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  • Introduction
  • Karen Sánchez-Eppler

This issue celebrates one of the truly crucial books for the history of childhood: Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Short essays by Birgitte Søland, Paula Fass, Michael Katz, Daniel Thomas Cook, Barrie Thorne, Linda Gordon, and Viviana Zelizer herself reflect on the continuing importance of this book, not only for understanding children’s social roles, but also for thinking about the relations between history, sociology, and economics. Like Pricing the Priceless Child, these essays ask what the shifting value of children in the early-twentieth-century United States might suggest about the process of valuation itself. Zelizer’s book charts change. One of the most striking aspects of these probing meditations on her work is how much the “usefulness” of this account has itself changed as it has reached new audiences (see the essays on teaching Pricing the Priceless Child) and as it illuminates new economic and familial structures.

As many of these scholars note, one of the ways that children have indeed proved economically “useful”—even as children’s value as laborers waned—has been in the market role of consumers. The three long essays in this issue focus on young people’s relations to consumption. Emily Hamilton-Honey’s detailed reading of the scrapbooks compiled by two Smith students in the 1890’s provides a wonderfully tangible account of the varied roles commercial establishments played in the education of these young women. Indeed the college boardinghouse itself—an institution mimicking a home—encapsulates many of the patterns Zelizer describes in which emotional value simultaneously diverges from and enhances market value. The effort to sentimentalize economic transactions is rampant in the educational arrangements of the college, the marketing strategies of Northampton shopkeepers, and the girls’ own penchant for making commercial ephemera into keepsakes. L. Halliday Piel’s essay is quite literally about children’s consumption. It details the problems of hunger and malnutrition that beset Japanese children during the 1940s. Through an innovative combination of governmental and medical records, children’s [End Page 351] diaries, adult memoirs and oral history testimony Piel documents not only the shortages of food but also the scavenger strategies with which children found things to eat. These accounts of learning to forage invert peacetime assessments of use, value, and even harm. Finally Jason’s Reid’s account of the post-war teen bedroom makes clear how expensive in terms of both money and space the “priceless child” had become by the end of the period traced in Zelizer’s book. The mutual reinforcing circuit of childrearing advice and real estate sales simultaneously casts these dynamics in psychological and architectural terms: making teen identity and autonomy questions of space, possessions, and decor.

Laura Lovett’s Object Lesson focuses on a 1972 toy explicitly produced by the Women’s Action Alliance to instill non-sexist and anti-racist attitudes. Here children’s play is recognized as serious business, and toys are purposefully enrolled in the radical work of changing values. Reflecting on women’s increased role in the labor force, Viviana Zelizer ended her 1985 book with a similar hope that, in the context of these new family structures, understanding the interrelation of economic and emotional value might assist both families and governments in making better choices about how to value children. [End Page 352]

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