Evidences of Childhood

In the same spirit that we read slave narratives and the diaries of pioneer women to gain insights about those societies, we may read Small Worlds to seek illumination about the contributions made by an often poorly understood group of people: America's children from 1850 to 1950. Through such peripheral evidence as their toys, interviews with children in reform school, or the study of children's patronage of turn-of-the-century nickelodeons, the fourteen essayists here try to recreate that for which we often have little first-hand account. Since the essayists must rely upon interviews and autobiographical evidence, among other sources, we are not provided a comprehensive view of childhood in the United States in this century, but rather an anecdotal mosaic that shows how varied we have been. Perhaps emblematic is N. Ray Hiner's photographic essay of 53 images dating from 1847 to 1960, which again makes no single point about American childhood in general but allows us to look directly into the faces of the young people who became us.

Hiner's essay shows children proudly displayed like richly appointed possessions, and, in contrast, children persecuted by child labor, segregation, disease, and abuse. The images present as many children working as playing. The picture West and Petrik have compiled is a good indicator of our preoccupations and prejudices as a multicultural society: Vicki L. Ruiz's view of young Mexican-American women in the middle of the twentieth century, Victoria Bissell Brown's "Female Socialization among the Middle Class of Los Angeles, 1880-1910," Ruth M. Alexander's "Wayward Girls in New York, 1900-1930," and Robert L. Griswold's "Children's Attitudes toward Fathers, 1900-1930" serve as examples of these race and gender concerns. Likewise, it is interesting as well as fun to note that in an age when we worry that our sons and daughters are too attached to the television set, the same concern was raised about cheap movie houses in 1910 and radio in the 1940s. William M. Tuttle, Jr., in his "Radio, Movies, Comics—Adventure, Patriotism, and Sex-Typing," a study of the grim news about World War II which the young received relatively unfiltered through the radio and Life magazine, makes the point that children have a deep need to be informed and often know more than we realize or should control. This is also evident in editor Paula Petrik's contribution on the proliferation of amateur adolescent newspapers made possible by the Novelty Toy Printing Press and other relatively cheap portable printing machines near the end of the last century. The adolescents active in this hobby from 1870 to 1886 formed conventions such as the National Amateur Press Association and hotly debated such current topics as the vote for women and the rights of African Americans.

A continuing motif throughout the book is the generational shifts in perception that children bring. For instance, editor West's essay "Children on the Plains Frontier" shows us that while pioneer parents homesteading in the Midwest held onto a nostalgic vision of the East's populous towns and cities and its more sophisticated entertainment, their children grew up in the Plains, working hard, and formed their definition of the world from their own landscape. Likewise, Selma Berrol and Ruiz point out in their essays how such institutions as public school directed immigrant children away from the values of their parents, who always had a foot in their country of origin. This is of course the way with children, whom the future always tugs away from us toward new worlds. Nevertheless, Liahna Babener reminds us that the homesteading that settled the middle of our country was tough going:

when lifetime resident Clara Lenroot begins her uncelebrated memoir Long, Long Ago with the wistful evocation of her hometown, Hudson, Wisconsin, pining for the simpler yesterdays of her rural upbringing and then leads readers through a grim tale of withering poverty, dispiriting routine, and personal entrapment, we are confronted with the need to...