American Studies and Childhood Studies: Lessons from Consumer Culture

Why is the field of childhood studies relevant to American studies? As R. Gordon Kelly pointed out in a seminal American Quarterly essay in 1974, studying childhood and the culture surrounding it provides crucial insights into core values and practices of our society, revealing how American culture reproduces itself in the younger generation.¹ Classic inquiries into "American character" recognized this basic fact: anthropologist Margaret Mead, for instance, observed in 1942 that "just as one way of understanding a machine is to understand how it is made, so one way of understanding the typical character structure of a culture is to follow step by step the way in which it is built into the growing child."²

Scholars of certain historical eras—perhaps most notably the post–World War II period—have paid special attention to children as "barometer[s] of American life" (to use Richard Pells's formulation), but only relatively recently have works with children as their focus begun to gain the sustained attention of American studies scholars.³ However, a strain of exciting scholarship by people such as Karin Calvert, Katharine Capshaw Smith, Gary Cross, Paula Fass, Miriam Forman-Brunell, Sherrie Inness, Henry Jenkins, Kenneth Kidd, Lynne Vallone, and others, in what has come to be called "childhood studies" should be of interest to all scholars of American studies.⁴

The three books reviewed here implicitly or explicitly suggest that we cannot understand consumer culture as a defining feature of twentieth-century America without examining its development in relation to children and childhood. Yet even as Americans increasingly define themselves by the goods they buy, own, and consume, we often view children as somehow apart—or ideally apart—from the crass realm of commerce. As Daniel Cook notes in the introduction to The Commodification of Childhood, "in various ways . . . childhood stands apart from the market even as children are born, live, and grow in tandem with commercial culture" (7). The irony of this false separation is compounded by the fact that "bad" consumption tends to be corrected not by limiting consumption, but by introducing "beneficial" consumer goods. As one nursery school educator argued in the 1920s, "[if] our stimulation is to compete with Satan's . . . we must provide legitimate thrills."⁵ These three books argue that the tension between consumerism and childhood in the modern era was not simply reconciled but actually employed in service of their mutual development.⁶

Growing emphasis on providing edifying activity, entertainment, and goods for children marked not simply a new relationship between children and consumer culture but also crucial transformations in both phenomena at the beginning of the twentieth century. During the same period that the United States underwent a profound shift from a production-oriented economy to a consumer-oriented economy, childhood was likewise redefined. As the nation shifted from its agricultural roots to an urban, bureaucratized economy, the child, removed from the labor force, was sacralized: valued for sentimental rather than instrumental reasons.⁷ This "priceless" child was also increasingly studied, codified, regulated, and protected through the new fields of pediatrics and child psychology, new agencies devoted to child welfare such as the Children's Bureau (established in 1912), and the rise of compulsory schooling, child study programs, and "scientific" regimes of parenting. All of these new patterns of study and regulation shifted public attention away from the immigrant/working-class child in need of "saving" and toward the "normal" child whose development parents would want to emulate in their own offspring, and whom advertisers would...