Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500

Hugh Cunningham

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000093841
• Auflage: 3
• Thema: History
• Thema: Social History

Updated to incorporate recent scholarship on the subject, this new edition of Hugh Cunningham's classic text investigates the relationship between ideas about childhood and the actual experience of being a child, and assesses how it has changed over the span of 500 years.

Through his engaging narrative Hugh Cunningham tells the story of the development of ideas from the Renaissance to the present, revealing considerable differences in the way Western societies have understood and valued childhood over time. His survey of parent/child relationships uncovers evidence of parental love, care and, in the frequent cases of child death, grief throughout the period, concluding that there was as much continuity as change in the actual relations of children and adults across these five centuries. Since the book's first publication in 1995, the volume of historical research on children and childhood has escalated hugely and is testimony to the level of concern provoked by the dominance of the negative narrative that originated in the 1970s and 1980s. A new epilogue revisits the volume from today's perspective, analysing why this negative narrative established dominance in Western society and considering how it has affected historical writing about children and childhood, enabling the reader to put both this volume and recent debates into context.

Supported by an updated historiographical discussion and expanded bibliography, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 remains an essential resource for students of the history of childhood, the history of the family, social history and gender history.

1 Introduction

In June 1992 an eleven-year-old, caught up in the siege of Sarajevo, wrote in her diary,

BOREDOM!!! SHOOTING!!! SHELLING!!! PEOPLE BEING KILLED!!! DESPAIR!!! HUNGER!!! MISERY!!! FEAR!!! That’s my life! The life of an innocent eleven-year-old schoolgirl!! A schoolgirl without a school, without the fun and excitement of school. A child without games, without friends, without the sun, without birds, without nature, without fruit, without chocolate or sweets, with just a little powdered milk. In short a child without a childhood.

Zlata had a clear sense of the ingredients of a childhood: innocence, school, fun, games, friends, nature, sweets. Deprived of them, she and her friends ‘can’t be children’.¹ For Zlata a child was not simply someone aged between, say, birth and fourteen; a child could be a real child only if he or she had a ‘childhood’.

My aim in this book is in part to trace the development of this late-twentieth-century belief that children are real children only if their life experiences accord with a particular set of ideas about childhood. Will we find Zlatas in 1800 or in 1500, distraught that what they have been taught to expect of childhood is so at odds with the reality? Has ‘childhood’ in the past conveyed a set of ideas different to those which Zlata articulated?

I want also to explore the lives of children. Both ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ appear in my title because we need to distinguish between children as human beings and childhood as a shifting set of ideas. Have there been, in the 500 years since 1500, significant changes in the experience of childhood, and, if so, when did they occur? To put the question thus bluntly is to invite the riposte: it depends on country, on social class, on gender. That, certainly, is true; it will nevertheless be my argument that there were patterns of change in the experience of childhood in Europe and North America which were broadly similar, and which eventually encompassed all social classes and both genders.

It is in many ways much easier to write a history of childhood than of children. There is an accessible body of literature and of images, such as advice books, fiction and portraiture, which make it possible to piece together the ideas about childhood prevalent amongst particular social groups at particular points in time. It is possible to go further, to look at the role played by childhood as an idea in a society’s explanation of the world as a whole. It has, for instance, been common to imagine the history of humankind as equivalent to the life cycle of a human being; some societies have seen this as an ascent from savagery/childhood to civilisation/adulthood, others as a descent from primeval innocence/childhood to corruption/adulthood. A view of the world incorporates a view of the nature of childhood.²

Ideas about childhood in the past exist in plenitude; it is not so easy to find out about the lives of children. There are sources that can tell us about their numbers in relation to adults, their life expectancy, the ages at which they were likely to start work and leave home, and so on, but those seeking to recapture the emotional quality of the lives of children in the past encounter formidable hurdles. The letters and diaries of parents seem to be one way of surmounting the hurdles, but they tend to be written only by the articulate and well-to-do, and in them our view of the child is mediated through the perceptions of the adult. Children themselves have sometimes left behind written materials, but too often what they write in their diaries tells us more about the genre of diary writing and the desires and expectations of adult readers than about the experience of being a child.³

The issue that has underlain much recent historical writing about children has actually been more to do with parents than with children. Did parents in the past, it is asked, love their children? Whether or not children loved their parents is apparently not an issue. The question as posed is impossible to answer, partly because we simply do not know, and can never know, very much about the intimacies of relationships between parents and children, and partly because it assumes that we would recognise love if we saw it, and record its absence if it was not there, as though it were a material object like a table; in fact, of course, it may have expressed itself in very different ways in different societies.⁴

There is, then, a problem for the historian of childhood and children in that it is easier to write with some confidence about childhood than about children. The challenge is to tease out the relationship between ideas about childhood and the experience of being a child, and to see how it has changed over time. How can the relationship between the two be explored? The answer is that ideas about childhood can be shown to have had some impact in two distinct ways. First, manuals for parents provide us with ideals of child-rearing in the past, and although we know that they were hardly ever followed to the letter by those who read them, and that frequently the advice was totally ignored, we also know that sometimes they were taken seriously; changes in emphasis in the advice books may be both a symptom and a reflection of changes in practice.⁵ Second, ideas about childhood fed through into the discourses and actions of philanthropists and governments; a major theme of the book will be that public action shaped the lives of innumerable children in the centuries with which we are concerned.

It would be a mistake to fall into a way of thinking that assumes that if we beaver away at the relationship between children and childhood we may come up with some satisfactory history. Childhood cannot be studied in isolation from society as a whole. It is arguable that the factors which have had most impact on it, both as a set of ideas and as a phase of life, have been primarily economic and demographic, and, secondarily, political. It has been the economic development of the Western world that has allowed for both the shift in the experience of childhood from work to school, and for the emergence of the idea that childhood should be a time of dependency. And concern for the present safety and future needs of the state has often provided the impulse for public action concerning children. If, as we shall see, one of the theories about the history of children and childhood is that they have become increasingly separate from adults and adulthood, that is, in fact, all the more reason why we need to embed their history in wider economic, social and political developments.

The historiography of childhood

Over the past half-century historians have shown a burgeoning interest in children and childhood, but have rarely been in agreement with one another. There has been a reversal of opinion on some of the central issues. At the end of the 1970s most people agreed that the history of childhood was a history of progress, that the experience of being a child, and an understanding of the nature of childhood, had improved over time. A decade later the accepted orthodoxy was that, whilst obviously material circumstances had changed, the vast majority of children in the past had been brought up within nuclear families in which parents had loved their children; continuity replaced change as the leitmotif of the history of childhood. Subsequently the emphasis has been on the diversity of children’s experiences.

Philippe Ariès’s L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (1960), published in English as Centuries of Childhood (1962), launched the debates on the history of children and childhood which have lasted to the present day. His central theme had, however, been anticipated by Norbert Elias. In his volumes on The Civilizing Process, first published in Switzerland in 1939, and reaching an English readership only in the 1970s, Elias argued that ‘The distance in behavior and whole psychological structure between children and adults increases in the course of the civilizing process.’ This was the precise point underlying Ariès’s book. For Elias, ‘the civilizing process’ involved a control of the instincts, something that was hardly under way in the Middle Ages when, consequently, ‘The distance between adults and children, measured by that of today, was slight.’⁶ In the early modern period a plethora of advice books told adults how to behave, marking off the distance between adult and child. A French guide in 1714 urged readers to ‘Take good care not to blow your nose with your fingers or on your sleeve like children; use your handkerchief and do not look into it afterward.’ Of course, children too were urged to control their instincts, another French advice book of 1774 noting how ‘Children like to touch clothes and other things that please them with their hands. This urge must be corrected, and they must be taught to touch all they see only with their eyes.’⁷ The assumption by the end of the eighteenth century was coming to be that adults, in the social classes who might be assumed to read the advice books, would already have acquired good manners, but that children needed to be taught them; the distance between the two was increasing. The recognition in the twentieth century that children should be allowed to develop the manners of the adult world at their own pace did nothing to decrease that distance.⁸ For Elias the marking out of the world of childhood from adulthood was inseparable from ‘the civilizing process’.

Ariès’s book is an extended gloss on Elias’s perception. He did not disguise the fact that he was seeking to understand the particularity of the present by comparing and contrasting it with the past. What struck him about the present was the way in which social life and the emotions were centred in the family. From the eighteenth century, first within the middle classes, ‘the wall of private life’ was raised ‘between the family and society’. The old sociability of the community was lost. Children were at the centre of these families, in a privatised world where adults were ‘obsessed by the physical, moral and sexual problems of childhood’.⁹ Ariès’s starting point, then, was his distaste for what he saw as the oppressive and intolerant nature of modern family life.¹⁰ In seeking to understand how this had come about, he chose to focus on childhood, for it was changes in ideas about childhood that, in his view, had been central to the making of the modern family. Crucial in this was the development of the idea that children should have an education, which Ariès saw as part of a ‘moralization of society’ promulgated by reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; children came to be subjected to ‘a sort of quarantine’ before they were allowed to join adult society. Parents were taught that they had a duty to ensure that their children were sent to school.¹¹ In what, as we shall see in the next chapter, may have been a rather romantic view of the Middle Ages, Ariès pictured medieval children as merging naturally into adult society from about the age of seven, retaining only relatively loose ties with their families. By contrast, education, and the responsibilities of parents with regard to it, placed children at the heart of a family that was increasingly in isolation from the rest of society. The consequences were not good for children:

Family and school together removed the child from adult society. The school shut up childhood which had hitherto been free within an increasingly severe disciplinary system. … The solicitude of family, Church, moralists and administrators deprived the child of the freedom he had hitherto enjoyed among adults. It inflicted on him the birch, the prison cell.

Given the importance that Ariès ascribed to education in defining modern concepts of childhood, it is not surprising that he devoted roughly half of his book to a study of changes in ‘Scholastic Life’. The key change was the development of the idea that schooling was for children only, rather than for people of all ages; childhood and adulthood were being separated out. Once schooling became something confined to children, it became possible to impose on it an order and discipline, including corporal punishment, this discipline separating ‘the child who suffered from it from the liberty enjoyed by the adult’.¹² Moreover, as schooling spread and was extended, childhood itself lasted longer. Ariès recognised that these changes were of long duration, and took effect on different timescales according to gender, class and nation, but he was in no doubt that the influence of moralists in spreading the idea and practice of schooling was fundamental to the emergence of modern ideas of childhood.

It has been necessary to stress this point because most commentary on Ariès’s book concentrates on the essays that make up Part I of the book, entitled ‘The Idea of Childhood’. These were exploratory and tentative in their conclusions. Ariès investigated in turn changes in concepts of age, the portrayal of childhood in pictures, children’s dress, the history of games and pastimes, and the development of the idea that children were naturally innocent and should be protected from anything which might disturb their modesty. His overall conclusion was that by the seventeenth c...