Teaching Pricing the Priceless Child in a Global Context

I’ve taught Pricing the Priceless Child in a wide variety of classes, undergraduate and graduate, including those focused on family and gender but also general US history. I consider it fundamental, part of my personal core curriculum, for its vivid and intricate illustration of the complexity with which I want students to view such concepts as “family values,” commoditization, money, and love. I had an unusual experience with the work in the fall of 2011 when I taught it at NYU–Abu Dhabi in a course on global families and the transition to modernity. My fourteen students came from all over the world—Kuwait, Jordan, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Russia, Hungary, Argentina, India, Canada, China and the US—majority Muslim. They had more difficulty with the work, especially because many came from high schools where they had been taught only to memorize and then repeat. They also had difficulties with distinguishing the various points of view of the various parties in the conflict. So it was a double challenge: they had to understand a complicated piece and to be prepared to discuss it. But they learned quickly and because of their diverse backgrounds they disagreed with each other and had to confront clashing values. As our class discussion illuminated it their comments brought out large differences among them with respect to insuring children. Unfortunately for your royalties, Viviana, I usually use the article rather than the book.¹ But I hope I have made up what you lost in money with the legacy that many of my students have learned a lot from you and know your intellectual prowess.

This piece of work sees the world in this grain of sand, as Blake wrote. It is a multifaceted gem whose every facet lights a path along a different line of analysis. To name some of these lines: There’s the social and familial imperative of burial and the rituals that mark death. There’s the simple history of laboring children—which is not so simple, because it involves both the necessity and the ethic of families’ dependence on children’s contributions. There’s the economic transformation that made laboring children seem to the privileged a vagary of the poor, and sometimes a sign of the greed and callousness of the poor. There’s the commoditization of children’s labor and its complex history. The way that capitalism’s radical expansion of commoditization produced resistance, and the creativity and variety of those resistances. There’s the rise of mothers’ employment. Life insurance. The Victorian sacralization not only of children but also of women and the family in general. The reformers’ sense of responsibility to protect children. Compulsory education. Corporate insurance. This is a work in the history of political economy, family, corporations, class values, gender, and much more. In this sense it is a kind of micro-history or a micro-historical sociology.

In 1992 when Nancy Scheper-Hughes published Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, an ethnography of the Brazilian favelas, she detonated an explosion of objections.² She suggested that some very poor, barely subsisting women were forced by their horrific circumstances to ration their love and favor those infants and toddlers who seemed to have the best chance of survival. Moreover, she suggested that some mothers “collaborated” and “hastened” the deaths of infants thought to be lacking a will (desejo), a knack (jeito), or a taste (gusto) for life. The reformers’ case against burial insurance, as Zelizer showed, rested on a similar charge. So one aspect of the power Pricing the Priceless Child offers in teaching about family is that it directly confronts an almost taboo question: Do poor people love their children less? In my family courses I have paired this with Kathryn Edin and Christopher Jencks’s essay raising a parallel question: “Do Poor Women Have a Right to Bear Children?”³ In other words, discussion of Pricing the Priceless Child raises fundamental questions about the hidden injuries of class.

That in turn leads to a question almost never asked in political-economy scholarship: What is love? In...