Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective eds. by N. Ray Hiner, Joseph M. Hawes (review)

292 Shorter Book Reviews point, that Americans "still grapple with the [Victorian] legacy, [which]while seriously modified... was not to be reversed" (68). I think that the authors demonstrate variations on basically Victorian themes more convincingly thanthey present linear emotionological evolution. The modem managerial mode they depict more nearly resembles Victorian denial than Progressive channeling.In addition to this underlying continuity, the authors identify with their grandparents when they wish us to reassemble ourselves as neo-Progressives. As I readthem. the Steamses actually advance, more than they have realized, a cyclical model, filledwith sophisticated qualifications and permutations. This framework fitstheir data with more elegance and explanatory power than does modernization theory Inelegance of composition and literary style do mar this book. Taking thesame emotionological mode through all its settings in workplace, family, schooland marriage, rather than exploring expressions of anger as well as other emotions. often becomes repetitious. Ironically, the writing style is most often modem: cool, detached, social scientific. Far better are those few passages in whichthe authors let their own anger about anger control out of their carefully, if perhaps unconsciously, monitored scholarly discipline! It must be remembered that this is an innovative book in a developing field. Thus there is no clear and conventional way of handling this topic, and the authors are tobe praised for their thought-provoking, experimental probing. And thetopic of anger is highly charged and of central historical and cultural importance. Anger, not sex, is the great modem taboo, especially for intellectuals. The Steamses have turned over one of the big stones blocking the path to human freedom, and one can only hope that many other scholars, feelings at least somewhat out of control, will follow along the trail they have blazed. Michael Fellman Department of History Simon Fraser University, B.C. N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes, eds. Growing Up in America: Childrenin Historical Perspective. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. xxv + 3!Opp. Illus. Although in 1971 David Rothman greeted the first volume of Robert Bremner's Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History as "Documents in Search of a Historian,'' the present collection of journal articles-all but two published from 1975 through 1980-shows that the history of childhood soon became a flourishing subfield of social history. The book has faults: there aretoo many misprints and no notes or index; such a collection unavoidably missesmajor work that appeared in book form; and inclusion of only one item publishedafter Shorter Book Reviews 293 1980 is odd. But Hiner and Hawes have assembled an interesting selection that revealsthe early strengths and weaknesses of this subfield and have added good bibliographiesthat carry the subject through to 1984. As advocated by Hiner and Hawes and practised by most of their authors, the historyof childhood contributes to the process of subdivision that has enriched but fragmented social history. The editors urge historians to emphasize the uniquenessof childhood; only a few of their authors manage either to describe growingupas socialization for adulthood or to portray childhood experiences as influences on the broader American culture. William McLaughlin vividly describes how FrancisWayland (1790-1865) used will-breaking to imbue his sons with his own obsessiveconcerns for filial submissiveness and paternalistic dominance; more tentatively, McLaughlin suggests that such obsessions may have warped Americanmen 's treatment of women, blacks, and other purportedly child-like groups. Drawingupon nineteenth-century children's literature, child-rearing advice, and descriptions of classroom management, Daniel Rodgers sketches shifting norms of steady habit and romantic impulsiveness that may have socialized children poorly for adult work. David Wiggins finds connections between adult slave cultureand slave children's play. Otherwise, socialization is ignored or at best confinedto tantalizing asides, such as Daniel Blake Smith's speculation that the blend of autonomy and affection he finds in eighteenth-century Chesapeake planters' child rearing raised generations of strong-willed political leaders. Hiner and Hawes have favored articles that portray colonial childhood in relatively modem terms as a distinct stage of life watched over by caring parents. Ross Beales argues that childhood and youth were thoroughly differentiated from adulthoodin colonial New England, while Peter Slater shows the love of bereaved Puritanparents coping surprisingly well with the theology of...