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  • Viviana Zelizer : Giving Meaning to the History of Childhood
  • Paula S. Fass (bio)

Two books are foundational to the now burgeoning field of Childhood and Children’s History. The first is Philippe Ariès’s provocative attempt to contrast childhood in the modern and the medieval periods, Centuries of Childhood. The other is Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child, a book that allowed historians to understand just what the modern conception of childhood was and shaped the direction of their work.1 It would not be too much to say that Zelizer’s thesis allowed historians to move forcefully toward a full exploration of why and how modern childhood was meaningful and important.

Where Ariès, drawing on the Annals School, placed childhood in the landscape of mentalities regarding age, privacy, and play, Zelizer defined the special appeal of modern children in the realm of social values. In so doing, she vastly sharpened our understanding of how exactly childhood came to be a special province of modern society. Everyone who grapples with the nature of childhood since the nineteenth century (and most of us now agree that what we know to be modern childhood begins to flourish only at that point) is deeply indebted to her articulation of the idea of sacralization. In defining and giving substance to this value, Viviana Zelizer laid out the terrain on which we all walk.

So what exactly did she do? In a masterly stroke worthy of Max Weber, Viviana Zelizer placed childhood in a separate column of the ledger of values, apart from and substantially distinct from the dominant commercial values of capitalist society. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and developing strongly by the early twentieth century, children, according to Zelizer, were not evaluated in ordinary transactional terms, but existed in a realm of sentiment and emotion that allowed society to view them in entirely different terms than it did houses and cars. Today, historians of childhood know that children’s romantic appeal—cultivated in nineteenth-century culture by novelists, [End Page 457] philosophers, and artists and subsequently upheld in law and social institutions by women and reformers—recreated our understanding of how children were to be treated in social life. Zelizer not only helped to introduce culture and sentiment into the calculus of values in ways that made sociologists sit up and take notice, but gave a platform to a new historical form of inquiry.

Children’s history had been foundering on the shoals of psychology when Zelizer literally rescued it and brought it back to life by giving it a social space.2 She not only made clear that children in the nineteenth century were no longer being evaluated in commercial terms, but that childhood itself became valuable, introducing an alternative kind of estimation. What was important about studying children historically was not that their psyches somehow shaped culture as some early childhood historians had been arguing, but that children instantiated certain kinds of social value in the late nineteenth century that gave cultural meaning and historical direction to their parents’ affections. These values were strong and important enough to become the ground upon which many institutions and practices grew up to help inscribe those meanings. Childhood—as a sacred realm kept separate from commercial values—was not just a legitimate expression of affection; it was the motor of historical change.

Of course, historians of childhood are now demonstrating that eventually the meaning of childhood was also transformed by those institutions. But that hardly matters to historians today, since it was not one specific form of childhood that made inquiries into the history of childhood worth pursuing, but the fact that values surrounding children had historical weight. Only as children and childhood could be made historically meaningful could historians begin to devote themselves to its serious investigation. This, it should be added, was also something Ariès did as he placed children into a much larger set of historically meaningful patterns of culture and society.

Up to the publication of Viviana Zelizer’s book, many social historians had located children in the context of what was frequently called expressive or affective individualism, a modern family configuration that emerged in...

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