The Priceless Child as History

When it came time to prepare for the symposium marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Viviana Zelizer’s, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children,¹ I took down my much thumbed, underlined, original hard cover version of the book. Opening it, a note fell out. It was from my colleague Michael Zuckerman to whom I had lent the book shortly after its publication. The note read, simply, “This is a wonderful book.” And indeed it is.

The excitement I felt on first reading recurs on each re-reading. It is one of the rare books whose conceptual brilliance and sharp insights keep it from becoming dated. I have assigned the book often to undergraduate and graduate students, always eliciting admiration and a productive discussion. My thick folder of notes from teaching the book is full of questions and comments from students during the decades since its publication.

What do they like so much? For one thing, Pricing the Priceless Child is unusual in the admiration it elicits from historians as well as sociologists. For its base in archival research is superb: deep, thorough, and imaginative. I remember that when Viviana Zelizer was working on the book, she talked with me about her important discovery of allowances given to children in the early twentieth century. My reply was that while this certainly was of great interest, it surely must have been class based, not something found in working-class families. By the next time we talked, she had discovered evidence for its practice in working-class families, too. This is a book with its head in theory and its feet in the archives.

Going over old notes, this is what I emphasized about the book to students: (1) It is an example of the history of the life course, that is, of how the life course is socially and culturally constructed. (2) It provides an effective counter to purely economic-based interpretations of major changes in social policy and practice. (3) It shows how values intervene between price and value to shape markets. (4) Building on the preceding two points, it makes clear that money must be understood for its symbolic, not just for its exchange, value. (5) In the course of telling its story, the book contributes powerfully to understanding the meaning of the “socialization of reproduction” and the rise of experts, two of the most consequential trends of the twentieth century. If some of these points sound more familiar today, it is largely on account of Viviana Zelizer’s leadership of the field of economic sociology in this and her subsequent books and essays.

In the years since the publication of Pricing the Priceless Child, I have thought a lot about the context in which the book’s story took place and about the book’s meaning for today. These are the topics which the rest of these brief remarks will address.

First, context. The special aspect of context that interests me is the parallel changes in other components of the life course, notably old age and what we have come to call adolescence.

Despite the work of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, it is remarkable how most popular discussions naturalize life stages, treating exceptions from the standard pattern as surprises or deviations. This is often a consequential mistake because it leads to a poor fit between policies and institutions, on the one hand, and lived experience on the other. A case in point, I have long thought, is secondary education where fixed notions of “high school” and “adolescence” blithely ignore the lives of kids on the ground, a point recognized by educational critics of the 1960s and 1970s like Paul Goodman but largely lost in subsequent discussions.²

Children were not the only group redefined and removed from market work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I have often discussed Pricing the Priceless Child along with Carol Haber’s book on old age, Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America’s Past.³ Interesting parallels link developments at both ends of the life course. Both children and the...