this eclectic series is Brian Lowe's nfb Kids: Portrayals of Children by the National Film Board of Canada, 1939-1989, published in 2002. This book explores representations of children in mid-twentieth-century Canadian society through the lens of Canada's leading documentary film firm.

Freedom to Play: We Made Our Own Fun reflects the series' interest in the experience of family life, by exploring the 'games, activities and amusements' that were part of the culture of Canadian childhood between 1900 and 1950. Norah Lewis drew together three different kinds of sources about childhood play. She made excellent use of letters written by children to the 'children's clubs' in five rural newspapers in Canada between 1900 and the mid-1950s. These children's letters contain a rich, if child-like, source of information about children's games and activities. A second and more reflective source of childhood memories about play came from Lewis's interviews with people recalling their childhood. Finally, the author drew on a number of published memoirs that included detailed accounts of childhood games and leisure activities.

These descriptions of childhood play, and the feelings they evoked as they were experienced and remembered, are mixed together in the volume. They vary considerably in length, from three-line snippets of information to five-page reflections on childhood past and present. The editor has organized these recollections in loosely thematic chapters pertaining to kinds of play, such as 'Go Outside and Play,' 'Creating Their Own Equipment,' and 'Playing Is Playing Games.'

However, the memories of childhood play recounted in this volume provide information and impressions of childhood culture that will certainly be of more interest to the general public than to historians of the family. Certainly, its central themes of freedom and independence reflected in the titles 'Freedom To Play' and 'We Made Our Own Fun' will resonate nostalgically with many of those who grew up between 1900 and 1950. This collection of memoirs, however, made this historian of the family think nostalgically of history books that have used similar materials - oral and written memoirs of childhood - to situate the powerful and evocative memories of childhood within a more...