NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

	Presidential Address       Kriste Lindenmeyer   University of Maryland, Baltimore County
President-Elect Paula Fass presenting President Kriste Lindenmeyer with a plaque in recognition of her many contributions to SHCY

Moving Into the Mainstream:

Childhood, Dependency, and Independence in U.S. History

I am humbled to address this distinguished group. I could spend the next twenty minutes highlighting your important contributions and thanking you for helping to build the history of children, childhood, and youth as a viable field. Hum…that would probably go over fairly well. But instead, I am going to take more of a risk and ask for your reaction to some ideas I have about how to better integrate our field into the mainstream historical narratives. After all, it is the nature of modern historical methodology to be critical. This reminds me of a twist on an old joke. A new recruit, who happens to be a historian, enters a monastery. There he is told the rules that must be followed for the next year before he can be a full member.

1) He would be required to get up an hour before dawn each morning for prayers.

2) He would be required to spend each day in the library until dusk.

3) He would receive a simple meal each evening and then go to bed.

4) And, most important, he must be entirely silent for a full year except during three meetings with the head of the monastery when the initiate would be allowed to utter two words ---so a total of six words for the entire year.

After the first four months our recruit, (I’ll call him John) is asked about his experience.

“BED HARD” he responds.

And after the 2^nd four months:

“FOOD BAD”

And after the 3^rd

“I QUIT”

When the head monk was asked why John quit, he responded,  “It isn’t a surprise, after all, he was a historian and you know them, they criticize everything.”

So, in that spirit, I ask for your constructive criticism.

As many people have pointed out at this conference, the history of children, childhood, and youth has matured from what some critics called the lunatic fringe of historical scholarship to a perspective that legitimately challenges the historical diversity mantra of interpretive subfields: race, gender, class, and ethnicity. I assume that for most of us this is progress, but it will not be easy to bring our work from inclusion in the subfield mantra to entrance into the inner circle of mainstream history. Some people at this conference have been able to cross this gap, but it is not the norm for the field.

Perhaps we can learn from other fields. Children are often used as key indicators for answering the big questions in many disciplines. For example, public health researchers and advocates generally accept infant mortality rates and child health data as the most important signals of a society’s general health. Psychiatrist and psychologists look to children’s lives for keys to understand human development. Sociologists and public policy scholars focus on efforts directed at children as evidence of a community’s overall commitment to social welfare. Others note the successes and failures of public schools as predictors of the chances for future economic growth and prosperity. In a similar way, I believe that the history of children, childhood, and youth can serve as the, or at least a, major indicator of the primary trends encompassing the human experience. In other words, does the history of children, childhood, and youth provide special insights about historical themes already in the inner circle of mainstream history? Can the history of children, childhood, and youth provide a prism which intensifies insights for better understanding all history.

For the next few minutes I want to present a possible example from my own field, United States’ history. (That sounds like an Alcoholics Anonymous confession---“My name is Kris and I’m an alcoholic”---I mean United States’ historian). I am not suggesting that everyone use the specifics of my U.S. model. Instead, I want to urge you to use the idea behind the model to illuminate the useful perspectives of children’s history in your own specific areas of study, be they national, regional, or thematic. As an historian of the United States (and childhood in that country) I gravitate to two words that I think lie at the heart of American history:

Independence and Dependence

Some of the most successful (influential books) in U.S. history relate to the political and philosophical rhetoric that rests at the foundations of American identity. Words and phrases such as, freedom, democracy, the idea that all men are created equal, and the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (even if the later should probably say life, liberty and the purchase of happiness). As many historians have show, the history of the United States is the story of the struggle over the meaning and application of these ideas. Studying the history of children and adolescents (especially related to the development of public policy and America’s semi-welfare state) has raised a new wrinkle for me in the traditional historiographical debate. In other words, I believe that using insights from the history of children, childhood, and youth offers a window to the fundamental core of American history; the power shifts overtime between the ideas and practical applications of INDEPENDENCE and DEPENDENCE.

Today as in the past, being labeled as dependent in America suggests inadequacy, incompetence, immaturity, and a lack of self-determination or free choice. Dependents are viewed as docile, well behaved, having limited free choice, but in exchange generally depicted (at least by proponents of the existing structure of dependency) as carefree and happy recipients of benevolent protections that keep them from being dirtied or corrupted by the full realization of independence (for example, think pro-slavery arguments, anti-female suffrage, and domestic sovereign status for American Indians). As an American ideal, dependency is a status to avoid.

Most of the mainstream narrative about U.S. history points to independence as key to American identity, but few use the word dependence as the comparative context for understanding the past. I believe this is the case because since the colonial period, various groups and individuals have used language about independence, freedom, and rights to displace the social, political, and economic limitations justified under the mantel of dependency by those that held power. Interestingly, very different from almost every other group I can think of, advocates for children have held up dependency (not independence) as a desirable ideal that is a right of all American children. In fact, looking at the relationship between independence and dependency seems to be at the root of why the modern ideal of a protected and extended childhood dependency through adolescence began to take root in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.[1]

The Root Meaning of Independence and Dependence in the United States

For American revolutionary leaders in 1776, the Declaration of Independence justified the thirteen colonies’ rebellion against the king and parliament. The men that created the American Revolution equated independence with freedom. Many argued that by 1776, the once protective mother (Britain) had become a tyrant, partly due to changed policies in England, but also because the thirteen American colonies had matured into states capable of making decisions on their own. In other words, the colonies had earned independence. What they did not mention, was the fact that there were a variety of groups labeled as dependent within the newly independent United States.

It is easy to understand how dependency was used to define the status of children in early America because we still accept that notion today. But other groups equated in public policy with children eventually won rejection of their dependent status. The changes did not come without struggle (in the case of slavery it took a bloody civil war). Many historians have told that story, but few pay attention to the fact that as a diversity of groups joined the circle of American independence, the idea of a childhood dependency changed and became an important marker of U.S. identity as a modern civilized nation.

The Modern Childhood Ideal and Dependency in the United States

Property ownership had initially been one of the most important markers of independence---and therefore full political and social citizenship. But after the revolution, American white men rejected property ownership as the key test of adult independence. Race and gender, not property ownership, became the chief marker of independence in the United States.

I do not think it is a coincidence that the modern middle-class ideal of a dependent and protected childhood emerged at the same time as the most important power shifts involving class, race, and gender in U.S. history. I also don’t believe that it was simply a convenient opportunity for women like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley to embrace child welfare as what Robyn Muncy has called the female dominion of American reform. Instead, I believe that women understood that one efficient pathway to gain independent status for themselves was to clearly distinguish adult women from children; especially adolescent boys and girls. For most of American history, women and children were grouped together as dependents of husbands, fathers, and adult sons. The birth of the American women’s rights movement in 1848 and its expansion into the mainstream in the 1890s demanded a distinct separation from children---especially adolescent girls that were not physically different from adult women.

The Modern Childhood Ideal

In 1905, Florence Kelley called for the federal government to protect “a right to childhood” for all American children. Within her argument, Kelley outlined the specifics of a dependent status for American children. She believed that this protected childhood dependency should extend from birth through at least age nineteen. Protected dependency for children, according to Kelley, “follows from the existence of the Republic and must be guarded in order to guard its life….the noblest duty of the Republic is that of self-preservation by so cherishing all its children that they, in turn, may become enlightened self-governing citizens.” In other words, a modern, civilized republic could not continue to exist without creating a state of protected dependency for its children. As an independent adult, Kelley believed she could demand this benevolent status for children due to their incompetency and immaturity in a society that demanded self-sufficiency from adults. Dependency included limitations on the freedoms of young Americans that would have been rejected for adults. Restrictions such as compulsory school attendance laws, limitations on wage-labor, laws prohibiting the sale of tobacco products and alcohol to minors, mandated state or parental guardianship, as well as a separate legal system (juvenile courts). These were trumpeted as essential protections (rights) for children able to take full responsibility for themselves; as I mentioned, up to at least age nineteen.

Adolescents and the Extension of Childhood Dependency

Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century popular culture celebrated men like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Carnegie as American ideals. Each was applauded for their precocious self-sufficiency and ability to overcome life’s difficulties while still in their teens. In 1906, G. Stanley Hall challenged that tradition by arguing that while valuable in the past, modern life created new challenges for adolescents that put them in danger of being unable to achieve adult independence. Hall claimed that modernity itself was the major threat. Hall argued that adolescence was as a period of incompetence, emotional inadequacy, and immaturity---therefore as state that necessitated dependence. Margaret Mead argued against that interpretation, but by the 1930s, Hall’s notions won the popular and scholarly debate. Americans increasingly emphasized the extended dependency of childhood through adolescence as a right and as an inevitable consequence of modernity.  As I write about in my book, The Greatest Generation Grows Up, the onset of the Great Depression further intensified this transition. Even young members of the American Youth Congress (AYC) declared that an extended dependency through adolescence was good for all young Americans. By 1940, the transition was universalized in law and popular.

School-based Education and Work

Supporters argued that school-based education was an important predictor of successful independence as an adult and assimilation to American values. By the early twentieth century, the movement was successful among elementary school children, but failed to reach most adolescents.

The 1930 census showed that 95 percent of children age six through thirteen were in school full time. Every state had a compulsory school attendance law for youngsters in that age group and a few extended the requirement to sixteen. Less than half of fourteen through seventeen year olds remained in school. Fifty percent unemployment rates among teens and adults’ desire to remove young workers from the job market, encouraged a rise in high school attendance. In 1940, approximately 75 percent of fourteen through seventeen year olds were still in school and the proportion of high school graduates in the U.S. population doubled from 667,000 in 1930 to 1,221,000 in 1940 (the nation’s overall population had only increased by 7 percent).

Outside the classroom, high school authorities encouraged teens to spend their time in extra curricular activities such as team sports, clubs, and school sponsored dances and socials---all activities overseen by adults. The New Deal’s National Youth Administration formalized this prescription at the federal level by requiring the over enrollees to live at home and attend some form of full-time school-based education.

Hollywood movies provided larger than life images of the new ideal of American adolescence centered on school. The Andy Hardy film series, starring American’s perpetual adolescent, Mickey Rooney, was first released in 1937. Andy and his friends spend their days engaged in a world focused on school and social activities with same-aged peers. Sex was limited to puppy love and problems were easily solved by the end of each film. Parents were loving and tolerant of the teens’ extended dependency, but intolerant of precocious behavior reserved for adults. By 1960, 89 percent of seventeen-year olds remained in school and as early as the 1940s, the term “teenager” defined this definition of adolescence focused on school, same-aged peers, and extended dependency.

At the same time high schools expanded full time work for adolescents diminished and public opinion shifted. In 1933, adolescent garment workers in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania went on strike. Most were between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. The press dubbed the labor action, “The Baby Strike” and newspapers across the country condemned the companies’ exploitive labor practices. The governor held special sweat shop hearings and the state’s labor relations board lamented that Pennsylvania law made it impossible to force the young workers to quit their jobs and return to school full time. Many of the young strikers, however, seemed more interested in their rights as workers than returning to school. Most adults across the United States gained workers right in the 1935 Wagner Labor Act, but in 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt declared “the end of child labor” with passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The law prohibited the employment of anyone under sixteen in most industries throughout the United States (excepting agriculture and domestic service---which, unfortunately, I don’t have time to discuss). The FSLA also limited the wage-work of sixteen and seventeen year olds and reinforced the idea that they should be in school. By the end of the 1930s, the message to adolescent boys and girls was clear: earning a high school diploma, not fulltime wage work, was the formula for American adolescence and adult independence.

The Anti-Child Marriage Campaign

Throughout American history adults have expressed angst about adolescent sexuality. So the attention social reformers paid to controlling adolescent sexuality, especially among girls (and also homosexual behavior with boys) is no surprise. However, the focus on raising age-of-consent laws (the age at which a female was considered by law capable of consenting to sexual intercourse) and minimum-age-of-marriage laws in this period underscores the relationship between independence for women (and other groups) and the extension of the modern childhood ideal for teens.

After the Civil War, black men and women understood that the right to state-sanctioned marriage helped legitimize their status as fully independent adults. (The recent demand by same sex couples in the U.S. to have state-sanctioned marriages is a similar effort.) In the decades following the Civil War, laws passed throughout the United States that raised the minimum age of consent and minimum age of marriage laws. As late as the 1880s, the age of consent in some states was a low as eleven. By 1900 all states had raised the age to at least sixteen.

In 1917, in her book Social Diagnosis, the Russell Sage Foundation’s Mary Richmond pointed to the nation’s rising divorce and desertion rates as evidence of the need for reforms in state marriage laws.  Modernity strikes again----

[In 1867, 10,000 American couples were granted legal divorce. An 1889 government report proclaimed the U.S. divorce rate “the highest in the world.” Despite legal barriers passed by the states designed to discourage divorce, the number continued to climb. In 1920 more than 167,000 couples divorced, a rate of approximately one in fourteen. Cities owned the highest divorce rates. In Chicago one in seven marriages ended and in San Francisco the rate was one in four.]

Mary Richmond and Fred S. Hall argued that individuals judged too "immature, reckless, or unfit" should be prohibited to marry by state statute.  All states prohibited the marriage of siblings, half-siblings, and first cousins. Twelve states outlawed marriage on grounds of miscegenation, the presence of mental defects, venereal disease, and addiction or drunkenness; and eighteen states included restrictions on the ability of divorced persons to remarry. Richmond and Hall also claimed that all adolescents were too immature to marry and called for a general rise in the minimum-age-of-marriage requirement to eighteen for both males and females. It seemed to be the last bastion of risk---as late as 1925 the allowable age at marriage was twelve (or as low as seven by judicial order) for females in fourteen states.  Others set the minimum between fifteen and seventeen with only one state at eighteen and twenty-one for males.

Richmond and Hall failed to gain passage of a federal “Uniform Marriage Act” that would prohibit marriage for males under twenty-one and females under eighteen, but their movement did have success at the state level. By the mid-1930s (the same time that adolescents are legally defined as dependents for the first time in U.S. federal law), all states passed their own version of the law and raised their minimum age of marriage (Georgia as the lowest at fifteen for females and sixteen for males). In the 1970s, Georgia became the last state to change its standard to eighteen for both males and females. Marriage, the only universally socially acceptable status for parenthood, became a privilege restricted to adults.

Conclusion

Uniform compulsory school attendance laws, restrictions on wage work, increased age of consent laws, and prohibitions on adolescent marriage and parenthood are embraced as evidence of a more civilized and modern America that protects its children. These shifts have also been part of a United States that adapted to shifts in the meaning of independence in an increasingly diverse and gender neutral representative democracy. I believe that seeing how childhood dependency has been sold as a positive when dependency among other groups is viewed as a negative creates an ambivalence about adolescent dependency. Perhaps it helps to explain why public policies directed at teens seem inconsistent in the United States and better suited to the needs of adults than teens. I also believe that the emphasis on dependency as a right of childhood contributes to an ambivalence about the status of children in general; especially teens. In the United States, rights suggest access to privileges and dependency is not a prized status in American tradition. Perhaps this is why children and adolescents are not valued for their contributions to American society. It may not be in the best interest of the nation’s young people to define all children’s status as a right of dependency in a society that values independency as the high watermark of representative democracy. I believe that this is increasingly problematic as the United States has expanded its social welfare state and its aging population is becoming more dependent on what is euphemistically called “entitlements.”

In other words, I believe that most public policies are made in the best interests of adults—not children. Some have suggested that children are being treated as little adults. Instead, I think that the trend is that increasing numbers of American adults want to be treated like big kids---and this has created a problematic status for children and especially adolescents in the United States.