By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (review)

Those who might expect from its title that this book is about the experience and social history of children in Britain and the United States in the early-modern period will be disappointed. Aside from a few interesting vignettes, this book does not focus on the experiences of children but rather on how ideas about children fit into the changing intellectual and ideological theories of the time. Within that framework, the author does a masterful job of relating debates about children's abilities and status to the transition from a society based on birth status to one of consent and contract.

Although many intellectual and legal historians have probed this transition, Brewer brings new insights to it by examining in detail how legal and social philosophers perceived the role of children; she also incorporates actual legal practice into her analysis, thus strengthening her argument. Brewer ranges widely with chapters on patriarchy, the relation between religion and political theory, the problem of legitimate consent to governmental authority and changes in common law regarding children, and the role of parental custody. Brewer claims that the arguments about children's roles in all of these areas reveal a much larger pattern of fundamental change in ideas about human nature and the sources of authority. She insists that until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the social status of children was much more important than their age in every aspect of life, including acting as witnesses or jurors, exercising political authority, making contracts, and serving in the military. That is, children of high status could participate in these activities in ways that those of lower status could not. Brewer wisely rejects the discredited interpretation of Ariès that children were simply seen as miniature adults or that parents did not love their children.¹ Throughout the book she presents evidence, largely from legal records, that provide proof that children's social status was much more significant that their age.

Brewer carefully documents the ways in which the Protestant Reformation's challenge to Catholicism was the precursor to political debates about the doctrine of consent as a basis for government. She relies on Locke's work to show that informed consent and the development of understanding or reason came to be seen as the only legitimate source of authority in English society as well as in the American colonies.² This fundamental notion of authority may have led to democratic-republican governments, but it also led to exclusionary practices. Because children could not give consent, their fathers gained more authority over them; the importance of parental custody, along with family patriarchy, increased in the eighteenth century.

By extension, as Brewer points out in the last chapter, the belief that reasoning ability was crucial to participation in the political process served as justification for the exclusion of groups defined as lacking reason. In the early nineteenth century, the perception of women, slaves, and Indians, among others, as childlike and irrational rendered them ineligible to participate in politics or even decisions about their own lives. Ironically, the transition from authoritarian to democratic states, while eroding the privileges of rank and birth status, also led to exclusionary policies based on age, gender, race, and ethnicity. Brewer's argument is that the debate about children's reasoning abilities was the foundation of claims that social groups defined as childlike could not claim the right to act as autonomous members of society.

This book will be useful for intellectual historians, legal scholars, and even social historians who wish to integrate the philosophical and legal debates about children into the fields of family and childhood history.