Guest Editors’ Introduction

We live in a death-and-dying-averse culture. And since death now tends to be relegated to the later lifecycle phase, known as old age, we as a society are even more uncomfortable when it comes to child death. Despite this truism, Kathleen Jones received an overwhelming response to her call for participants interested in young people and death for the 2013 SHCY conference in Nottingham. From three intriguing and diverse conference “death” panels comes this special issue that weds children and youth studies with the history of death.

Since the 1970s in Western social history, the study of death has animated family history, demography, and histoire des mentalités, enriching insights into public and private lives of the past. As the big tomes of death history—like Philippe Ariès’ 1975 Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident—have shown, a focus on death can shed light on many aspects of the human condition, from grief to commemoration. When historians and other humanists acknowledged child death they have done so usually within the confines of the vulnerability of early childhood and high mortality rates from infectious diseases. The articles collected in this volume suggest how much more can be learned about childhood and about death by working at the intersection of the two subjects.

The authors represented here explore the cultural meanings attached to child deaths, the experiences of mourning the loss of a child, the relative consciousness of death in childhood, and the social consequences that resulted from the deaths of young people. They do so by examining infant and youth mortality from a variety of causes—including disease, neglect, accidents, suicide, and war—and the meanings associated with those endings. The essays in this volume, including the object lesson, consider the topic of childhood and death from multiple perspectives and methodologies. They draw upon approaches from social work and archival studies, art history, social and cultural history, oral history, and the history of the emotions and memory to explore a rich array of sources, including a quilt made by a mother and daughter in mourning, inquest and coroners’ reports, newspaper accounts, records from children’s institutions, interviews with Palestinian mothers, and visual culture depicting child death. In doing so, these authors draw attention to the effects of class, race, ethnicity, region, religion, and gender in shaping both the experience and the representation of child death. Taken together, these studies help us to understand connections between the lives young people led and the ways they died, the spaces that put young people at risk for death, and the manner in which dying is as much a social as it is a physiological process.

Our hope, in putting together this issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, is as much to raise questions as it is to provide answers. How has childhood death taken on new meanings along with changing mortality rates and changing ideals of childhood, and where do we find continuity? Why are some children memorialized and remembered while others are dismissed and forgotten? What has been the role of the state in characterizing child deaths and the risk of death? How do we reconstruct—in what sources can we find—the meaning of death in the lives of young people as well as adults who mourned them (or forgot them)? How are children and youths taught to reflect upon or protect themselves from early death, and how do they learn the emotional and material practices of mourning? What insights into the lives of children could be gained by comparative, cross-cultural studies of these questions across time? We look forward to future conversations about this painful but critically important aspect of childhood studies.