Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America.

This is an unusually rich and imaginative scholarly work which belongs to the steadily growing field of the history of childhood and adolescence. Professor Graff answers the call of those scholars who have urged that more attention be paid to the subjective experience of those who are growing up. This has heretofore been considered a nearly impossible task, because in the past children have traditionally left few traces of their lives. In general, it has been assumed that they have followed in the paths marked out for them by adults, and the possibility that they developed their own reactions and behavior in the course of their maturation has been ignored. Thus, scholars have generally studied the institutions surrounding children's lives and the influence of adults upon the formation of these institutions. In other words, we know a lot about "normative" behavior, but little or nothing about the actual behavior, of children and adolescents in America and elsewhere. The handful of studies which have attempted to throw light on the childhood experience have focused mostly upon urban late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century societies, using both autobiographies and oral histories as sources.

The importance of a study which tries to map out the subjective experience of children is enormous. Here we get an opportunity to understand children's own perspectives on the process of growing up and how they dealt with their immediate environments. In fact, studies of this nature touch upon a variety of historical topics, such as the function of the family, the development of educational systems and the importance of work. A focus on the childhood experience rests on the theoretical assumption that the life course of children is an important barometer of continuity and change in any society.

In his attempt to follow the process of growing up in America, from the second half of the eighteenth century to our own time, Graff employs over five-hundred personal documents (first-person testimonial sources), including autobiographies, diaries, letters and memoirs. This database is extraordinary, given the difficulties presented by such sources for systematic historical research. Since the nature of the sources is "subjective," which for many scholars means irreconcilable with the requirements of historical research, Graff has put a lot of effort into the construction of the conceptual and theoretical framework which holds his research together.

In his first chapter, Graff reviews the various previously-made assumptions about childhood - "the rise and fall" mythology. He then chooses to emphasize instead the importance of integration, inclusion, conflict, and historical constructedness which characterize growing up. In exploring the historical experiences and transformation of children he uses three analytical tools: paths, conflicts, and experiences. "The history of growing up," argues Graff, "is a history of conflicts, of conflicting paths, as myriad indicators, including first-person testimonies, richly demonstrate." (p. 11) He also explores the difficulties which face histories of this kind:

Conflicts exist within the developing self in pursuit of the maturity and competence appropriate to its era and station; the dialectical dance of generations within and without the family; tradition and change. They confront developing institutions and expectations, as well as class, gender, race, geography, ethnicity, and age itself. They criss-cross and overlay other conflicts that stem from socialization, authority, morality, ideology, and historical circumstances. In personal as in social, cultural, economic, and political terms, growing up is a conflict-defined, conflict-ridden, and conflict-bound historical process. (p. 11)

This conflict-ridden process of growing up involves the complexity, fluidity, and multi-dimensional character of the individual person. By overlooking this important feature of growing up, scholars have tended to construct "mistaken dichotomies." Since children have to deal with expectations derived from their closest environment, with laws and regulations which are the foundation for formal institutions, and with their own maturation, they ultimately negotiate their way through the life course by moving along various kinds of paths. "The major focus of this book," Graff states, "is on the formation, experience, and transformation of the principal paths of growing up. . . . The concept of paths is a useful one for organizing and probing the mass of evidence provided by the testimonies." (p. 18) He focuses upon a fairly limited number of principal paths which combine "social-historical description, interpretation, and metaphor." (p. 20)

Graff divides the study into four periods and reconstructs the paths in connection with time and place. These paths are named in the study as "traditional," "transitional," "female," and later, "emergent." All of these paths have their own particular routes which further divide the experience of growing up from one point in time to another. Missing from the study are certain other common paths: in particular, those of "servants, especially women; poor and working people, both rural and urban; African Americans; and native peoples." (p. 29) This stems from the biases inherent in the first-person sources used.

In the main body of the study Graff uses the "experiences" of individuals to shed light on the growing-up process in general and the development of society as a whole:

On the one hand, experience refers to paths of growing up in the explicit sense of description, including reconstructions of the life course of individuals singly and collectively in a historical and comparative context. On the other hand, experience also refers to individuals' efforts to grasp, express rhetorically, and make meaning of their growing up in their own words, including appropriation of cultural terms and mythologies in varying degrees of explicitness. (p. 22)

One can argue that this is both a strength and a weakness of the study. The illustration of each life story, classified according to the appropriate paths, gives the reader a remarkable sense of the experience of the people who saw reason to write about their lives. Their individuality of expression makes the book great fun to read. At the same time the analysis itself becomes problematic because of the variety among the stories told. But it was Graff's intention to begin with to show the complexity and the many dimensions of growing up. There is simply no easy way of expressing the everyday struggle, and Graff is well aware of that fact: "First-person testimonies tell their tales of growing up with power and sometimes with surprising clarity and insight as well as contradiction, complexity, and variation." (p. 25)

By using the device of "paths" to demonstrate changes over time, Graff takes each life story and tells it from beginning to end, spanning a number of different life stages within an individual life course. The advantages of using a life-course analysis in this particular way is that it gives an opportunity to categorize each life story by placing it within some specific path. This categorization makes a comparison over time not only possible but extremely interesting. In short, the method of conflicting paths turns out to live up to the goal which was set at the beginning, to dispose of the myths of childhood: its "discovery" and the "rise and fall" of different life stages; and it demonstrates that growing up was just as complicated in the middle of the eighteenth century as it is today. The final chapter on the late twentieth century is especially revealing, because Graff links the developments which have taken place during the course of several centuries with the front page news of today.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to do justice to a study like this in a short review: its fine sense for human situations; its methodological power; and the author's unusual interdisciplinary overview of the secondary literature covering topics related to children, adolescents and youth are all worthy of more attention. The last point, by itself, makes this book a valuable source of information for students and scholars alike interested in this field of research. All of these positive characteristics became very apparent when I taught this book to a class of undergraduates.

The complexity of the study is indeed intellectually stimulating, but one wonders whether it would also have been possible to work more with independent paths by applying the life-course analysis differently from Graff's method in this book: to do, in fact, what Graff states at the beginning that he wants to avoid, i.e. "segregating and fragmenting the principal components of the life course." (p. 4) In principle I agree with him that much is gained by dealing with the life course as a whole; and the book is a manifesto to that approach. But, by the same token, I think that times and places could have been picked, a selection of personal testimonies could have been compared, and a thorough analysis could have been done on specific life stages. The result might have brought out more fully how children of different classes, ethnic backgrounds, and gender (or those who belonged to specific paths) dealt with the transitions which all of them usually experienced independently. I realise that this analysis would have been more static or, at least, would not have the same dynamic character as the study we have before us. Nevertheless, it might have shown in more detail how children and young people managed to carve their own special social niches at given moments during their life courses.

I have to admit that I hesitate to suggest even slight changes in the approach, since this work is so masterfully crafted. Graff's book both enlightens and entertains and is, at the same time, a wonderful addition to the historical scholarship of childhood, adolescence and youth: the history of growing up.

Sigurdhur Gylfi Magnusson University of Iceland