NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

"To Explain and Protect: A Century of Scientific Research on Children"
History of Science Society Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA
November 2008

Chair and Comments by Hamilton Cravens, Iowa State

Presenters

Kathleen W. Jones, Virginia Tech: “Unnatural and Monstrous: Creating Child Suicide in the Nineteenth Century”

Ellen Herman, University of Oregon, “At Risk”

Marga Vicedo, University of Toronto, “The Secret Life of Children: Searching for Children’s Natural Emotional Needs from London to Baltimore, Via Uganda”

Introduction

Good afternoon. I am Hamilton Cravens, professor of history at Iowa State University, the chair and commentator for this session, to which I would like to extend a warm, fulsome welcome to our audience. The session’s title is “To Explain and Protect: A Century of Scientific Research on Children,” which the Forum for the History of the Human Sciences, an interest group of the History of Science Society, has sponsored and endorsed to the Society’s Program Committee, which graciously accepted that recommendation and has put the session on the program. Heartfelt thanks all around. The Forum, if I may put in a word for our sponsor, is a lively, congenial, band of intrepid, innovative historians who are rewriting the complex history of the human sciences and moving beyond the old fashioned practitioner histories of the first half of the twentieth century as well as the now dated although clearly more elegant and historicist professional intellectual histories of Europe and America. Should anyone in the audience wish to join us, I will be delighted to sign those persons up forthwith.

Why is the history of scientific ideas of childhood and of children so important, or, at least, deserving of more attention and reflection? For the nineteenth century, the child was often an integral part of the all too familiar recapitulationist slogan—or paradigm, especially in Anglo-American discourses. For the twentieth century, child science has had important policy implications in many fields of knowledge and action, including public health, education, social work, juvenile justice, criminology, urban renewal, mass communications, law—the list is long, although probably not infinite.  And ideas about children reflect large ideological and cultural themes, bromides, chatter, palaver, and even serious discourse, and all three of our excellent papers demonstrate the seriousness of the discourse that they describe, analyze, and explain. Put simply, ideas about children are notions about us, our past, our present, and our future—and the future of our species, for that matter.

Comments:

Professor Jones’s paper is fascinating. She shows us that child suicide became a category of the emerging human sciences as did many other secular scientific ideas or notions that took shape in the nineteenth century. Yet on the other hand powerful cultural traditions and taboos seemed to block wide recognition of the phenomenon. This came at least in part from a rigid and widely shared schemata of the life cycle’s course, which sharply differentiated children from adults. And there was that new watchword, not to say bugaboo, of the nineteenth century, “civilization”. But there is another concept that her work literally bumps up against; as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim reminds us in his classic Suicide. A Study in Sociology (1893; 1979 Translation) “The relations of suicide to certain states of social environment are as direct and constant as the relations to facts of a biological and physical character were seen to be uncertain and ambiguous.” (p. 299)

Let me suggest a modest and limited line of reflection. Can we not follow the great Durkheim’s suggestion and tease out the general cultural notions from those of the then agreed-upon developmental model. That is, what role did these cultural discourses play in ideas about child suicide, and what contribution did the more narrow and specific notions of development make? Some provisional parsing out should be possible. We do have to be careful of a too-hasty assessment, for fear it might lead us to practitioner or Whig history. As for the potency of the developmental paradigm in the twentieth century, again we have the problem of the contributions of general cultural notions and of professional, technical discourses. With the maturation theory of such eminences as Arnold Gesell, the biological model, so influential in the nineteenth century, returns in the twentieth with a vengeance. One might ask oneself why, and to what function or purpose, articulate persons in a leveling democracy would seek out and emphasize the role of biological processes, especially ones that appeared to be automatic, or approximately so, in human development. And within that context, why did child suicide seem so ‘monstrous’? In brief, we have a fascinating topic here and as important as the numbers are, we also need to know what they meant and implied to the actors in these sad dramas.

Professor Herman’s thoughtful overview of the four major schools of scientific thought on child abuse could also be seen, and rightly so, as a model of the distillation, in distinct and successive chronological eras in the twentieth century, of notions of human nature and conduct. That the literature is quite large—an avalanche, really—after World War II bespeaks post-Kinsey frankness about scientific and medical discourses about human sexuality more generally. The criminological tradition goes back to the early twentieth century, especially when we view it within the context of the new “Mendelian” eugenics that students of crime so often grafted onto their work.

If one examines the progressive era literature on “delinquency” one quickly realizes that it is gendered as a discourse into “violent, delinquent boys” and “wayward girls”.  That the crusade against male sexual violence was dominated by professional males for much of the twentieth century speaks volumes about sexual or gender segregation in the new helping and manipulative sciences of the twentieth century, thanks to the enormous expansion of male dominated academic positions, especially in the social sciences. Similarly the psychoanalytic tradition, which stretched back into the early twentieth century in some fashion, reflected broad cultural trends. It was not distinctly and overtly Freudian until the 1930s, and only then when certain psychologists, such as John Dollard and Robert R. Sears, established some experimental verification for it, thus shifting from a progressive era kind of optimism to a Depression era skepticism and empiricism. As for the third tradition that Professor Herman identifies, that of sexology, that was pretty much a construct of the interwar period, stretching back to the early 1920s and the National Research Council committee on sex, which eventually gave Alfred Kinsey his first grants for his work on human sexual behavior. Now there was a medical literature that dealt with sex and reproduction, to be sure, that predated the NRC Committee and its clients, but in the main Professor Herman is right, the scientific concern with sex and its social ramifications was a construct of the interwar years, between the 1920s and the 1950s.

Now the abuse paradigm that Professor Herman isolates is entirely a product of our own contemporary age—an age of postmodernism, of insisting that the individual, not the group or the larger whole, is at the center of society. Much of the discourse of the ‘radicalism’ of the New Left or the New Right was a discourse, spoken and written—nay, shouted in many instances—of victimization, of the system oppressing the poor individual, trampling on his or her rights and perquisites. This discourse of victimization, so pervasive in our culture, was made for the abuse paradigm—and that paradigm is truly a period piece, a construct of our own time.

Now to Professor Vicedo’s fine paper, which treats an interesting artifact of our own age of individuation and fragmentation, of the essentialist/biological v view of the individual. She is absolutely right about the centrality of concern for the child as a scientific object in many psychological and psychiatric theories. The attachment model, which was so successfully used in primate studies, Bowlby and Ainsworth extended to humans. Surely Professor Vicedo is correct when she aligns this specific intellectual development—evolutionary determinism—to other trends in contemporary research, such as ethology and other arguments against behaviorism. There is also in this a reaction against the once-fashionable “culture and personality” school of the period from World War II to the Viet Nam conflict in the 1960s. Above all what Professor Vicedo discusses is the emergence of theories based on the individual; even in the dyad of mother and child, the mother is reduced to a mechanism calling forth the environmentally stable responses. Biological determinism, anyone?

Return to Table of Contents