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Reviewed by:
  • Children and Youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era ed. by James Marten
  • Brian Rouleau
Children and Youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
James Marten, ed.
New York: New York University Press, 2014
v + 297 pp., $79.00 (cloth); $27.00 (paper)

With Children and Youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, prolific scholar James Marten has helped assemble a splendid collection of essays that stand at the forefront of both the history of labor and the history of childhood in the United States. The scope and ambition of this volume are truly impressive, particularly given its compact size. Subjects covered include everything from the playground movement and campaigns against corporal punishment in schools to child marriage and deft literary analysis of some of the era’s more celebrated serialized fiction. But despite the array of topics, a few key themes emerge to help organize the anthology. In some way, shape, or form, each author seems keen to demonstrate a dimension of what was, during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, a massive campaign to establish order at a tumultuous moment in the nation’s history. These historians help remind us that we cannot comprehend the scale—and what some at the time would have considered the intrusiveness—of the Progressive reform campaign without looking at families, children, juvenile institutions, and youth culture broadly conceived. Each of those dimensions of American life was the particular focus of those seeking to better the world around them. The many “crises of modernity” brought about by the era’s rampant urbanization and industrialization could be best (and most lastingly) resolved through addressing the concerns of younger generations. Children and adolescents, thought more malleable and more receptive to the sorts of changes reformers would implement, would then grow to govern a decent, just, and equitable nation.

Of course, in any era, the best intentions of social engineers have to compete with the contrary impulses or outright resistance of those they presume to regulate. This was no less true of children during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Cultural engineers and crusaders, often operating under the auspices of the state, frequently found themselves frustrated by the resistance of young people. Children could only be idealized as a more cooperative crowd unencumbered by preexisting prejudices and independent mindedness; as most of these essays reveal, the reality was closer to the complete opposite. Innovative archival work has allowed these scholars to capture the voices and agency of children, often buried within the historical record and rarely exhumed without some difficulty. And what we find, when listening to the youth of that generation, is a cohort of individuals who sought to repurpose well-meaning reform for their own use. This impulse toward reimagining and recycling took a variety of shapes, all effectively chronicled in the collection. And so, for example, we learn that newly minted child labor laws ran up against regional and ethnically specific conceptions of childhood that emphasized the educational and character-building capacity of strenuous work. Or, in another particularly savvy piece, some of the era’s adolescents are shown pushing back on the issue of child marriage, wedding themselves despite parental and legal injunctions, in defiance of emergent adult consensus regarding matrimonial age restrictions. [End Page 104]

But despite this struggle to impose Progressive objectives on a sometimes unwilling cohort of young people, the work continued, in large part because the stakes were seen as so very high. And that conviction was itself in part the product of developing social scientific consensus at the time about the stages of human development. As this volume makes clear, one cannot disentangle the history of Gilded Age and Progressive Era youth from then emergent theories on adolescence. Most famously articulated by Clark University psychologist G. Stanley Hall, the concept of the adolescent posited a stage in life lying between childhood and adulthood and characterized by particular stresses and volatility. Adolescents as a class yearned for independence from their parents and families, and that desire often led to domestic strain and emotionally charged outbursts. When coupled with the adolescent’s struggle with budding sexual desire, the results could be particularly destabilizing. Indeed...

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