From Superman to Social Realism: Children's Media and Scandinavian Childhood by Helle Jensen (review)

Childhood studies really took off with Philippe Ariès's now classic Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Originally published in French in 1960, and translated into English in 1962, it provided a provocative history of family life among the French middle classes. Since then, the topic has expanded into a full-fledged research field. Despite its French origins, however, the field has been dominated by writing in English about Anglophone countries. Moreover, as David Buckingham points out in his preface to From Superman to Social Realism, discussions of children's relation to media are obsessed with the here and now, the latest gadgets and devices, and there is a great need to assume a broader historical perspective in order to distinguish between the ephemeral and the entrenched patterns of response (ix). Helle Jensen has responded to these challenges with a monograph examining three media debates that took place in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark from the end of the Second World War to the present day. This era saw television enter the private home, often transmitting American media, which carried beliefs that jarred with the political ideology that led to the establishment of the social welfare states that we know today. The volume is primarily of interest to researchers within Scandinavian studies, but also proffers a valuable antidote to the Anglocentrism and neophilia of childhood studies more generally.

Jensen's decision to focus on Scandinavia as a whole rather than on the individual countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway reflects the reality of cross-border discussion in the region. The three national languages are mutually intelligible, especially in their written form. During the first period that Jensen examines (1945 through the mid-1960s), Norway and Denmark were recovering from German occupation during the Second World War, whereas Sweden's neutrality had enabled the country's infrastructure to survive largely unscathed. Throughout this period, all three countries were transitioning from primarily agrarian economies toward the technology and service-industry economies of today. Social welfare was the cornerstone of this development, affecting everything from housing, education, and healthcare to pay and conditions in the workplace and the banning of corporal punishment. The impact on children was significant: immediately after the war, children were such an integral part of the agricultural workforce that school holidays were arranged to coincide with seasonal activities such as harvesting. Today there are strict limits on the number of hours that children can work, and they have vastly more free time. These great social upheavals provide the background for the intense debates about children's leisure time engagements that Jensen examines. Her decision to focus on what children engaged with outside the school context resonates with their departure from the labor market and exposes the fractures between political policy and citizens' behavior.

During this postwar period, debates about children and media focused on the arrival on the Scandinavian market of affordable comics, particularly superhero comics such as Superman. Opposition to these stories focused on their violence, their subjugation of women, and the likelihood of children mimicking the behavior of either the villains or the superheroes. The latter, as one would expect, is key to understanding the underlying theme of all of the debates through the present day. In contrast to American debates on the suitability of material, which have been integrally tied up with the practice of banning books, Jensen shows how the Scandinavian debates have chosen a more pedagogical perspective, as critics endeavored to warn parents of the dangers of this material and promoted alternative homegrown media such as the Swedish Tuff och Tuss (33). The establishment of school libraries, particularly in Sweden, improved access to approved materials. Teachers and other key actors in the education system were also concerned that exposure to these American comics was undermining their attempts to educate their nations' children. Throughout this debate, Jensen identifies the image of the fragile child who needs to be protected from these dangerous materials...