Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950.

Historians have never quite known what to do with children. Are children simply adults-in-waiting so that historical generalizations about adults will suffice for understanding children? Or do we have reasons to believe that developmental and historical forces converge uniquely such that children of an historical period are no more like their parents than they are like children of our times? These questions vex us not least because children leave so little evidence of their lives from their own perspectives. Most of the work on American "family history" in the past two decades more truthfully must be called "the history of married couples and of the views of adults about children." We must find some way to recapture children's lives from their own perspectives.

The editors of this volume have gathered essays aimed at writing the new history of American children. Their "Introduction" sets the stage intelligently, urging the reader to see children as important actors in history, as (for example) important producers and consumers in the American economy. The editors make the crucial point that both historical and developmental forces are at work in the child, but they also recognize the problem of evidence. Adults create most of the evidence of children's lives, from institutional records to private correspondence, and even the memoir or reminiscence of childhood suffers from all the problems of selective memory. The greatest challenge facing the authors in this collection lies in finding new sorts of evidence and new ways of interpreting the evidence of children's lives.

The authors meet this challenge with mixed success. The more successful essays draw upon three or more sorts of evidence, looking for continuities and discontinuities in what the evidence tells us about children's lives. Bernard Mergen's essay, "Made, Bought, and Stolen: Toys and the Culture of Childhood," draws upon autobiographies, adult writing on toys, and the surviving artifacts themselves to show how children used toys to create identity, to try out adult roles, and to resist adult socialization. Mergen's mastery of the interdisciplinary scholarship on play makes his the most daring and, I think, the most interesting essay in the collection. Miriam Formanek-Brunell's essay on the "politics of doll play" in the nineteenth nicely complements Mergen's essay, as she uses autobiographies, biographies, oral histories, adults writing about dolls (including "doll fiction"), and to some extent the surviving dolls themselves to show how doll play gradually changed to take on increasingly symbolic functions. Doll play in Victorian America may have mimicked adult tastes in conspicuous consumption, but boys and girls alike also engaged in play (such as doll funerals) meant "to subvert convention and to undermine restrictions".

Vicki L. Ruiz's study of the acculturation of adolescent Mexican American women from 1920 to 1950 takes advantage of a range of evidence to argue that these teenagers managed somehow to adopt the trappings of American popular culture without necessarily losing their Mexican identity. Ruiz makes good, creative use of oral history interviews, movie and romance magazines, popular film, and organizational records to examine the "Americanization" of these teens, from dating practices to community beauty pageants. Editor Paula Petrick draws together evidence of a different sort, as she has available for her study of novelty toy printing presses a unique set of publications created by and for adolescents, 1870-1886. Along with the records of the National Amateur Press Association and other organizations, the juvenile papers from this period permit Petrik to explore the ways these young middle-class men and women were grappling with changing ideas regarding race and gender.

Some contributors, like Elliott West, have to settle for a small range of sorts of evidence of children's lives. West uses conventional evidence--the letters, diaries, and reminiscences of families on the Plains frontier in the second half of the nineteenth century--in order to make an unconventional argument. So many generalizations about life on the frontier, such as those about hardship and about the pioneer's nostalgia for the East left behind, simply do not apply to children, under West's careful readings of the evidence. Children were essential to the economy of the frontier family, and these children built a different set of meanings of the Plains. This "'inner' history of the frontier," as West puts it, helps us understand the real cognitive differences between frontier children and their parents. These children, especially the girls, felt acutely the contradictions between social expectations and the real conditions of their lives. West also challenges the historians' orthodoxy that American childhood was "reconstructed" in these decades toward a separation of the safe, female domestic sphere and the more masculine public world. For frontier families, these goals collided with the realities of lives as actually lived.

Despite the good intentions of the editors, some of the contributors never really rise above relying upon evidence reflecting only the adult versions of children's lives. These essays, by and large, still make interesting reading, but the "Introduction" promises more of a breakthrough in writing the history of children's lives than some of the authors deliver. William M. Tuttle, Jr.'s essay on children's popular culture during World War II offers an intelligent survey of the radio, film, cartoon, advertising, music, popular fiction, and other texts consumed by American children and adolescents on the homefront, but it is hard to judge what sense the consumers might have made of the texts.

Ethnographically-based audience-response criticism now so common in cultural studies has the luxury of dealing only in the present and only with living audiences, so it would be interesting to see Tuttle grapple with how the historian might take on an historical audience, in this case, children. Similarly, David Nasaw's essay on children and the moving picture industry in the early twentieth century tells an interesting story about reform groups and their influences on the content and accessibility of films, but by Nasaw's frank admission this is a story about adult discourse on the effects of movies on children. Ruth M. Alexander uses twenty-two inmate case files from two New York State reformatories in the first decades of this century to write about "wayward girls" and the ways in which working class adolescent females created a lifestyle later appropriated by middle-class girls, and her conclusions offer helpful modifications to historians' wisdom about the history of working class women. But we are still working with evidence created by and for the adult caretakers of these children, and generalizations about the "subjective experience and emerging social identities" of these women need this careful warning.

The remaining essays seem to me the least successful, given the goals announced in the volume's introduction. Thus, Selma Berrol's essay on "Immigrant Children at School, 1880-1940," relies entirely upon memoirs and, despite its subtitle of "A Child's Eye View," renders a conventional view of schools as remembered by adults. Lester Alston's essay on slave children attempts to apply psychohistorical methods and content analysis to the body of slave narratives in order to reconstruct (speculatively, Alston admits) the themes, tensions, and contradictions in slave children's lives, but there seems to be little new to say about slave children's lives. Victoria Bissell Brown's essay on "Golden Girls: Female Socialization among the Middle Class of Los Angeles, 1880-1910," uses reminiscences and contemporary studies to survey that generations' coming of age, but again the evidence and approach are rather conventional. The same must be said of Robert L. Griswold's essay on children's attitudes toward their fathers in the first three decades of this century. It is interesting to have Griswold survey public attitudes toward fatherhood during this period, but he offers little evidence that seems to come from the children themselves. Finally, Liahna Babener's concluding essay, "Bitter Nostalgia: Recollections of Childhood on the Midwestern Frontier," uses conventional evidence (memoirs) to explore the dark side of frontier life. Babener sees in the narrative strategies of these memoirists the "bitter nostalgia" arising from the stresses of frontier life, a personal and public "myths" collide with realities. The editors placed this essay at the end of the volume to alert the reader, as they say, to the "contradiction between explicit memories and implicit emotions", as if to issue a final warning to historians who rely too glibly upon memoirs and reminiscences.

The editors and N. Ray Hiner alert the reader to the possible uses of photographs as evidence in writing the history of children's lives. Hiner provides a very brief essay accompanying a number of photographs reproduced in the center of the volume, and other photographs illustrate the essays throughout. Hines's essay is speculative and provocative, meant to raise more questions than he is prepared to answer, and clearly we are only in the early stages of figuring out how to "read" photographs for Clues about children's lives.

Overall, this volume may be more important for what it attempts than for what it accomplishes. It announces clearly that we need truly to begin writing the history of American children's lives from their point of view, and that this history will be very difficult to reconstruct. At their best, the essays show how new sorts of evidence and new approaches might begin writing this history; at their least successful, the essays tell us some interesting things about what adults think about children. Were it not for the grand ambitions announced by the editors, the reader might take the less successful essays as solid social history, which they are in most cases. Once we realize that we are not yet writing the history of children's lives, though, we get impatient to get on with the work. This volume whets that appetite.

Jay Mechling University of California, Davis