NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Conference Report
European Social Science History Association Meeting, Lisbon, 2008

Session: "Views on Childhood in the Twentieth Century: Britain and the United States"
Janet Golden, Rutgers University, Camden

This session featured four papers on different aspects of the history of childhood.  Kathleen Jones discussed girls suicide in "Jazz Age" America through an analysis of stories in the New York Times.  Jones pointed to the ways in which cultural scripts of modern young womanhood shaped the reporting, highlighting the discussions of freedom, love, identity and accomplishment that suffused these accounts.  Turning from young womanhood to girlhood Susan Miller described how girls organizations in the United States used pageantry to imagine pioneer pasts and mythic ancestors (in what she called indigenous dramatics) that expressed conservative ideas of race and culture.  Particular critical to these dramas was the celebration of place and specifically the locale of the camps.  Next, Rachel Niewert examined how English children growing up in the colonies were taught to construct a British identity.  She focused on the Parents Union School (PUS), which provided lessons for children educated in the colonies and examined letters from the children to the journal Parent's Review published by the PUS.  The fourth paper, by Ian Grosvenor and Catherine Burke analyzed the influential volume, Story of a School about the Steward Street School in Birmingham England.  In the postwar years the school adopted an experimental curriculum based on the arts and faith in children's creativity and this became a model for progressive education throughout Britain.  Janet Golden served as chair and discussant for the session and noted the common themes in the papers including the focus on children's self esteem in the 20th century, the importance of place to the analysis of children and childhood, the question of important texts within the field of childhood history and the significance of "performance" as a way of seeing children's agency.