Race, Gender, and the Elusive Child

“Young children,” as Barbara Beatty notes in her study of American preschool education, “are the most silent and silenced of historical actors.”¹ Because children, especially preliterate children, “leave relatively few direct records,” they are, as Peter Stearns points out in Childhood in World History, exceedingly “elusive” (2). Historians often resolve this problem by dealing with children in the aggregate: how many siblings were they likely to have, how many were likely to live to age two, to go to school? Moreover, historians have easy access to adult narratives and institutions that articulated and attempted to implement adult understandings of what children ought to be. But such approaches often tell us more about socioeconomic structures and “adult fantasies” than about the experiences of children themselves.²

Reminiscences of childhood pose problems of their own. By the time children are able to control the recording of their words they are usually no longer children, and their memories reflect both the child’s and the adult’s explanations and emotions.³ Thus while histories of children, “flesh and blood human beings of a certain age,” and histories of childhood, the largely adult “cultural construction of ideas” about children, may be separate endeavors, they rarely exist independently of one another.⁴ This interdependence and the resulting sense that children’s voices and viewpoints can never be recovered—that accretions of adult words doom children to silence—have worked to push children to the margins of history.

How, then, can historians move children and childhood to the center of the story, and what sorts of stories emerge as a result? The answers, unsurprisingly, vary. Stearns, whose brief and wide–ranging book begins with hunter–gatherers and ends with global consumerism, understands childhood as a component of “big history.” He is interested in how, with the shift from agricultural to industrial societies, “the basic purpose of childhood was redefined” (5). Childhood, he asserts, “depends first and foremost on economic systems” (131). By contrast, Lisa Jacobson’s Raising Consumers and Heide Fehrenbach’s study of black occupation children in post–World War II Germany and the United States concentrate on the “great symbolic significance” (Fehrenbach, 2) of children, their roles as emotionally charged and therefore politically powerful “cultural icons” (Jacobson, 2). Here adult ideas about children and sometimes children themselves are not merely dependent on great historical changes but are central actors in political and cultural contests over race, gender, and consumption.

In her book on children and childhood in late imperial China, Ping– chen Hsiung likewise draws in substantial ways on adult representations of childhood, but she approaches “the lives of children and the discourse of childhood, which formulates and presents” children’s lives as part of the “same sociocultural ecosystem” (247). She is interested in how the “voice of the young” (242) can be heard in the mediated sources available to historians of children, and in how listening to children “requires a fundamental reexamination of historical outlook” (15). She counters the notion, derived from “examinations of European and American families,” of a linear development from authoritarian and “traditional” childrearing to more permissive “modern” childrearing by demonstrating that in China “both strands of thought and practice existed side by side” (20). Echoing Virginia Woolf’s ironic call for a “supplement to history” in which “women might figure . . . without impropriety,” Hsiung also advocates, and makes a start at supplying, histories of children and childhood that are “not just complementary or supplementary” but that “illuminate...