Childhood in World History, and: The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s, and: Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (review)

Peter Stearns is the author or editor of eighty-four books. His work over the last thirty-five years includes studies of the French working class, an early foray into the history of masculinity in American culture, the history of emotions, as well as histories of gender, body image, obesity, old age, consumerism, and culture contact. Latterly his efforts have turned to the growing field of world history. Childhood in World History is just one example of several books by Stearns in the last few years on some aspect of world history. Stearns's inclusion of childhood in his surveys of world history signals its emergence as a growing subfield in historical studies. A slender volume, reliant on a correspondingly lean literature, it nonetheless spans the globe and all of known human existence. Stearns's treatment is characteristically learned, conceptually sleek, and sensitive to societal and temporal variation. While frank in its acknowledgement of the improvements in children's lives—particularly over the last 150 years—it is intensely skeptical about whether the gains in children's material and physical well-being over the same period have been worth the cost spiritually and culturally.

As almost every historian of childhood will note, children in the past are particularly elusive historical subjects because even more than adults, they leave behind few traces of their lives. The historical "record" of prehistorical peoples makes this task even more difficult, yet Stearns summarizes what is known (or reasonably surmised) to address an important transition in the care and regard for children from early societies of hunters and gatherers to societies based on agriculture, roughly 10,000 years ago. Transient by definition, hunter-gatherers could not carry more than one child at a time and so it is speculated that women rarely had as many as four children over the course of their reproductive lives. With the rise of agricultural economies family size increased and led to the eventual expansion of human populations as agriculture crept across the world. This marked the advent of the major epoch in human civilization and established the essential outlines of children's roles, functions, and treatment in societies everywhere that, despite variations owing to religion, social structure, and political practices, shared more similarities than differences for thousands of years.

It was during this lengthy era that children's utility as household members became a central feature of the family's functioning. In addition to contributing to the production of foodstuffs they learned crafts and became essential to home manufacturing. The enlarging capacity to produce food meant that more children could be supported, resulting in a key demographic change: the birth rate climbed as six or seven children were born, on average, to each family, making the "agricultural centuries" ones in which villages "were full of children," who usually exceeded half the total human population (12). Higher fertility rates were necessitated in large part by the intensive nature of agricultural labor; moreover, because average life spans remained short and infant mortality high, fertility was elevated for thousands of years. Other important social changes were realized during this period as well. Ties with extended family and especially grandparents became more prominent than previously and gender distinctions grew stronger. The ability to accumulate wealth in agricultural economies meant that social distinctions multiplied and at every social level patriarchy began to take root as men assumed control of crop raising and relegated females to necessary but supporting roles in the household economy. Extending from this, property holding and the inheritance of property was ultimately limited to men in many societies and...