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ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842



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Playing at Class

Karen Sánchez-Eppler


Class and childhood are both highly visible yet often under-theorized features of nineteenth-century American identity, perhaps for the same reason: national ideologies of class promise that in the United States poverty, like childhood, is merely a stage to be outgrown. In this essay I will think about class conversely as an identity to be grown into and about childhood as a powerful site for such growth. That childhood is individually our most important period of identity formation has been a stable presumption of gender theory. I want to suggest that how childhood is imagined and inhabited similarly provides one of the most potent mechanisms of class formation, and one comparatively little explored. 1 Moreover, not only is class identity constructed in childhood, but in nineteenth-century America childhood itself is increasingly recognized as a sign of class status. The invention of childhood entailed the creation of a protracted period in which the child would ideally be protected from the difficulties and responsibilities of daily life--ultimately including the need to work. "For the history of children," Priscilla Clement explains, "the legacy of industrialization was the hardening of class lines," with middle-class families' exemption of their children from labor as one of the strongest markers of their difference from the lower classes. 2 Thus to the extent that childhood means leisure, having a childhood is in itself one of the most decisive features of class formation. Yet since the "work" from which children were exempted never fully includes household labor, these general shifts in the definition of childhood function quite differently for girls than for boys.

Historians of leisure have charted the rising valuation of play throughout the nineteenth century while historians of the family have described the period's idealization of childhood. 3 My concern is with the links between these trends, as the same patterns of urbanization and industrialization that separate workplace from home, labor from leisure simultaneously function to commodify leisure-time and to idealize middle-class domesticity, especially that of childhood. "Play," explains Bronson Alcott in justification of his pedagogical proposals, "is the appointed dispensation of childhood." This wonderfully un-playful phrasing presents child's play as part of the created order of things. "Appointed dispensation" [End Page 819] emphasizes in its very redundancy the guiding wisdom--divine and/or social--that regulates human affairs, and Alcott's discussion of children's play focuses on how teachers should use play to ready children for the "loftier claims" of "instruction" and "advancement." 4 Alcott, writing in 1830, was among the nation's earliest champions of children's play, and his defense of its "designed purpose" shows the marks of the culture's general view of leisure as a largely suspect activity and childhood as besmirched by infant depravity and original sin. 5 By the time Macy's opened the nation's first toy department in 1875 the merchandising of children's toys epitomized how leisure, not work, would drive the consumption patterns of mature industrial capitalism. The 1870 census would be the first to track children's employment, and it would be in the 1870s, too, that states would begin passing laws regulating child labor. 6 These are enormous and extremely swift shifts in the cultural understanding of childhood, work, and play. I will focus my exploration on the verge of transition--the decades of the 1850s-1870s--and on the figure of the working child, whose need to labor stands in potent opposition to the burgeoning idealization of childhood as a life-stage appointed for play. 7

This is not a simple story of play-time's haves and have-nots, for with remarkable consistency it is the working child who is seen to embody play, and hence teaches the middle class about fun. By the end of the century, play--and the worlds of the imagination--would have become cultural markers for what was marvelous about childhood, and this culturally valuable play would be recognized as an attribute of middle-class affluence and leisure. Yet, and this...

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