Children's envy and the emergence of the modern consumer ethic, 1890-1930.

In his 1892 book, The Moral Instruction of Childhood, educator and ethicist Felix Adler recounted a familiar story. "Abel ... led ... the most delightfully easy life. ... He was a little selfish too.... [I]n a perfectly innocent way, which yet stung Cain to the quick, he would rattle on to his brother about the increase of his herds, about his plans and prospects, and the pleasant things that people were saying of him." After hearing such glowing reports, Cain began to envy Abel. "He kept comparing his own life of grinding toil with the easy, lazy life of the shepherd ... his own poverty with the other's wealth, his own loneliness with Abel's popularity." The more he thought of his brother's good fortune, the more troubled he became. He began to frown, grew "moody and silent," and "knew that he was not in the right state of mind." An inner voice told him: "'Sin is at thy door, but thou canst become master over it.'" Sin, explained Adler, "is like a wild beast crouching outside the door of the heart. Open the door ever so little, and it will force its way in, and will have you in its power. Keep the door shut, therefore; do not let the first evil thought enter into your heart. Thus only can you remain master of yourself." Tragically, however, Cain could exercise no such self-mastery. "[T]oo far gone to heed the warning voice," he murdered Abel.

Adler summed up the story for his readers, noting that had Cain learned to suppress his envy, he would not have killed his brother. His sin sprang from his failure to practice emotional control. Adler suggested that parents repeat the tale to their offspring so that they would learn to control the "wild beast crouching outside the door of the heart" and would repress their envy. Children needed to reconcile themselves to the hard reality that some people would have more of the world's goods than they, and they must resist any feelings of envy or rancor towards those who were more fortunate.

Some 35 years later, social worker Sybil Foster praised parents who bought extra gifts for their children. If a son or daughter needed a hat, adults should buy it, but they should also purchase hats for their other offspring, whether or not they needed them. This would prevent children from envying one another. (1) Whereas in the 1890s and 1900s children were expected to live with deprivation and conquer their envy, children of the 1910s and 1920s were learning that they need never feel such deprivation. Instead, they should acquire or be given whatever they wanted. In a quarter of a century, conventional wisdom about envy had changed dramatically.

This shift in attitudes represented a significant cultural reorientation which was visible not only in literature about child-rearing but also was evident throughout American culture. The changed view of envy bespoke a new tolerance for pleasure and indulgence and a turn away from the repression which the Victorian moral code had demanded of the envious. It also signaled the emergence of a full-blown consumer ethic.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Americans worried about the influence of the expanding consumer economy on morality and behavior. Educators, moralists, and child-rearing experts focused particular attention on the effects of consumerism on children.

During the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, they often expressed the fear that the dresses, toys, wagons, and other playthings which were being mass produced, and which store windows, catalog pages, and magazine ads prominently displayed, would corrupt the nation's youth. Moralists and educators who hoped to limit youthful involvement in the consumer culture often focused on young people's envy, believing that if they could teach children to control the emotion, they might be able to limit their consumer activity and reduce the amount of moral damage which the material world--and all of its temptations--could wreak on young character. Child experts and educators of the 1910s and 1920s, while far more sanguine about the effects of consumer culture, nevertheless continued to dwell on the issue of envy. They still suggested that youngsters learn to manage and minimize their envy, but often simultaneously offered advice which encouraged the emotion. Ultimately, the advic e which parents read, and the textbooks which their children studied during the 1910s and 1920s, promoted the idea that the key to happiness, fulfillment and an end to envy was not to reconcile oneself to deprivation but instead to acquire what one longed for. This new advice helped to foster in children an emotional style which encouraged consumer activity.

This essay traces how attitudes towards children's envy changed between 1890 and 1930, and how these changes supported the expansion of the consumer economy. It focuses particular attention on the advice offered to middle-class children and their parents (2)--the socio-economic groups whose emotional habits and behaviors were perhaps most critical to the long-term success of the expanding consumer marketplace. It seeks to ground this advice in its social and cultural context, because the growing concern which educators, moralists, and psychologists expressed about children's envy often reflected their larger unease with the changing shape of American culture.

The Social Context for Envy

Children growing up between 1890 and 1930 found themselves in the midst of a glittering and abundant world of consumer goods. In their daily interactions they saw with clarity the important role which these objects played in social life. As they gained new knowledge of emerging consumer institutions and their tantalizing offerings, and as they observed family and friends cast longing glances at the possessions of the wealthy, middle-class children came to desire the prestige-marked items which they believed would give them social power.

Children learned what goods were desirable from their encounters with the consumer institutions which were developing and expanding during the period. Youngsters, particularly those growing up on farms, often paged through the Sears' "Wish Book" or Ward's catalog. Both urban and rural children studied ads and flipped through the illustrated pages of mass-circulation magazines. They might also visit urban department stores, attend the stores' "children's days," or wander through their extravagant Christmas parks. What they read and saw whetted their appetites. (3)

Children found models for consumer behavior in movies, as well. By the 1920s, both middle-class children and working-class youths were watching films with great frequency. Movies gave men and women, adults and children, new visual access to the material culture of the wealthy. Such entertainments offered alluring images of appealing stars surrounded by an abundance of consumer goods. In 1933, Yale University researchers Frank Shuttleworth and Mark May, commissioned to study the effects of movies on youth, reported that children who attended movies were far more likely to place great importance on material goods and appearances than non-movie-goers. Movie-going children were more apt to agree that "good clothes make the man," "smartly dressed girls are popular," "attractive girls wear smart clothes," and "children would stay away from a party rather than wear shabby clothes." (4) Children who attended movies took home with them images of glamor and a heightened sense of the social power of consumer goods.

Perhaps even more influential were the examples of envious and striving behavior provided by families and friends. Children absorbed the aspirations, desires, and tastes of parents who were adjusting to the growing consumer economy. Many parents believed that they needed to shelter their children from market forces and social competition, yet they themselves were unable to avoid these pressures, and sometimes unknowingly taught their children to be sensitive to them as well. They wanted the signs and privileges of higher status and exhibited their longings in front of their children, thereby giving such emotions at least tacit legitimacy. (5)

Parents not only pursued high status in the adult world but were also acutely aware of the ways that their children's behavior, possessions, and appearance reflected family status. Adults' investment in the social life of their children led them to shower their offspring with expensive toys. In the late nineteenth century, parents began to show affection for their children by purchasing factory-made toys. In these early days of mass-produced and mass-marketed toys, parents controlled the purse strings, influenced the selection of toys, and thereby exerted some control over both their own and their children's social image and identity. To use Thorstein Veblen's terms, parents frequently considered their children to be vicarious consumers and symbols of family status. (6) They offered toys to their children out of love, but they often were also motivated by a desire to establish their own and their household's status. Congressman Sol Bloom of New York recognized this tendency in himself. His daughter Vera was b orn in 1900 and he gave her extravagant gifts including expensive dolls, an ermine coat, and a pony and cart. As he considered his purchases, he mused: "I have no doubt that a psychologist would tell me I really bought all those things for myself. I couldn't argue the point, for I certainly derived huge pleasure from Vera's playthings. She, I am sure, would have been just as happy with much simpler toys. I wouldn't have been." (7)

Children discovered that the adult social world was filled with rivalry and competition and found that they had a role in forwarding the family's social fortunes. That the social needs, envy, and ambitions of adults often dictated the tastes and possessions of children was only more apparent in succeeding years, as the practice of buying toys for children became ever more common. Observers of the era recognized that parents were doing more than merely giving toys to their offspring; they were also providing lessons in the social meaning of things. By showering children with toys, parents enhanced their own status, communicated the importance of striving to their children, and encouraged them to want ever more. (8)

Children also learned important lessons about what was enviable from their peers. Affluent children frequently educated less savvy or fortunate youngsters in the social meaning of possessions. Sometimes this education was delivered with a touch of malice, for privileged youngsters often gleefully publicized the particular advantages which they enjoyed and pointed out the shortcomings of their playmates' lifestyles. In 1903 pioneering psychologist G. Stanley Hall published a study on children's tendency to boast. Hall and his researchers recorded boasts such as that of a twelve-year-old boy, attuned to the subtle status distinctions between hand-made and store-bought toys, who told a playmate: "My sled is better than yours; yours was made, mine was bought." Girls' boasts were very similar to those of boys. A four-year-old girl proudly informed another child: "Your mamma haint got what my mama's got! My mamma's got a new silk dress." (9) For less fortunate children, such exchanges often proved to be powerful--i f painful--lessons in the status system. From these day-to-day interactions with family and friends, children came to recognize which garments, toys, and family possessions carried connotations of high status and came to desire them.

Children encountered the temptations of the consumer marketplace and became ever more aware of the ways in which possessions fixed social status. To a greater degree than earlier generations, their desires and daydreams were shaped by commercial forces. Consumer goods assumed a new centrality in children's psyches, and caused many to experience the sharp pangs of envy.

Expressions of Envy

There was widespread evidence at the turn of the century that American children were envious of the possessions of others. Their envy took on a distinctive form, and was the subject of considerable social scientific scrutiny. Bourgeois children who longed for toys, ponies, fine clothes, and a multitude of other commercially sold goods, usually could not purchase the objects they desired, for they had little income. Although by the end of the period, many youngsters received spending money from their parents, most still could not afford all that they desired. (10) The financial powerlessness of middle-class children often drove them to rely on their imaginations to supply what they could not actually possess. Children frequently acted on their envy not by making purchases but through make-believe. Some children told lies as they fantasized about what they had, living aloud their day-dreams. Other children acted out their dramas with a greater acknowledgment of their fictive nature. While children have always d aydreamed, pretended, and lied, the fantasies which turn-of-the-century youngsters constructed reflected the increasingly important role of consumer goods in their daily lives.

Many observers of child life concluded that envious children lied about their possessions in an attempt to pass themselves off as something other than what they were. Two turn-of-the-century studies documented children's deceitful behavior and reflected the heightened attention which envy was receiving from child-rearing experts. Linus Kline and C.J. France's 1899 study, "The Psychology of Ownership," and G. Stanley Hall and Theodore L. Smith's 1903 study, "Showing Off and Bashfulness as Phases of Self-Consciousness" offer evidence of the ways in which children acted on their envy by lying and pretending.

G. Stanley Hall claimed that when children bragged and lied about things which they did not possess, "envy and imitation are frequently motives. Several papers report actual epidemics of lying as occurring among groups of children whose sole object seemed to be the attainment of some fancied superiority, conferred by the possession of superior advantages of dress or household furnishings." Kline and France provided a sense of just how widespread these "epidemics" of dishonesty could be. They asked adults to describe "children who wished to own property far in excess of his wants or his ability to use the same aright." Over 80% of the 406 responses they received "described a child who would beg, cheat, or steal to get the coveted article." Kline and France reported that these dishonest youths were nor "peculiar" or "exceptional" children, rather the youngsters could be "anybody's children; the average child." (11) Deceptive behavior was not extraordinary behavior; instead it was quite ordinary among American c hildren, and this concerned social observers and child experts enormously.

The specific lies which the psychological researchers recorded reveal how preoccupied children were with material goods. A seven-year-old girl told a playmate "how many gold rings, watches, and earrings she had and promised the girl to bring her a watch the next day." Another girl, nine years old, "boasted of costly dolls and dresses which she did not possess." A twelve-year-old boy told listeners that "I am going to have a thousand dollars to spend the day the show is here." An eleven-year-old girl showed great familiarity with the social significance of particular home furnishings, as she reported "that they had Brussels carpets in every room but the kitchen, where there was a rag carpet. [In reality] the kitchen floor was bare and there were no Brussels carpets."

Children sometimes went beyond merely pretending to own goods and lied in order to gain the items they envied. Kline and France reported that an eight-year-old girl "bought a dress which she charged to her grandmother. Then took it to the dressmaker's and ordered it made up, but she never went after it. Entered another store and ordered two handsome pictures sent home. She went to a milliner's and selected two hats and ordered them trimmed, but never went for them. All these things she charged to her grandmother," although her grandmother apparently had no knowledge of these purchases and had never authorized them. The child had observed and remembered how her family charged goods and had employed the same methods. She had been able, at least temporarily, to carry off her lie and fulfill her desires.

During the late 1910s and 1920s, as consumer goods came to have even greater significance in social life, competitive pressures on children grew. In 1926 Dr. Adolf Meyer reported in the Scientific Monthly that modern social conditions fostered dishonesty in children. He blamed ambitious parents who often encouraged their children's deceitfulness. He wrote: " ... the number of families living beyond their income in order to 'keep up' in social position and dignity with other families is also on the increase. Children in such families are quick to be inoculated with the germ of duplicity." Meyer speculated that parents might even encourage such social dishonesty and that in consequence, envious children became accustomed to telling lies when they wanted to "simulat[e]... parental wealth and social position." (12) Lies, although often easily disproved, allowed children to act on their envy, to temporarily transform their lives and their selves into more desirable forms, and to present these fictive selves to the public.

These children's actions were not so radically different from the actions of adults who tried to refashion themselves through imitative dressing and thereby equal those whom they envied and admired. (13) Yet many social critics and child-rearing experts found scant comfort in the fact that children were acting as their elders did. All around them they saw proof that American children were envious and materialistic, and many believed that they must combat aggressively these corrupting tendencies.

The Lessons of Emotional Control, 1890-1915

In turn-of-the-century America, bourgeois adults generally regarded childhood as a time of innocence. In this idealized view of youth, adults sheltered children from financial realities, freed them from the need to labor, and protected them from the stiff social competition and status anxieties which so plagued the adult world. (14) Youngsters' frequent displays of envy, however, contradicted this vision of childhood purity. In an effort to preserve their idealized vision of childhood, and to protect the morality of children, many educators and child-rearing experts worked to find ways to control youthful envy. Between 1890 and 1915 they tried to teach children to resist temptation and to practice emotional restraint.

The men and women who urged children to control their envy, while diverse in their professions and approaches, shared a common background and a set of common concerns. Most were Protestant and middle class, and had been born prior to 1875. They had come of age before the dramatic expansion of the consumer economy--before the rise of large department stores, mail-order catalogs, mass-circulation magazines, and modern advertising. They were unaccustomed to the material abundance of this new economy and unsettled by the emotions and behaviors which it provoked. They viewed with great alarm the envy which many children were displaying in the face of the new commercial temptations and tried to inculcate in youngsters the same outlooks and virtues which they had been taught decades before.

In an effort to reinvigorate the moral traditions which they valued and the ideal of childhood innocence to which they subscribed, these educators, ministers, and parental advisors attempted to control children's envy by limiting occasions where they would be aware of inequalities, and by teaching them to be more sanguine when faced with inequity. They often relied on children's reading books to communicate this message. Children's readers contained a wide variety of moral and practical lessons and themes, and were not solely or even primarily concerned with controlling envy, but they consistently condemned the emotion and celebrated its purported opposite and antidote, contentment. Whether students read the McGuffey Reader, Hilliard's Reader, Barnes' Reader, or the Monroe Reader, they were sure to encounter treatments of these emotions. Many of these schoolbooks, in fact, contained identical selections on the topic.

Editors, ministers, and reformers who tried to restrain envy among Americans of all ages celebrated the virtue of contentment. If individuals were contented, they would accept their social and economic condition with serenity and grace and would not struggle to leave it. They would not pine for what they did not possess, nor look longingly at the belongings of their neighbors, but instead would accept happily their divinely ordained position in life. (15) McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader, published in 1896, illustrated the benefits of such contentment. In "Discontent--An Allegory," by the English writer Joseph Addison, everyone was allowed to exchange his or her burdens, all believing that the loads of their fellows were lighter, but finding them instead to be more burdensome than their own. Eventually, everyone longed for his or her original burden and learned, with the help of "Patience," "to bear it in a commodious manner." Each character then "marched off with it contentedly, being very well pleased that he had not been left to his own choice as to the kind of evil which fell to his lot." The narrator related that he had learned "never to repine at my own misfortunes, or to envy the happiness of another, since it is impossible for any man to form right judgement of his neighbor's sufferings."

A number of poems taught the lessons of contentment in a more light-hearted format. "The Miller of the Dee," by English poet Charles McKay, appeared quite often in readers. In the poem, a king overheard a miller proclaim, "'I envy nobody--no not I, And nobody envies me!'" "Good King Hal" asked why the miller was so contented, and the miller replied that he loved his family and friends and possessed all that he needed. The King took the miller's leave, declaring:

'But say no more, if thou'dst be true
That no one envies thee.
Thy mealy cap is worth my crown;
Thy mill my kingdom's fee;

Such men as thou are England's boast,
O Miller of the Dee!' (16)

Presumably the miller was "England's boast" because he knew his place and was satisfied with it. By accepting his lot in life, rather than struggling to change it, he helped to maintain a peaceful and static social order.

Another commonly reprinted poem by McKay, "Daily Work," exhorted children to do the work before them diligently and not to yearn for the worldly goods of the aristocracy.

... let us work! We only ask
Reward proportioned to our task;
We have no quarrel with the great
--No feud with rank--with mill or bank--No envy of a lord's estate.

The poem concluded that if individuals could earn enough to meet their daily needs and save a little for old age they were "rich indeed." (17) The poem implied that most children should not expect more than this from life. Readers would have to make do with relatively simple pleasures, because they would have few chances to indulge in more luxurious ones.

It is revealing that as American textbook editors endeavored to teach contentment and help children control their envy they repeatedly included the works of European writers which referred to the stratified conditions of social life in England and France and relied on references to kings and nobles. Such works held up as models those who knew and accepted their place in a hierarchical society. Schoolbook editors believed that the example of the rigid and stratified European class systems might benefit envious children in the ostensibly classless United States.

In addition to celebrating contentment, children's readers often attempted to justify inequality and teach contentment by invoking the hoary idea of a divinely ordained Great Chain of Being. Time and again, children's reading books and magazines described creatures in nature who compared themselves with larger, grander, or brighter beings, and in consequence wished to be something other than what they were. The tales routinely ended with an affirmation of the divine wisdom which had put things where they were. These formulaic stories drummed the principles of hierarchy into children's minds. In Sarah Orne Jewett's story of "The Discontented Buttercup," a robin met a buttercup who wanted to be a daisy. The buttercup wanted to change herself because "She always had a passion For wearing frills around her neck, In just the daisies' fashion. And buttercups must always be The same old tiresome color; While daisies dress in gold and white, Although their gold is duller." The buttercup asked the robin if it could fi nd her a white, daisy-like frill to wear about her neck. The bird refused and explained the importance of being true to one's God-given nature. The robin told the buttercup:

'I'd rather be my honest self
Than any made-up daisy....
Be the best buttercup you can,
And think no flower above you....
We'd better keep our places.
Perhaps the world would all go wrong
With one too many daisies....
... be content with knowing
That God wished for a buttercup
Just here, where you are growing.'

As the buttercup learned, too much striving might contravene God's plans and upset the order of the universe.

Innumerable other school-book fables reiterated the importance of accepting one's place in the Great Chain of Being and staying contentedly in it rather than struggling to leave it. They included Henry Van Dyke's story of a fir tree who longed to replace his needles with utterly unsuitable leaves, but who eventually learned that "... he had been a fool, To think of breaking the forest rule, And choosing himself a dress to please Because he envied the other trees;" the story of two jackdaws who tried to transform themselves into peacocks and pigeons, but came to realize that their borrowed plumage deceived no one and that they should remain jackdaws; and the story of the discontented boy who wished himself a bird, and then a cat, and then dog, and finally realized that he was best off as a boy. (18)

By relying on natural imagery, the poems and stories transformed the arbitrary positions, distinctions, and inequalities of society into divinely and beneficently designed relationships. They literally "naturalized" the social order. Because social positions and inequalities were presented as natural and foreordained, they (at least theoretically) resisted questioning. Such stories offered a deeply conservative ideology and sought to inculcate complacency in their youthful readers. Rather than encouraging children to seek advancement and higher rank, the stories instead seemed designed to keep all in their assigned places--a strange lesson for a liberal democracy. (19)

In addition to reading injunctions against envy in their schoolbooks, children also learned of social prohibitions against the emotion from the child-rearing advice offered to their parents. As professional psychology developed at the turn of the century, children's envy and rivalry gained new significance in child-rearing literature.

In the period between 1890 and 1915 the main objective of this advice literature was to discourage immorality. Felix Adler's counsel on envy illustrates this tendency. Adler, born in 1851, helped to organize the International Congress of Moral Education and establish the Society for Ethical Culture. It was he, in his 1892 book, The Moral Instruction of Children, who advised parents to discourage envious behavior by telling children the story of Cain and Abel. After telling of Cain's murder of Abel, parents should emphasize that "[t]he moral of the story is: 'Do not harbor evil thoughts in the mind.... Cain's sin consisted in not crushing the feelings of envy in the beginning; in comparing his own lot with that of his more favored brother and dwelling on this comparison, until, in a fit of insane passion, he was led on to the unspeakable crime which, indeed, he had never contemplated.'" Envy could lead to a host of immoral actions and dreadful consequences--even murder--if not carefully contained. Other child- rearing experts of the period avoided such dramatic episodes, but nevertheless offered similar lessons and warned parents that they must train their children to control their envy and cultivate a contented spirit. One advisor, William Forbush, in his Guidebook to Childhood, suggested that parents teach envious youngsters that their "unfortunate circumstances" need not detract from their "real joy of living." Parents should point out that there were "certain compensating values" which offset their deprivations, and which could bring contentment. (20)

Parents should not only teach their children to be contented, they should also try to eliminate the occasions which might threaten contentment and cause envy. Columnist Filson Young believed that many parents, blinded by their own social ambitions, failed to realize how the gifts and parties they gave their children actually harmed them and caused them to envy.

... there are the presents--sources of endless hidden woes and heart-burnings. The cotillion, or the Christmas tree, is crowned by elaborate and expensive gifts that cannot all be equally desirable, and that therefore cannot fail to cause longing, envy, jealousy and disappointment. Have people forgotten how frightfully sensitive children are to anything like social inequality, or how the darts of snobbishness can stab ...? A child who cannot give to her friends a party as 'good' as she received, is to some extent ... a victim to the selfishness of her elders.

Naturalist John Burroughs called such parental generosity "the crime of the age; it is a sin against our children; it corrupts their simplicity." (21) To make children contented and to keep them from covetousness, parents must not only teach emotional restraint, but must also practice it themselves. They must limit the number of toys and entertainments which they gave to their children, for their unrestrained materialism could easily damage young character.

In the years between 1890 and 1915, parents and children repeatedly heard of the moral dangers of envy and the sinfulness of excessive materialism. The advice and sermons they read and heard, however, often seemed unequal to the temptations of the material world which they daily confronted. In their forays into stores, in their casual interactions with friends and enemies in the schoolyard, and in their own families' parlors, children observed first hand the power of consumer goods and found themselves sorely tempted by them. It was often difficult for them to cultivate a contented spirit and accept deprivation when the glittering goods they saw about them excited their longing and their desires.

A New View of Envy, 1915-1930

The formal advice about children's envy began to change around the time of the first World War. Increasingly, concerns about the sinfulness of envy began to drop away and educators and child advisors instead began to look at the emotion from a different angle. While many advisors continued to worry about the destructive effects of envy, rivalry, and competition, they no longer couched their concerns in terms of sin. Similarly, while many experts hoped that children would not squabble and compete for goods, they seemed relatively unconcerned about the overall effects of consumer culture on children. They often, in fact, encouraged parents and children to buy more rather than less. Much of their advice reflected a belief that consumer goods might be the solution to children's social and emotional problems rather than the source of their woes. These educators and advisors took a more tolerant attitude towards envy, and embraced a more commercialized vision of childhood.

There were several underlying causes for this new view. During the 1910s and 1920s, an eclectic group of secular advisors gained prominence and influence, while traditional religious writers were accorded less cultural authority than in earlier years. Generally college-educated, and in most cases born after the Civil War, the new generation of advisors, which included doctors, economists, psychologists, and advertisers, had grown up along with the consumer society and the expanding urban industrial order. Accustomed to material abundance in a way that previous generations were not, many believed that the moral problems traditionally associated with envy were overstated. Their perspective on the morality of consumption was also shaped by their social and vocational positions. Most advisors were members of the new middle class who worked for large corporations and institutions like department stores, advertising agencies, universities, and publishing houses. Their positions within these new institutions may hav e disposed them to promote commercial values and made them willing to support the industrial and modernizing social order.

These factors combined with and to some extent, depended upon another development--the gradual weakening of the moralistic Victorian tradition. As historian Peter Stearns points out, Darwinian theory first challenged conventional religious notions about the possibility or desirability of perfect self-control and restraint. If humans were descended from animals, perhaps they too were subject to sometimes ungovernable emotions and instincts. The rise of new academic disciplines, including sociology, with its focus on the effects of larger social and environmental forces in individual life, and psychology with its interest in how the unconscious worked, and how it might be manipulated, also drew attention to the idea that self-restraint was not always possible, nor even always desirable.

Darwinian theory also undermined the idea of a static, providentially ordered universe in which people's positions and fortunes could not and should not be altered. Evolutionary theory endorsed the idea that struggle, competition, and change were natural, an idea which many who defended envy and discontent eagerly seized upon. World War I was the final nail in the coffin of the Victorian emotional code. To the extent that the War undermined religious belief, it also undermined the rationale for controlling envy. As belief in a divinely and beneficently designed universe waned, so too did the idea that God had chosen individuals' stations in life specifically for them and that they should therefore be content with their particular lot. (22)

The effects of these new attitudes were plainly visible in the changing content of children's schoolbooks. During the late 1910s and the 1920s, the editors of children's readers began to include selections which encouraged youngsters to buy status goods. While editors still included the old stories about fishes and flowers learning contentment, they also seemed to recognize that these moral tales no longer quite fit the social realities of the times. Many of the schoolbook editors and writers active in the 1920s had been children in the 1880s and 1890s and were accustomed to the consumer abundance which department stores, advertisements, and movies displayed. They considered this abundance to be a benefit to society because it seemed to offer all Americans the opportunity for a higher standard of living. (23) Accordingly, these authors presented consumer activity, envy, and discontent in a far different light from their predecessors.

For example, in a 1924 curriculum guide for consumer education, education professor Henry Harap suggested that students should learn prudent purchasing habits. In an extended discussion of clothing, he wrote that in "our democracy we have made great progress toward breaking down the barriers of class, rank, and office as they are expressed in the outward costume of men and women. Thus it may be said that the few who choose their clothes wisely join a new aristocracy of dress which takes in all classes." Because the right clothes might raise ones status in society, Harap believed it important to teach students how to distinguish between good and bad clothing, elegant attire and "tawdry ... ill-fitting clothing" which could "affect the social relations of men and women." Harap thought students should learn of the great social power of consumer goods, and be given sound advice on precisely which items to buy, for consumer spending was a force for progress and equality. If students made wise clothing purchases, t hey would not need to envy the upper classes; instead they would be on equal footing with them.

In the Home and Country Reader, published in 1918, home economist Isabel Bevier focused on fine household furnishings rather than clothing, but her message was much the same as Harap's. Bevier, born in 1860, had reservations about certain types of consumer spending. She disliked imitation luxury goods, and discouraged her readers from trying to resolve their envy by purchasing such items. Nevertheless, she made some accommodation with the modern consumer economy, and did not condemn spending, so long as purchases were made with judgement and taste. "Avoid pretentious things," she wrote. "If real lace cannot be afforded, sham lace ought not to be allowed.... Get simple things, few things, durable things." In succeeding pages, however, Bevier abandoned the idea of getting only a "few things," for she laid out an ambitious purchasing plan for students. She suggested that "two-toned green paper with a cream ceiling, weathered oak furniture and woodwork with Oriental rugs or American ones in shades of brown and a little red, make a satisfactory living room." A parlor, her readers learned, should contain "delicately upholstered furniture, the rare vase or bit of favrile glass. Oriental rugs with their mellowed tones will harmonize with almost any color." Bevier and Harap seemed to be encouraging students to pursue the luxuries of the wealthy. They suggested that it was legitimate and laudable for students of all income levels to desire and purchase well-cut suits and expensive Oriental rugs. In this new vision of consumer plenty everyone was entitled to the finer things in life. Rather than telling students to practice contentment and to keep their desires in check, these books actually encouraged readers to cultivate new desires.

Some schoolbook authors went even further and suggested that students should not only consume, but should actively develop an envious and discontented spirit. For instance, a selection in the textbook Economic Civics, published in 1921, criticized the complacency which many felt with their current standard of living. The book's author, Ray Osgood Hughes, worried that some Americans were not participating fully in the consumer economy and did not display an appropriate interest in improving themselves or their conditions. He suggested that not just adults, but children as well, must learn to want more than they currently did. "The poor ignorant man who lives in a mean little home and works all day in our mills may be entirely contented with his life because he knows no other. The child who has never had beautiful toys to play with may be happier with her old rag doll than the rich child is with her more expensive French dolls." Hughes believed that these people should demand more of life. If they were to exper ience envy, they might progress. "Let these same ignorant people once ... become acquainted with the pleasures and luxuries that some folks have in abundance. Immediately discontent sets in, and a striving for higher and better things may follow. And then gradually from this, a new contentment comes.... This higher kind comes from realizing what one ought to have and knowing that one is actually making progress toward gratifying those needs. In many cases, then, a certain discontent is almost desirable." (24) Hughes maintained that individuals should act on their envy in order to gain contentment, because true contentment came not from accepting one's deprivations but from possessing what one truly wanted. Schoolbooks of this sort implied that envy, discontent, and materialism, traits once considered sins, were now emotions and character attributes worthy of cultivation. A materialistic and commercial ethos had seeped into children's readers, just as it would in so many other sectors of American culture.

The child-rearing advice which parents read also took on a commercial flavor during the late 1910s and 1920s. First, the advice itself was mass-marketed. According to some estimates, by the 1930s, 90% of mothers and 65% of fathers in the professional class read child-rearing advice. (25) Additionally, the content of the advice was increasingly commercialized. The advice books continued to preach the same message: children should be taught to conquer their envy. There were, however, significant changes in both the rationale for repressing envy and the methods for training children to do so. While at the turn of the century, child-rearing advisors warned of the moral perils of envy, experts of the 1920s focused much more attention on the societal hazards of envy, and the moralistic content of their advice gradually dropped away.

By the 1920s, child-rearing experts concurred that envy should be discouraged not because it made children sinful, as earlier generations of child advisors had warned, but because it might lead to character flaws which would surface in adulthood. Indeed, Daniel Rodgers and Peter Stearns have suggested that the child-rearing practices of this period were especially suited to corporate needs, for they were designed to produce adults who could function easily in the white-collar world. Adults were supposed to rid themselves of the emotional habits of entrepreneurial capitalism--envy, competitiveness, and ambition--and instead cultivate the traits useful to a corporate capitalist organization-loyalty, teamwork, and cooperation. (26)

To be well-adjusted members of corporate society, children had to develop these same traits. Child-rearing experts told parents that not only must they discourage envy, they also must encourage their children to take joy in others' successes, to practice cooperation, and to lose gracefully rather than to express envy of another's triumph. Parental advisor Benjamin C. Gruenberg counseled that children's "satisfaction with competitive rivalry should be gradually transferred from personal rivalry to group rivalry, with its demand for subordination, for self-control, for cooperation, for admiration and for loyalty." This was necessary

because "we are coming to see that cooperation will probably turn out better for society as a whole than will unrestrained competition."

Given this belief that society would be better served by cooperation, it seemed imperative to teach children emotional habits which would make them less competitive. Gruenberg's contemporary, Douglas Thom, Director of the Habit Clinic of Boston, Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Director of the Division of Mental Hygiene for Massachusetts, argued that if envious children grew up without conquering their envy, they would be unhappy, overly competitive, and profoundly maladjusted. Using the words envy and jealousy interchangeably, as would become common in the twentieth century, he wrote: "Later in life this emotion causes an inability to share the joys of others, and makes it impossible to see others succeed without manifesting open resentment." He continued, "Keep in mind that the jealous child will be a jealous adult, an individual who will be constantly resenting his friends' success, who works poorly with others.... In brief, he will be an individual who is completely out of harmony w ith the environment in which he lives, and out of adjustment with his fellow beings." To prevent such a dire outcome, envy and jealousy had to be overcome in childhood. Thom suggested that parents accomplish this by teaching their children to share their belongings, to be less selfish, and to be good sports when they lost at games. Gruenberg, born in 1875, and Thom, born in 1886, were representative of the new cohort of child-rearing experts: seemingly unconcerned with moral questions, they condemned envy because it did not mesh with the needs of the modern corporate economy. (27)

While Gruenberg, Thom, and many other child-rearing advisors hoped children would learn to conquer their rivalrous and envious instincts, they did not condemn the material desires which so often were the source of envy and competition. In fact, much of the advice they directed to parents during the 1910s and 1920s focused on the importance of using consumer goods to teach social lessons. They even suggested that toys and other commercially sold items might solve the vexing problem of envy.

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, psychologists began to describe toys not as corrupting objects which encouraged an immoral love of material things and bred social competition, but instead as important tools for socializing children. As educator and psychologist Ethel Kawin noted, since the late 'teens, many child experts had come to believe in the "4 Rs." The "4 Rs," Kawin explained were "'reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic, and recreation." Toys, central to this faith in recreation, were "helps to Habit-Training and Character-Building." While educators like Kawin realized there could be pitfalls in distributing too many or the wrong types of toys, they nevertheless were convinced that if parents chose playthings prudently, they might help their children develop emotionally. As a writer for American Magazine noted: "Educators and psychologists say that toys have an incalculable influence on a child's life." She warned that " ... a play-starved childhood makes for a colorless maturity and a gray old age." (28)

Some went even further and argued that not only were toys and other consumer goods important to children's general psychological health, but claimed that they might be used to combat the particular problem of envy. Whereas child advisors of the 1890s and 1900s had viewed material goods as the source of envy and social tensions, and therefore advised parents to limit their purchases, experts of the 1910s and 1920s suggested that toys, clothes, and other commercially sold playthings would bring children satisfaction and pleasure, and would assuage their envy.

According to this new view, children's desires for popular toys or modish clothing were not sinful or frivolous; rather they represented legitimate social needs which must be met if a child was to develop into a healthy adult. For instance, Benjamin Gruenberg and his wife, Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, the president of the Child Study Association, counseled parents that they should purchase items like silk stockings for their offspring so that they might fit in with other children at school. While they should discourage extravagance, parents should not make their children conspicuous by depriving them of popular articles which other children possessed and which they longed for. The Gruenbergs implied that social acceptance depended, at least to some degree, on ownership of the right objects. Parents should not force their children to live with a sense of deprivation or feelings of envy, for to do so would make them unhappy, poorly adjusted, and dogged by feelings of inferiority. If parents responded to the longi ngs of their offspring, and purchased particularly desirable goods, they might guarantee that their children would fit it with their peers and experience emotional satisfaction and well-being.

This wisdom represented a marked and self-conscious departure from the Victorian moral and emotional code. The Gruenbergs, for instance, condemned a mother who would not buy her daughter silk stockings. The mother reasoned that as a child she had not worn them; neither, then, should her daughter. This, the Gruenbergs argued, was bad parenting, for "it could profit no one for the parent to impose her childhood sentiments about finery. Not was it helpful to insist upon the virtue of privation and self-sacrifice as having intrinsic merit for everybody and under all circumstances." The Gruenbergs believed that the mother was incorrect to "carry over the standards of another time" and impose them on her daughter.

Child advisors and moralists at the turn of the century had harbored the hope that they might restrain Americans' materialistic tendencies and shelter children from the status anxieties and conspicuous consumption which plagued the adult world. By the l920s, parenting experts had come to see this goal as outdated and instead adopted a new perspective. They embraced the consumer culture and suggested that both children and adults should acquire what they longed for because material goods offered individuals emotional and social benefits.

The new view of consumer goods as beneficial to child development was also visible in the emerging literature on sibling rivalry, a problem which concerned many experts of the 1920s. As Peter Stearns has noted, advisors told parents that to minimize rivalry, they should give extra love to children who might feel neglected because of the arrival of a new baby, and extra toys to youngsters who might otherwise feel envious, deprived, or excluded. For instance, if a child was celebrating a birthday, his parents should be careful to provide his siblings with gifts as well. Rather than teaching children to repress envy and to accept inequality, adults were to make sure that no one felt neglected or passed over. Simply put, more toys would solve the problem of children's envy. Ethel Kawin, for instance, suggested that the "wise distribution of toys and fair and friendly play habits ... will usually contribute something toward relief from jealousy symptoms in most situations." Social worker Sybil Foster offered an ex ample of a mother who had eliminated troublesome outbreaks of sibling envy and rivalry through such a policy of "wise distribution." Foster noted approvingly: "If two articles cannot be bought, one for each of the two older sisters, then both go without. This winter Maria needed a new hat. Angelina did not, but the mother said, 'I just saved a little more and got them both hats, for she would have been so unhappy." (29)

Thirty-five years earlier, parents had been told that they should repeat the story of Cain and Abel and force their children to suppress their envy, no matter how strongly they felt it. Children would have to live with inequality. By the 1920s, this approach had been completely supplanted by the belief that parents should assuage their children's envy by buying them what they wanted. If Maria was to get a hat, Angelina should have one too. If the popular girls at school wore silk stockings, one's daughter must as well. By offering such advice, child advisors undermined their stated goal of teaching youngsters to repress their envy, for they implied that the way to overcome covetousness was not through self-control but through increased materialism. This message--that the problem of envy could be solved by providing more goods to children--was repeated throughout American culture, and ultimately this emotional ethic, rather than the older lessons of self-control and repression, "privation and self-sacrifice," would carry the day.

By the 1920s, America had become a consumer society. There was no part of American culture unaffected by the powerful new values of consumerism, no cultural preserve off limits to market forces. During the late nineteenth century, bourgeois Americans had conceived of their children as pure beings, existing in a world quite separate from the pressures of commerce and competition. While this vision had always been more myth than reality, it had become even less accurate by the 1920s. Bourgeois childhood was not separate from commercial forces, but in many ways was defined by them. Even the textbook authors and child-rearing experts who sought to restrain children's envy, by the 1920s had adapted to this new reality. They suggested that parents should assuage children's envy by providing them with the objects they coveted, for they had come to believe that consumer goods might be aids to children's social development rather than the source of their moral corruption. Envy, in their view, was no longer a sin--inst ead it was a problem of personality adjustment which might be overcome through the purchase of more toys or hats or wagons. This new approach to envy, propagated by educators, psychologists, movies, parents, and peers, was perhaps best summed up by a small Southern girl who had clearly internalized the modern emotional code. An Alabama minister reported that "a little girl in one of my church schools was asked the other day, What was the Tenth Commandment? The reply was 'Thou shalt not covet.' When asked what covet meant, she replied, 'not to want other folks [sic] things, but to get Sears, Roebuck Catalogue and buy for yourself.'" (30)

ENDNOTES

Portions of this essay are adapted from Chapter 5 of Keeping Up With the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Culture, 1890-1930, by Susan Matt. [C]2003 University of Pennsylvania Press. Used here with permission of the publisher.

(1.) Felix Adler, The Moral Instruction of Children (New York, 1892), pp. 116-120, pp. 396-413. Sybil Foster, "A Study Of The Personality Make-Up And Social Setting of Fifty Jealous Children," Mental Hygiene 11 (1927): p. 73.

(2.) I define children as individuals under the age of 16. Although is a somewhat arbitrary dividing line, it seems to accord with the way the turn-of-the-century Americans defined childhood. Those working to regulate child labor, for instance, used 16 as the dividing line between childhood and adulthood. See Russell Friedman, Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor (New York, 1994), pp. 1, 22-23; John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of die Children (New York, 1906), pp. 148-153, 163-167 reprinted in Richard Hofstadrer, The Progressive Movement, 1900-1915 (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1963), pp. 39-44.

(3.) Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York, 1973), p. 129. For accounts of children playing with paper dolls cut from catalogs see Anne McCall and Mary Jane Henderson, Fragments of Yesterday: A Collection of Childhood Memories in Delaware County, 1892-1929 (Deposit, New York, 1993), p.63; see also David Cohn, The Good Old Days: A History of American Morals and Manners as seen through the Sears Roebuck Catalogs 1905 to the Present (New York, 1940), p. 574; William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993) pp. 328-338; Miriam Formanek Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and die Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (New Haven, CT, 1993), pp. 160-184. Harry Selfridge, "Children's Day," from "Notes Concerning Subjects of Talks Made by H.G.S. to Department Heads ..., as compiled by Waldo Warren, 1901-1906," Marshall Field's Archives, Chicago, September 25, 1905, quoted in William Leach, "Child-World in the Promised Land ," p. 214.

(4.) Frank Shuttleworth and Mark May, "The Social Conduct and Attitudes of Movie Fans," in W.W. Charters, Motion Pictures and Youth (New York, 1933), pp.7-9,58. See also Kathy Peiss, "Making Faces: The Cosmetics Industry and the Cultural Construction of Gender, 1890-1930," Genders, 7 (March 1990): pp. 143-169, especially p. 155. Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York, 1929), pp. 81, 82n; Viola Goode Liddell, With a Southern Accent (Norman, Oklahoma, 1948), pp. 80-81.

(5.) As one magazine writer recalled, his mother "continually impressed upon us children that we were 'as good as anybody,' and ... she would urge us to 'get to know the best people.' And by 'best people' she meant those who had the most money, and got their names in the society columns. What lam trying to make clear is that the whole atmosphere of our home was one of strain and worry. We were all striving so hard to succeed ... "Why I Quit Thinking About Myself," American Magazine, 103 (April 1927): p. 137. For other accounts of children learning to envy and strive from their parents see James S. Plant, "Sociological Factors Challenging the Practice of Psychiatry in a Metropolitan District," American Journal of Psychiatry, 8 (January 1929): pp. 705-716. Most of the children who saw Plant saw in his practice in suburban New Jersey were children whose parents had relocated to more affluent areas in their quest for status. Plant reported that many of the children in such families were plagued by feelings of ins ecurity and inferiority in their new, more elite surroundings.

(6.) Gary Cross, Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA, 1997), p. 8; Bernard Mergen, "Made, Bought, and Stolen: Toys and the Culture of Childhood," in Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America 1850-1950, Elliott West and Paula Petrik, eds. (Lawrence, KS, 1992), p. 88. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, p. 69-70 (Veblen does not discuss children but uses the term to discuss wives; nevertheless it seems applicable here).

(7.) Sol Bloom, The Autobiography of Sol Bloom (New York, 1948), pp. 174-175; See also Viola Goode Liddell, With A Southern Accent, pp. 67-68.

(8.) Nora Atwood, "Children and Toys," Outlook, 122 (May 7, 1919): pp. 27-29.

(9.) G. Stanley Hall and Theodore Smith, "Showing Off and Bashfulness as Phases of Self-Consciousness," Pedagogical Seminary, 10 (June 1903): pp. 172-3; For other examples of children informing each other about the relative prestige of particular goods, see Nathalie Dana, Young in New York A Memoir of a Victorian Girlhood (Garden City, New York, 1963), pp. 64-65, 76-77, 99.

(10.) Historian Viviana Zelizer has likened middle- and upper-class children at the turn of the century to "paupers." Ironically, poor children who worked frequently had more spending money than children from affluent households. David Nasaw has described the spending habits of working children from poor families who often pocketed a portion of their earnings and were thereby able to afford candy, toys, clothes, and nickelodeon shows. In contrast, middle-class children growing up at the turn of the century had less spending money and in consequence, fewer opportunities for consumer spending than many working-class children. By 1930 most child-rearing experts agreed that "every child needs an allowance," because the possession of money would inculcate fiscal responsibility and prudential shopping habits. Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York, 1985), pp. 5, 103, 112; Helen B. Seymour, "Money Matters with Young People," Outlook, 48 (September 23, 1893): p. 553, quoted in Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, p. 103; David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and At Play (Garden City, New York, Doubleday, pp. 130-137; William Byron Forbush, Guidebook to Childhood (Philadelphia, 1915), pp. 155, 246-250; Thomas D. Eliot, "Money and the Child's Own Standards of Living," Journal of Home Economics, 24 (January 1932): p. 2; Francis Frisbie O'Donnell, "Every child needs an allowance," Parents Magazine, 5 (March 1930): pp. 18-19, 38-40. Gary Cross, Kid's Stuff, p. 51; David I. Macleod, The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890-1920 (New York, 1998), p. 18.

(11.) G. Stanley Hall and Theodore Smith, "Showing Off and Bashfulness as Phases of Self-Consciousness," p. 174, emphasis in the original; Linus Kline and C.J. France, "The Psychology of Ownership," Pedagogical Seminary, 6 (December 1899): pp. 452, 454.

(12.) G. Stanley Hall and Theodore Smith, "Showing Off," pp. 174-175; Linus Kline and C.J. France, "The Psychology of Ownership," p. 453; Adolf Meyer, "The Lies that Children Tell," Scientific Monthly, 23 (December 1926): pp. 522, 526, 527.

(13.) See Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870; see also Susan J. Matt, "Frocks, Finery and Feelings: Rural and Urban Women's Envy, 1890-1930," in An Emotional History of the United States, Peter Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds. (New York, 1998), pp.377-395; See also Susan Mart, Keeping Up With the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Culture, 1890-1930 (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming in 2003).

(14.) Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Robert Baldick, trans. (New York, 1962), pp. 110, 119; see also Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (Cambridge, MA, 1988), pp. 126-128.

(15.) For a fuller discussion of the doctrine of contentment, see David Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York, 1985), pp. 100-125; see also Susan Matt, "Frocks, Finery and Feelings: 1890-1930," pp. 377-395.

(16.) Joseph Addison, "Discontent--An Allegory" in McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader (New York, 1896), pp. 300-301; Charles McKay, "The Miller of the Dee," in Barnes Notional Reader (New York, 1884), pp. 177-178. See also Edna Henry Lee, The Lee Readers: Fourth Book (New York, 1912), p.213; Howard Copeland Hill and Rollo LaVerne Lyman, Reading and Living (New York, 1924), pp. 220-221; John Manly, Edith Rickert, and Nina Leubrie, Good Reading: Fourth Reader (New York, 1927), pp. 180-181.

(17.) Charles McKay, "Daily Work," Williams' Choice Literature, Book Two Intermediate (New York 1898), p p. 149-150. See also Ellen E. Kenyon, The Character Building Reader, Fourth Year: Thoughffulness and Devotion (New York, 1910), pp. 152-154.

(18.) "The Discontented Buttercup," in Ellen E. Kenyon-Warner, The Character Building Reader, Fourth Year, pp. 103-104; Henry Van Dyke, "The Foolish Fir Tree," in Howard Copeland Hill and Rollo LaVerne Lyman, Reading and Living, pp. 436-439; "The Two Jackdaws who Pretended," in Calvin Kendall and Marion Paine Steven, The Kendall Series of Readers, Third Reader (Boston, 1918), pp. 16-18; Charles Love Benjamin, "The Discontented Boy," St. Nicholas, 24 (November 1898): pp. 71-72.

(19.) Daniel Rodgers has noted a similar conservative tone in the children's stories and advice manuals of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Daniel Rodgers, "Socializing Middle-Class Children: Institutions, Fables, and Work Values in Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of Social History, 13 (Spring 1980): pp. 354-364.

(20.) "Felix Adler," National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol.23 (New York, 1933), pp. 98-99. Felix Adler, The Moral Instruction of Children, pp. 116-120; William Byron Forbush, Guidebook to Childhood (Philadelphia, 1915), pp. 331-332. In examining these advice books I have tried to separate discussions of what was traditionally called jealous behavior from discussions of the envy of possessions, abilities, and opportunities of others. Peter Stearns has noted that experts increasingly came to conflate the meanings of jealousy and envy, and in the case of child-rearing advice I agree. Peter N. Steams, "Girls, Boys, and Emotions: Redefinitions and Historical Change," Journal of American History, 80 (June 1993): pp. 36-74; Peter N. Stearns, "The Rise of Sibling Jealousy in the Twentieth Century," in Emotion and Social Change: Towards a New Psychohistory, Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, eds. (New York, 1988), pp. 193-222.

(21.) Filson Young, 'Children's Parties," Living Age, 272 (February 17,1912): p. 431; John Burroughs, "Corrupting the Innocents," The Independent, 61(1906): pp. 1424-1425.

(22.) T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1981), pp. 7-12,37-40; Peter Stearns, Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self Control in Modem America (New York, 1999), pp. 113-116; Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940 (Baltimore, 1985), pp. 163-165; Hal Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (Cambridge, pp. 41-42; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York, 1964 [c193 1]), pp. 73-101; T.H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics in James Paradis and George C. Williams, Evolution & Ethics: T.H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics With New Essays on Its Victorian and Sociobiological Context (Princeton, 1989), p. 85.

(23.) See for instance T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace, pp. 7-10; Charles McGovern, Sold American: Inventing the Consumer, 1890-1940, (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1993), pp. 18-26.

(24.) Henry Harap, The Education of the Consumer: A Study in Curriculum Material (New York, 1924), pp. vii, 224-240. Isabelle Bevier "Coloring and Furnishing the Home" in The Home and Country Readers, Book Four [ed. Maryy A. LaSalle] (Boston, 1918),p 52-57; Ray Osgood Hughes, Economic Civics (Boston, 1921), pp. 15-17; "Bevier, Isabel," in Who Was Who in America, Vol. 2 (Chicago, 1950), p. 61; "Hughes, Ray Osgood," in Who Was Who in America, Vol. 3, p. 426.

(25.) Gary Cross, Kids' Stuff, p. 124.

(26.) Peter N. Stearns, "Consumerism and Childhood: New Targets for American Emotions," in An Emotional History of the United States, Peter Steams and Jan Lewis, eds. (New York, 1998), pp. 396-413; See Peter N. Steams, "Girls, Boys, and Emotions," pp. 37-39, 64, 66; Daniel Rodgers, "Socializing Middle-Class Children," pp. 354-364. Steams makes a similar observation about the match between child-rearing advice and corporate needs. For a discussion of the emotional code for adult white-collar workers, see Matt, Keeping Up With the Joneses; Clark Davis, Company Men: White-Collar Life and Corporate Cultures in Los Angeles, 1892-1941, (Baltimore, MD, 2000), pp. 42, 47; Stearns, Battleground of Desire, pp. 110,175; Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930 (Baltimore, MD, 1994), pp. 53-54.

(27.) Benjamin C. Gruenberg, "Rivalry and Competition," in Guidance of Childhood and Youth: Readings in Child Study, Compiled by the Child Study Association of America, ed. Benjamin C. Gruenberg (New York, 1926), pp. 95-98. Douglas A. Thom, Everyday Problems of the Everyday Child (New York, 1929), pp. 179-181. See also Charles Germane and Edith Gayton Germane, Character Training: A Program for the Home (New York, 1929) pp. 68-69; Ethel Kawin, The Wise Choice of Toys (Chicago, 1934), pp. 52-56. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild has noted that there often is great similarity between parents' work and children's roles. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley CA, 1983), p. 156.

(28.) Ethel Kawin, The Wise Choice of Toys (Chicago, 1934), pp. 1, 44,48. "A Grandmother Talks about Picking Toys," ed. by M. Harrington, American Magazine, 114 (December 1932), pp. 44-45, 87-89. For another example of the new valuation of toys, see Minnetta Samis Leonard, Best Toys for Children and Their Selection (Madison, Wis.; Prepared for the Wisconsin Kindergarten Association, c. 1925), pp. 5, 8, 9-10. This new faith in toys is consistent with trends Lisa Jacobson described. She argues that experts of the 1920s "envisioned play as a positive force in children's lives ... as an essential element of child development, personal growth, and happiness." According to Jacobson, children's play in the house was supposed to offset the passive and corrupting amusements available outside of the home. See Lisa Jacobson, "Revitalizing the American Home: Children's Leisure and the Revaluation of Play, 1920-1940," Journal of Social History, 30 (Spring 1997): pp. 581-596.

(29.) Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg and Benjamin C. Gruenberg, Parents, Children, and Money: Learning to Spend, Save, and Earn (New York, 1933), pp. 8-9; Peter N. Stearns, Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion (New York, 1989), p. 94; Steams, "Girls, Boys, and Emotions, pp. 36-74; Stearns, "Sibling Jealousy in the Twentieth Century," pp. 193-222; Steams, "Consumerism and Childhood," pp. 396-413. Ethel Kawin, The Wise Choice of Toys, p. 48. Sybil Foster, "A Study Of The Personality Make-Up And Social Setting of Fifty Jealous Children," p. 73.

(30.) Quoted in David L. Cohn, The Good Old Days, p. 576.