Children's Childhoods

Observed And Experienced

Berry Mayall, Berry Mayall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135719401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This text explores the social status of children, through consideration of their positioning in a range of social settings and in sociological theory. It focuses on children as social actors in constructing the social order and participating in it.

1 Women and Children First and Last:
Parallels and Differences between
Children's and Women's Studies^*

Ann Oakley

This chapter considers the emerging field of childhood studies from the viewpoint of the established discipline of women's studies. Women and children are, of course, linked socially, but the development of these specialist academic studies also poses interesting methodological and political questions about the relationship between the status of women and children as social minority groups and their constitution as objects of the academic gaze. Are childhood and women's studies the same kinds of activities, or are they essentially different? What is the relationship between them? Are there insights that can be transferred from one to the other? Why are we studying children as a separate social group? Are these the same reasons as were used to justify the development of women's studies? Are they good reasons?

The first part of the chapter discusses in more detail the sociography of women and children's material and cultural position, and how this shapes the form of their personal and social relations with one another. The second part addresses the ways in which children and women have traditionally been constituted as objects of academic study. Lastly, the chapter considers the present phase of studying both children and women: the one in its infancy, the other, as some would argue, past its prime. Here I explore some of the ways in which studying children is like studying women, and some of the ways in which the two activities can be distinguished from one another.

The Social Status and Relations of Children and Women

Children are primarily women's business. Giving birth to children is what women do, though the cultural artefacts of hospitals, medical technology and obstetricians increasingly do not encourage us to remember this. Looking after children is also what women do, whether we call it childwork, or childcare, or childrearing, whether we speak of paid or unpaid work, and

whether we frame our observation in the sexually egalitarian, though usually dishonest, language of ‘parenthood’ and ‘parenting’. In these ways children are women's responsibility, though childhood, as I shall argue later, is much less so.

The close alliance of women and children has many different cultural representations. These run from the language of nineteenth century politicians, which spoke of the two groups almost as one (though more because women were regarded as less than adult than because anyone had given any particular thought to the actual competencies of children), through to the multiple, careful statistics of the Childhood as a Social Phenomenon project (Jensen and Saporiti, 1992). But statistics require interpretation; the same statistics can be invested with different meanings. Thus we read, for example, that virtually everywhere the birthrate is declining and virtually everywhere the paid employment of mothers is increasing. The link between these two phenomena can be stated in alternative ways: we may say either that women are choosing to invest less of their lives in mothering because they want to do something else with them, or that children control the form of women's labour power by winning the battle with employers and potential employers for ownership of women's time (Oldman, 1991). It seems clear that what frees mothers to work in the capitalist sense is not fathers but schools and other arrangements for out-of-home childcare. Educational and other institutions for children mediate the links between women's and children's lives. To be a mother in Switzerland, where school is a morning-only activity for most children, is quite different from being a mother in a country where school hours are regularly seven per day and some schools even make provision for after school care. Another, slightly more complex example of the relationship between women's and children's lives is the division of household labour: the fact that women's housework hours average twenty per week, those of girls six, of boys four, and of men three shows both that children are bound up with women's domestic oppression and that the development of masculinity can be defined as a progressive project for liberating men from housework (Frones et al., 1990).

Whose Rights?

Children and women share certain crucial social characteristics. In the first place, children and women are both members of social minority groups. Membership of a social minority group results from the physical or cultural characteristics of individuals being used to single them out and to justify their receiving different and unequal treatment—in other words, collective discrimination (Hacker, 1969). Women and children are so constituted within a culture dominated by masculine power—in other words, patriarchy. One obvious manifestation of this situation is that both women and children are disadvantaged as citizens. The concept of citizenship, with its associated de jure and de facto rights and responsibilities, is a patriarchal one. Children did not have rights under the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, which conceived of rights belonging to human beings who are adults; they needed their own codification of their own rights. It was a similar reasoning that caused the eighteenth century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to write her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798, and others to follow her example. Because these rights and responsibilities are not automatically conveyed to women and children, they will only be able to claim them as a result of consciously directed social change. Thus women in the past, and still now, have fought to be entitled to rights previously regarded as belonging only to men—rights such as the suffrage, participation in the paid labour force, and the right to bodily integrity. In today's children's rights movement, we see the same phenomenon, though complicated by the fact that it is largely not children but adults on their behalf who are claiming these rights. This attributed incapacity of children to act for themselves is, however, more than a complication, as I shall suggest later (see also Lansdown and Alderson in this volume).

Being Childlike

Deprivation of rights is only the most easily graspable aspect of minority group status. There are others which are less obvious but more fundamentally subversive in their effects. The first of these is the social construction of minority group members as less than adult, that is, as incapable of adult competencies and of behaving in adult ways. Over twenty years ago work by Rosenkrantz (Rosenkrantz et al., 1968) and Broverman (Broverman et al., 1970) demonstrated the ways in which cultural norms gender personality attributes so that qualities such as independence, rationality, intelligence, autonomy, and confidence belong to men, are seen as socially desirable, and are taken as standards of normal adulthood, against which gold standard women emerge as distinctly less adult, that is as more childlike, than men. This allegation does of course merit serious thought. What does it mean to criticize someone for being ‘childlike’? Certainly in English the terms ‘adultlike’ and ‘adultish’ are not uttered as condemnations in the ways ‘childlike’ and ‘childish’ are.

Another ascribed attribute derived from their minority group status women may share with children is the tendency to adopt negatively critical and even hostile attitudes towards one another. This observation was first made in relation to ethnic minorities (Lewin, 1941), and then extended to throw light on the competitiveness—‘bitchiness’—women are noted on occasion to display to members of their own sex (Hacker, 1969; Miller, 1976). This can be seen as a psychological effect of discrimination and of marginality and the need to respect power relations and seek alliances with the dominant group. It may be that one reason for children's competitiveness with one another, represented in later childhood in the phenomenon of ‘bullying’, particularly at school, derives from their sense of exclusion and lack of power and consequent need to prove themselves superior to others of their group. Such an explanation would fit with the observations of Bettelheim (1971) and others about the links between providing children with a collective peerfocussed social environment, such as that available in the Israeli kibbutzim, on the one hand, and the development of personal identity in which peer attachments, rather than competitiveness, are a prominent motif, on the other.

In Their Best Interests

These shared characteristics of women and children—their status as social minority groups, their relative lack of rights and moral construction as non-adult— coalesce in the language which, more than any other, has been used to describe the position of both. That is the language of ‘their best interests’, according to which judgments about the welfare of women and children are based not on asking them what they want or need, but on what other people consider to be the case. It is a philosophy of exclusion and control dressed up as protection, and dependent on the notion that those who are protected must be so because they are deemed incapable of looking after themselves.

The exclusion of women and children from the paid labour force is a good example of the way the ‘best interests’ argument works. While the early excesses of capitalist industrial production in the UK and other countries inflicted long hours and appallingly health-damaging working conditions on factory labourers, the offence caused to the moral sensitivities of the middle-class male social reformers by women's and children's labour took precedence over consideration of the hardship these groups might undergo as a result of the withdrawal of the right to paid work (Hammond and Hammond, 1923).
The process of restricting women's and children's labour was subject to cultural variation; in Finland and Sweden, for example, the motivation behind legislation to prohibit child labour was apparently principally that of eliminating the moral scourge of children idling on the streets (without, once again, any consideration of children's point of view) (Alanen and Bardy, 1991; Sandin, 1990). It is interesting to note that essentially the same debate is in progress today over child labour, with a conflict posed between the moral, protectionist perspective of the adult, and the potentially different, self-interested view of the child (Ward, 1990).

The legacy of the Victorian exclusion of women and children from industrial labour is evident today in the requirement that the main activity of children should be play—that childhood should be a time of fun and freedom—and that mothers should not work, that is, their commitment to paid labour is not expected to be the same as men's (though unpaid labour in the home and in caring for the old, the frail and the ill is quite alright, as it is not recognized as work—though here there is some cultural variation, with practices outside the UK generally viewing this more positively).

The Haven of the Home

For women and children, families and home life are the site of work— housework for women, school homework for children. Children and women are culturally represented as living in the ‘haven’ of the home, whereas men stride out into the marketplace of the world. The association of both women and children's labour with the home results in a similar invisibility (Qvortrup, 1985; and Oldman in this volume). The ‘paternalistic marginalization’ (Qvortrup and Christoffersen, 1990) of children and women is expressed in terms of temporal and spatial restriction. Thus children have their own institutions and their own timetables, and within homes there are special spaces reserved for the being of a child. The same holds true of women: in their case the special space is the kitchen. Cultural norms prescribe both that each child ideally has her/his own room and that women ideally share bedrooms with men, though this is not the case in upper-class households and is a relatively recent historical invention both architecturally and morally (Oakley, 1974).

But women and children's ideological restriction to the domestic sphere also results in a shared material deprivation. Women are more likely to live in poverty than men, and children are more likely to live in poverty than adults. Families with children are generally the poorest households, and families consisting of a mother and a child or children alone the poorest of all. It has often been pointed out that the realities of many children's lives uncover the empty rhetoric of the political valorization of children; children may be precious, worthy of protection, both in themselves and because they represent the future, but in many countries they are clearly not worth the financial and policy investment required to ensure even adequate living conditions. In this respect, the position of children is the same as that of women, who are put on another kind of idealistic pedestal, but not seen as worth the moral and economic investment of equitable living conditions.

Social Problems

Taking these material inequalities of minority groups together with the paternalistic language of ‘their best interests’, we can see how another common characteristic of women and children is derived: their constitution as a social problem. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century politicians and professionals of various kinds were widely concerned with something called ‘the woman problem’ (O’Neill, 1969). Whilst particular groups of women were variously considered to be a problem—the unmarried or the married, the sexually active or the sexually frigid, the educated or the uneducated, the working or the idle—the range of these categories reveals the fact that it was basically women themselves who were seen as the problem. In the same way, particular groups of children are seen as problematic today: those who are abused by their parents, or who might be; those who do not attend school, or who do not meet the standards of behaviour or attainment expected of them at school; those who fail to correspond to the charts of child development and growth beloved of paediatricians and child psychologists; those who eat the wrong food, smoke, drink, consume drugs, have sexual intercourse before they ought to, fail to use contraception, or become parents before they should; those who are not able-bodied or able-minded and who challenge the facile logic of ‘integration’; those in care who are not cared for, and those at home who might not be; those whose mental health may be threatened by parental divorce or separation or by its opposite; children antagonistic to, or even criminally subversive of, adult authority. There are, again, so many categories of children who pose problems that we are forced to conclude that it is children themselves who are seen as the problem.

The Problem of ‘The’ Family

A major difficulty confronting those who wish to chart the experiences of being a child is that these are hidden in the ideological apparatus of ‘the family’. This is the same for women. Indeed, the development of academic women's studies has very largely been the project of liberating women from ‘the’ family. But those who want to find out what goes on in families start with the handicap imposed by cultural thinking. According to this, ‘the family’ really exists and can be seen all around us in the form of idealized clones. ‘The’ family exists on the backs of cornflakes packets (Oakley, 1982), and in the medium of official statistics, which treat the family as the unit of analysis, and so deny the existence of real differences between individuals within families (Oakley and Oakley, 1979). A good example of this is the difficulty of deducing the living circumstances of children from official statistical data on families. It has been shown that using the family as the unit of observation results in an overestimate of the numbers of children without siblings compared to the estimate derived from using children themselves as the unit of observation (Qvortrup and Christoffersen, 1990). Within the rubric of women's studies, the critique of the tradition of studying families rather than people has given rise to a substantial body of work on the ways in which resources in households are actually and unevenly distributed (Brannen and Wilson, 1987). Though such work opens ‘the black box’ of the family to make women visible, it has done little to expose generational inequalities, including the experiences of children within families.

Among the most misleading myths of the twentieth century is this one; that everyone lives in families, and that these are happy, successfully functioning, democratic, supportive places, in which we may all retreat to share our secrets and replenish our energies for the harsh realities of the public world. Families may be like this for some people, but these families are the exceptions proving the rule. The rule is that within families power relations are unequal, resources are not equally shared, and frank or covert physical or emotional abuse often takes place. These features of family life affect women and children more than men.

In other words, a comparative sociography of children and women conveys a picture of mutual dependence and interdependence and mutual oppression. The term ‘oppression’ is a technical one: it describes the position of minority groups within a capitalist and patriarchal structure. The embedded—ness of children and women within each other's lives has consequences for their structural and personal relations with one another. These have been studied over the past twenty years in the case of women, for example, in that area of work which goes beyond the moral dogma of the perfect, and perfectly self-denying mother, to ask why women want to become mothers (or not), how mothers experience children, and what their relationships with children are like (Boulton, 1983; Oakley, 1979; Rothman, 1989). But the counter to this—how children experience mothers—has been little explored. Indeed, it is one of many questions few have thought fit to ask them.

Children and Women as Objects of Study

It is important to outline some of these common features of women and children's position because these constitute the framework within which women and children are studied. The next section of the chap...