Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900.

Centuries of Childhood is thirty-something now. Its account of the emergence of modernity has been assailed as well as amplified, but its premises and precepts remain as apt today as when they first appeared. Aries said and still says nearly everything that needed and still needs to be said to scholars of the family: that the family has a history, that child-rearing is the most revealing register of that history, and that material culture provides the richest repository of the record of that child-rearing.

Social historians took eagerly to the affirmation of historicity and the injunction to attend to child-rearing. They never did embrace the imperative to turn to material culture. Even as they came to admit, grudgingly, the limits of the prescriptive literatures they first favored--the school primers, sermons, medical manuals, and other such idealized directives--they continued to concentrate on documents in archives. Even as they took up new sources--wills, deeds, inventories, and the manuscript censuses--they continued to work with words.

Karin Calvert is the first American social historian to engage Aries's methods as well as his ideas. Just as he studied toys and costume because they afforded the widest windows on childhood, she studies "artifact constellations" because they intimate "cultural beliefs and assumptions so basic that they are rarely verbalized" and "social fears" so "emotionally laden" that they resist "direct discussion."

Calvert analyzes children's furniture and clothes with the acuity that the best social historians treat texts. Her exegesis unfailingly entwines subtle details and encompassing conceptualizations. And she analyzes pictures even more compellingly than furniture and clothes. Her interpretations of an extraordinar assemblage of nine hundred portraits are at once supple and systematic, fluid and shrewd, perceptive and powerful.

Visual virtuosity enables Calvert to tell a story that is intriguing in its own right. Imaginative ingenuity enables her to tell it in a way which illuminates--and sometimes even irradiates--the average reader's chaotic technological memory.

On her suggestive readings, artifacts acquire resonant contexts. Cradles and corsets, long petticoats and leading strings, perambulators and pantaloons all serve to delineate children themselves as Calvert's ultimate artifacts, constituted and reconstituted in successive phases of the American psyche from 1600 to 1900.

In the first phase, which Calvert calls the epoch of "the inchoate adult," parents pressed the child to stand erect from earliest infancy. They feared tha his disposition to crawl betrayed his bestiality, and they sought to assuage their anxieties about her animal nature by forcing upon her from the first an uprightness that was moral as much as physical. In their eyes, childhood "had n positive attributes of its own" which were "worthy of expression." It was "a period of inadequacy" to be hurried through; and when it was done, no one looke back upon it with nostalgia.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Americans began to abandon the equipag of colonial child-rearing and its attendant assumptions. In the second phase, which Calvert calls the era of "the natural child," parents came to new conceptions of the nature of the universe and a new optimism about human capacity. They ceased to see their offspring as an alien and unpredictable savage and started to appreciate him as a creature who could be trusted to outgrow his deficiencies. On this conception, childhood became "a vital preparatory stage" that "needed time to take hold." Its span literally doubled in the second half of the eighteenth century, as children came to "postpone their assimilation into adult society until they had finished the business of education" and as the generations came "increasingly [to] inhabit ... different worlds."

After 1830, Americans discarded the accoutrements and attitudes of the early republic. In the third phase, which Calvert calls the age of "the innocent child," parents receded from Enlightened optimism regarding rational perfectibility. So far from seeing human development as progress, they posited an infantile purity which made the child superior to the adult and made maturit "a downward slide into corruption and compromise." In this paradigm, childhood emerged as a time of androgynous asexuality and extreme susceptibility to degeneration. Victorian parents strained ceaselessly to keep their children fro contamination in pursuit of an "ideal of the cherub-child."

But abstract summary misses Calvert's eye for irony, her intuition of intriguin tensions, and her sensitivity to complementarities and contradictions. It misse her exquisite elaboration of divergent regimes of rearing for boys and for girls. And it misses, above all, the rich particularity of her analysis. Children in the House achieves an intricate interconnectedness of the loftiest notions of human nature and the lowliest implements of infant care and child management. Its force and fascination depend far less, finally, on its schemati sequences than on its compelling conjunctions and arresting asides.

These insights and observations are never as incidental as they sometimes seem. They testify more starkly than the sustained arguments to the social construction--and to the repeated social reconstruction--of childhood. They evidence such social construction in matters as patently conventional as the color-coding of gender, which Calvert discovers did not become normative until the twentieth century, and in affairs as apparently beyond cultural control as infantile crawling, which she finds was suppressed almost utterly for several generations in the seventeenth century.

Indeed, it is the teeming profusion of its casual insights which should make Children in the House an irresistible source for students of the family for years to come. Consider just a few of the tantalizing multitude: that there was not a single portrait of a nuclear family in America before 1730; that young girls encroached on the traditional male prerogative of pants a generation before the first feminists did; that the Doctor Dentons that American youngster wore for pajamas from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth were designed and purchased to prevent masturbation as much as to protect against th cold; that parents routinely reused diapers without washing them until after World War II; that children's actual amusement diverged widely from gender prescriptions for it, that doll play was far from universal among girls and far from deviant among boys, that hoops were the preferred playthings of boys and girls alike, and that stuffed animals beguiled boys as wrestling and mumblety-peg gratified girls.

Calvert does not always pursue the implications of her most striking findings, but she does set her study steadily in its essential context. She does insist always that "parents do not merely raise their children; they define them." She does understand unfailingly that "any study devoted to children has as much to say about... adults."

In tracing the transformations of those definitions of children and those assumptions, aspirations, and anxieties of their parents, Calvert provides the most challenging--and the most delightful history of early childhood in America that we have ever had.

Michael Zuckerman University of Pennsylvania