Childhood Studies Meets Early America

The three titles considered here point to the burgeoning scholarship on childhood emerging in the past several decades, a body of work that is now collectively identified as “childhood studies.” While current practitioners in this field encompass the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, sociology and cultural anthropology were the first (and most vociferous) to claim their multidisciplinary work on childhood as constituting a coherent field. The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies (2009), for example, is dominated by sociological approaches. Yet childhood studies raises a number of interesting questions within the humanities as well. In her introduction to The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, Anna Mae Duane boldly argues that “to include the child in any field of study is to realign the very structure of that field, changing the terms of inquiry and forcing a different set of questions” (1). This claim is common among childhood studies scholars, and while it is clear that childhood is a ripe area of analysis, its field-changing goal has yet to fully bear fruit.

As a site of inquiry, age is unique. Childhood provides a temporary social identity, and one that every adult has personally experienced. A scholar who analyzes childhood, then, is always both an insider and outsider, someone treading on both familiar and foreign ground. Yet for all its familiarity, childhood has been and is experienced differently according to subject position. In some places and at some times, for example, children might constitute half the human population, making it far from a minority identity in terms of numbers. This fact alone makes childhood a critically important area of study. Given the paucity of scholarship on children, we don’t yet know, for example, how the population density of youth might intersect with children’s access to power.

As a field, childhood studies takes cues from interdisciplinary approaches to the study of underrepresented populations founded in the postwar era: women’s studies, African American studies, and ethnic studies, for example. Like these areas of inquiry, childhood studies is concerned not only with bringing to light overlooked historical actors, their cultural productions, and the institutions that shape(d) their lives but also with what the omission of their experiences from scholarly accounts has meant for narratives of both past and present. In other words, what distortions of understanding have materialized because the lived experience and rhetorical deployment of childhood have not been scrutinized? What can we learn by adding age as a category of analysis, alongside gender, race, and class?

Unlike women’s studies, African American studies, ethnic studies, and other such interdisciplinary fields arising in the wake of the civil rights movement and establishment of the interdisciplinary American studies framework, however, childhood studies has not grown out of political organization by children in the academy—for obvious reasons. Some have pointed to the adult-authored 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as a trigger for the emergence of the field, arguing that it—like other “emancipatory fields”—sprang from and is rooted in an activist agenda. But the degree to which scholars and others involved with cultural objects, programs, and institutions created for youth understand their work as entailing an activist agenda differs. In her essay in The Children’s Table, “I Was a Lesbian Child: Queer Thoughts about Childhood Studies,” Sarah Chinn critiques the field for not being political enough, claiming that “[c]hildhood studies is resolutely historicized, not to say historical” (160). It “seldom articulates a political mission” (161). Yet the field’s emphasis on children’s agency, voice, and the methodology of ethnography—sometimes extending to the solicitation of children’s ideas for research agendas themselves...