Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History

National, Colonial and Global Perspectives

Stephanie Olsen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349555758
  9781137484833
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137484840
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Psicologia dell'educazione

Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History is the first book to innovatively combine the history of childhood and youth with the history of emotions, combining multiple national, colonial, and global perspectives.

1

Introduction

Stephanie Olsen

Where could modern children find joy? In Uganda, some found it in a leper home. In New Zealand, others found it through Christian faith and their minister’s sermons. Where did young people learn about fear, but also about defiance? Some learnt in family settings, by their fathers’ examples, while others learnt in public school. Where could late nineteenth-century Indian girls learn ‘reasoned emotion’? Some ‘experts’ maintained they could learn it through marriage and conjugal love. In England after the Second World War, other ‘experts’ insisted that architecture could condition or facilitate a child’s emotional self-governing. Where could children seek out ‘healing feelings’ after wartime fear, grief and deprivation? Some found them in singing together, some found them in their lived spaces, while others found them through feelings of patriotism. Still others did not feel what they were ‘supposed’ to feel at all. Were ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ feelings desirable in early republican Colombian children? What was an effective way to get American boys to really feel American? Was grief for deceased children an effective means to lobby for legislative change in England? This book introduces such a rich heterodoxy of childhood and emotional development and experience, contextualized by an equally diverse range of pedagogical, parenting and policy approaches to childhood emotions. But where there is empirical diversity, the scholars assembled here have found new, common questions and novel approaches, which suggest innovative theoretical and methodological ways forward for the history of childhood, through the history of emotions.

The chapters in Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives demonstrate how to do a history of childhood and the emotions and suggest why combining these fields affords historians from both approaches a valuable and more complete picture. Topics were chosen to provide as comprehensive a whole as possible, to represent the best new scholarship in the field and to encourage future research on the intersection of childhood and emotions as they relate to war and conflict, politics and policy, space and material culture, youth organizations and institutions, and relationships with families, authority figures and peer groups. While the chapters each provide particular nuance to the overarching theme, they were also chosen because of their overlap. Taken together, they demonstrate that neither the category of childhood nor the emotions associated with it are universal; they are dependent on time, place and a host of other historical contingencies. The contributors to this volume show that while a top-down focus on children’s emotional education and socialization was emphasised in many different times and places, children themselves are central to any analysis of childhood experience. In fact, it is in the dynamic relation between stakeholders of childhood (including, most importantly, children) and childhood itself that a new narrative of children’s emotions emerges.

The genesis of this volume was a conference on Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History held at the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in 2012. The reaction to the call for papers was enormous: we received over 200 applications, mostly from historians of childhood. My co-organizer, Juliane Brauer, and I realized that there was something particularly relevant about emotions to historians of childhood, but that until quite recently there had not been any rigorously developed historiographical means to get at them. We wanted to ask if there are particular emotions that are principally relevant in childhood. Can a focus on the history of emotions, its fundamental questions and its methodological approaches be a productive exercise for historians interested in childhood and youth? Can it open up new ways to uncover children’s voices? And, conversely, can the participation of historians of childhood and youth further the field of emotions history? The conference was successful in mobilizing these questions, and it has taken some time for those involved to develop the ideas we explored together and to apply them to their respective research. This book is the product of our labours and demonstrates a radical increase in sophistication from our first conversations.

We have found that it is impossible to conjure with modern concepts of childhood without also engaging with ideas about emotion and emotional education. As Nina Verheyen points out, over time ‘greater value [was] placed upon feelings in the educational process, educationalists emphasising that a child was in no respect capable of bringing its feelings under control without external assistance’.¹ Parents, informed by ‘experts’, were pressured to take the lead. At the same time, this emphasis on emotional education seemed to narrow possibilities for children’s acceptable emotional expression. In the estimation of Peter Stearns: ‘The new standards were hardly invitations to emotional freedom.’²

Yet any temptation we may have felt to focus only on those exercising authority over children has been resisted. Just as historians of emotion argue that emotional norms cannot be separated from emotional experience or that emotional structures are contingent upon individual emotional practices, historians of childhood have pointed to the artificiality of the binary between childhood – an historically and geographically contingent category – and children themselves.³ Children and the cultural category of childhood are mutually interdependent. As Joseph Hawes and N. Ray Hiner have put it: ‘Childhood without children is by definition impossible, and children have no meaningful existence outside childhood. Each must be examined with a continual awareness of the other, not as separate, dualistic categories.’⁴ Moreover, Peter Stearns has recently pointed to parallels in the historiographical trends of the history of childhood and of the history of emotions. ‘Modern emotional trends’, he argues, coincided with ‘broader cultural changes – such as the idea of children as innocent blank slates, to be protected from fearsome discipline, rather than slaves of original sin – which in turn helped translate larger modern shifts into personal and emotional standards’.⁵ At different times and in different cultures, children have been the particular targets of emotional education, of which the ideal of childhood, in its historical and cultural specificity, is especially informative.

Emotions allow us to access children’s agency and children’s voices in a new way. Several of the chapters in this book focus at least in part on children’s own emotional experiences, while others explore the emotional valence of children and their symbolic value. Other chapters explore adults’ efforts to cultivate or control children’s emotions, and the effects these had on children. Several chapters deal with the relationship between children and parents, or children and other authority figures. Where we witness a heightened effort to cultivate children’s emotions and a focus on their emotional education, we are alerted to a modern perception of the child as more malleable than an adult. Various steps were taken, depending on differences of time and place, to shape children while they were presumed to be still young enough to shape.⁶ It is up to historians to lend specificity to, and point to the historical contingency of, these important questions of emotional cultivation, but the questions themselves have a global relevance.

Historical scholarship is slowly becoming aware of the importance of such work. In my own work, for example, I have explored the ways in which children, and especially boys, were informally educated for their future roles as parents and citizens in Britain and in colonial India. This was especially accomplished through various appeals to the emotions. And in Learning How to Feel, a multi-authored volume that also emerged from the Centre for the History of Emotions in Berlin, the authors examine the ways in which children and youth learnt how to feel, through intricate interaction with their social and cultural settings, and specifically through their reading. Childhood and adolescence were the crucial life stages for this process. Rather than the existence of latent internal emotions, given specific cultural form, children are shown to have acquired competences in feeling itself. The insights that emotional repertoires develop through the social and cultural context, and that this happens principally in childhood, are critically important.⁷

In much of the world, as conceptions of childhood increasingly separated it from the other stages of the lifecycle, adults increasingly focused on children and youth who did not conform to the expectations of childhood. Modernity has witnessed an increasing number of youth experts and groups intervening with children and youth in order to work towards making new concepts of childhood universal (though these ‘universals’ have often remained class, caste, race or gender-specific).⁸ Children are portrayed as being the ‘hope for the future’ by the protagonists in many of the chapters here. Most of the contributions concern some form of emotional education, but the focus is primarily on evidence outside of formal schooling, picking up on a remarkably common perception of the inadequacy of school curricula to impart emotions. Several chapters analyse efforts to turn children’s hearts to the nation. But what struck us clearly as we advanced our collaboration was the need, within the history of childhood, for a new analytical toolbox in order to open up the question of emotions in a global context. How could we make seemingly ‘closed’ case studies ‘talk’ to one another? How could we deal with the complexities of transnational encounters, both in terms of dissonant concepts of childhood and their attendant emotions, and in terms of the experiences of children in a diversity of contexts? Could we not find a key to bring our research into line, making for viable comparative analysis without flattening out the richness of discrete cases?

These questions have led to the somewhat novel organization of this book. This introduction serves not only as intellectual background, but also as the guide for how to read the rest of the volume. Chapter 2 is the essential starting point. While each of the remaining chapters can be read individually, they will all be read more deeply through the lens of Chapter 2. Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander and I have provided a new theoretical approach for the combined fields of the global history of childhood and the history of emotions, which supplies the analytical key for navigating other chapters, both individually and as they interrelate. At the centre of this chapter are the concepts of ‘emotional formation’ and ‘emotional frontiers’, which repurpose existing history-of-emotions tools – emotional communities, emotional regimes and emotives – for the history of childhood. We did not, however, want to impose our constructions on the individual contributors to the book. They have brought their own research and their own sets of questions to the fore, and it only makes sense that the interpretations they make remain theirs. Nevertheless, I brought the contributors together precisely because their work makes a coherent and novel contribution as a whole. This is not merely the art of juxtaposition, but a long and careful process of internal dialogue, through which individual contributors have been exposed to theories, methods and questions they had perhaps not faced before. This is reflected in the thematic coherence of the chapters read collectively. That notwithstanding, a concern remained that without careful handling, the reader might easily refragment a book that had taken so long to unify. The impetus behind Chapter 2 was therefore to come up with a framework that would bind the chapters together, using them to forge a new historiographical direction. To that end, Chapter 2 can be read as an organizing principle for the book as a whole, in advance of any or all chapters that follow, or it can be read as a summation of the work in the rest of the book, as an analytical conclusion. Certainly, the intention of Chapter 2 is not merely to explain this volume, but to set the agenda for future research in the global politics of childhood and in the history of emotions relating to childhood in particular.

The book as a whole is therefore somewhat more than the sum of its parts. But the individual parts themselves were material in inspiring the innovations of Chapter 2 and are respectively packed with research that indicates the incredible potential of the history of emotions in opening up new fronts in the history of childhood. In Chapter 3, Ishita Pande analyses the clash over the issues of child marriage and the age of consent between administrators of the British Raj and segments of the native elite. Classifying precocious sexuality as unnatural, a new colonial law (1891) called for the systematic ‘emotional re-education’ of Indians. This led to a reconfiguration of both marriage and girlhood in late nineteenth-century India, and raised important questions about the universality of both childhood and the emotions. But by ‘evoking emotions’, Bengali authors strongly defended traditional early marriage, as it encouraged emotional concord between spouses. Particularly interesting is Pande’s discussion of conjugal love as an age-specific ‘reasoned emotion’, which was to be attained through proper education in childhood.

Similarly complicating ideas about colonial transfer and exchange on emotions and childhood, Kathleen Vongsathorn analyses the interconnected emotional framework of Ugandan child leper patients, their families and British missionaries in Chapter 4. She raises the question of differing, sometimes conflicting, views of British and native (mainly Iteso) childhood. Happiness, as the ‘right of childhood and the gift of the mission’, was a predominant emotion both in the young patients’ education and in missionaries’ accounts. Lending nuance to this argument in an important section on ‘children’s responses’, Vongsathorn makes clear that children sometimes performed happiness and other desired emotions in order to gain favour, but the chapter as a whole demonstrates that the distinction between ‘performing’ and ‘feeling’ emotion in this colonial context was not clear-cut. The young patients’ outward markers of childhood, however, were often transformed in the leper home, making the contrast between native notions of childhood and the ideals of ‘British’, ‘civilized’ childhood plain.

Both Chapters 4 and 5 emphasize the desire to cultivate positive emotions through Protestant Christianity. This was done not through fear and loathing, but rather by the encouragement of cheerfulness and joy. Through a micro-study of one parish in colonial New Zealand, in Chapter 5 Hugh Morrison explores the important nexus of religion, childhood and emotions, highlighting the specificity of ‘settler’ and ‘indigenous’ childhoods. Transcending the analytical confines of examining only religious institutions, he argues that religion was more about emotional experience than it was about theological ideas. Importantly, the messages children received were designed to teach them how to feel what was ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Morrison also points to the broader resonance of childhood religion, ostensibly binding children of different nations to a common religious, emotional framework, though this cohesion was always marked by racial, class and other hierarchies.

The emotional impact of war is the background to Chapter 6, and indeed is thematically important in several other chapters. Roy Kozlovsky provides us with a novel and useful framework to think about the relationship between children’s spaces and emotions. Through a study of several child-centred spaces, the playground, the hospital and the school, Kozlovsky demonstrates how new understandings of the special needs of childhood and of the specific emotions of children, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War, led various experts to reconceptualize childhood spaces in order ideally to provide an ‘emotional refuge for children to navigate the new demands and responsibilities of citizenship’ and to ensure the ‘ideal of a happy, secure childhood’. Moreover, he discusses children’s reactions to various spaces, showing that there was sometimes tension and transgression on the emotional frontier between children’s expression and ‘official behaviour norms’.

In Chapter 7, Jane Hamlett continues the discussion on children’s spaces and objects, and their complicated emotional valence, through a study of boys’ public school dormitories. The aim of dormitory planners was ‘a moral system, in which the discipline of the self, body and emotions played an important part’, and where the space itself would encourage boys to discipline themselves. The focus of the chapter is on boys’ experiences and the emotional responses of children to their environments, and is especially important in highlighting the relationship between spaces/objects and the emotional practices that these things encouraged and discouraged. However, as Hamlett innovatively points out, this is by no means a simple story of cause and effect. Boys’ emotions were influenced by their spaces, but they also subverted the intended use and feelings of those spaces.

In ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Emotions and the Global Politics of Childhood
• 3. Feeling Like a Child: Narratives of Development and the Indian Child/Wife
• 4. Teaching, Learning and Adapting Emotions in Uganda’s Child Leprosy Settlement, c. 1930–1962
• 5. Settler Childhood, Protestant Christianity and Emotions in Colonial New Zealand, 1880s–1920s
• 6. Architecture, Emotions and the History of Childhood
• 7. Space and Emotional Experience in Victorian and Edwardian English Public School Dormitories
• 8. Emotional Regimes and School Policy in Colombia, 1800–1835
• 9. Feeling Like a Citizen: The American Legion’s Boys State Programme and the Promise of Americanism
• 10. Disciplining Young People’s Emotions in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the Early German Democratic Republic
• 11. Inscribing War Orphans’ Losses into the Language of the Nation in Wartime China, 1937–1945
• 12. Everyday Emotional Practices of Fathers and Children in Late Colonial Bengal, India
• 13. Anti-vaccination and the Politics of Grief for Children in Late Victorian England
• Index