Kristine Alexander, Stephanie Olsen & Karen Vallgårda
https://doi.org/10.58077/ahtt-hs90
Historians of childhood and youth have spent the past several decades thinking critically and expansively about sources, epistemology, and ‘voice’ in ways that often resonate with the new history of experience. Yet at the same time, within and beyond our field, we regularly encounter sceptical adult readers. One review of Kristine Alexander’s analysis of Canadian children’s lives in the immediate aftermath of the First World War (based on letters by young writers published in children’s periodicals), for instance, deemed it ‘the most problematic’ chapter in the edited volume Canada 1919: A Nation Shaped by War. ‘The accumulated evidence is too slender to bear much interpretation’, the reviewer asserted, ‘and one always suspects parental guidance of the child’s pen’.[1]
The ideas at the heart of this critique are old hat to historians who study young people, who, at the dinner table and the seminar table alike, are frequently faced with an insistence that trying to analyse children’s experiences in the past is a problematic pursuit. Claims that ‘slender’ child-produced sources are of limited use because of the ostensibly inevitable ‘parental guidance of the child’s pen’ are based on the belief that (a) there is something universal about children that makes them more easily influenced than older people, and (b) there exists a purer body of adult-produced evidence that allows more direct access to insights about experiences in the past that are somehow unmediated. Sarah Maza’s 2020 American Historical Review article about the apparent limitations of the ‘history of children’ makes the same mistake, insisting that ‘children’s political activities nearly always amount to instances of mimicking parents’.[2] We contend that all historians, even those whose work focuses on young people, need to guard against the temptation to rest our claims on an apparently natural, obvious, and knowable distinction – legible through things like malleability, innocence, and openness to outside influence – between ‘children’ and ‘adults’.
The critiques quoted above bear a remarkable similarity to beliefs articulated over a century ago by Dr. C.W. Kimmins, chief inspector of London County Council schools and writer of many publications in the nascent field of child psychology, whose desire to access the inner lives of young people (before they were corrupted by the influence of parents and teachers) led him to ask groups of schoolchildren to write about their dreams. Yet, as Stephanie Olsen has recently demonstrated, the quest to find an authentic, unmediated interiority was bound to fail: “There isn’t one, even in sleep.”[3]
If dreams are mediated (and they are), then so too are the waking thoughts, emotions, and experiences of adults as well as young people. Over the past several decades, historians of childhood have developed a range of sophisticated tools to help us better understand young lives in the past. Reading often fragmentary sources along and against the archival grain, we work in conversation with other disciplines and theories to produce insights about power, experience, and the human condition that should be of interest to all historians.[4]
The mistaken belief that only children are easily influenced or malleable is based on what Ashis Nandy, writing nearly forty years ago, called the ideology of adulthood: the modern belief that the child is always ‘an inferior version’ of the (rational, autonomous, fully human) adult. Nandy suggested that this privileging of adulthood, based on an age-based binary rooted in the value judgements of liberal political thought, has frequently involved ‘a refusal to admit easily available data and experiences [that are] incongruent with’ established ways of thinking.[5]
More recent analyses by scholars working at the intersection of history and childhood studies amplify his point: Corinne T. Field, for example, writes that ‘interdependence characterizes most intellectual projects, [and] that autonomous authorship is an illusion’.[6] Anna Mae Duane puts it even more forcefully, arguing that scholars ‘can no longer stand on the crumbling theoretical ground that assigns partial, dependent, mediated subjectivity only to childhood’.[7] Despite the interventions of scholars like Duane, Field, and Nandy, faith in the possibility of autonomous adult authorship is still widespread in our profession, even if this faith often remains implicit, unarticulated. It is linked to ideas about the individual agentic subject – a topic that has been the focus of robust debate among historians of childhood in recent years.[8]
The nexus between the history of childhood and the history of experience offers innovative – and, we argue, richer – ways to read all types of evidence and to understand what it is to be human.[9] Following Catherine Hall, we believe that the often incomplete archives (sometimes the result of an intentional erasure of the marginalized) deployed in these intertwined histories offer a ‘profound lesson’ ‘about the significance of absences as well as presences’.[10] This lesson should also be applied to those who have left significant evidentiary traces. The fixation on agency and voices has led scholars to lose focus on the mundane, and invariably mediated, experiences that were never obviously recorded in an archive. It is time to broaden the conversation by encouraging historians to think carefully about how the ideology of adulthood (a powerful and pervasive collective fantasy) leads to value judgements about sources, questions and subjects in ways that ultimately hinder our ability to – in the words of Rob Boddice and Mark Smith – ‘capture the lived, meaningful reality of historical actors’.[11]
Childhood studies scholars like Spyros Spyrou have cogently cautioned against the fetishization of ‘the child’s voice’, arguing that we ought to approach children’s voices as the product of social processes, as shaped by ‘power imbalances’ and ‘ideological contexts’,[12] and this pertains to the moment of utterance as well as those of scholarly interpretation and re-representation.[13] Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, Sirkka Komulainen has furthermore suggested that in approaching children’s perspectives we should rely on ‘notions of “mutuality” and “multivoicedness” as alternatives to a unitary, atomistic understanding of an individual’s “voice”’.[14]
These theoretical insights – prompted in part by the notorious questioning of the credibility of evidence of children’s experiences – are, we contend, relevant for all historians. Voices are always produced in relationships, and they are always performative, always mediated. Any testimony of experience produced, documented, preserved, archived, or published – and later retrieved and interpreted by historians – is shaped by social processes, enabled by available language, circumscribed by structures of power, and moulded by normative registers, literary conventions, censorship institutional logics, and political discourses.
Rather than attempting to peel off these variegated relationships and layers of structuration as ‘biases’ to get at a supposedly truer core, historians need to home in on the dynamics through which subjectivity, experience, and ‘voice’ – for social actors of all ages – are continually mediated, shaped, and re-shaped. We would, in other words, advocate for a stronger focus on the making of categories, but also on the embodied practices and the formation processes that are involved in the relational constitution of subjects, selves and collectives.
Notes
[1]Jack Cunningham, ‘Canada 1919: A Nation Shaped by War ed. by Tim Cook and J. L. Granatstein’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, 54 (2021): 661-662.
[2] Sarah Maza, ‘The Kids Aren’t All Right: Historians and the Problem of Childhood’, American Historical Review, 125 (2020): 1268.
[3] Stephanie Olsen, ‘The Limits of Experience? A Case Study on Children’s Dreams’, Digital Handbook of the History of Experience (2022).
[4] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Karen Vallgårda, Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission. Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
[5] Ashis Nandy, ‘Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood’, Alternatives X (1984-85): 363.
[6] Corinne T. Field, ‘Why Little Thinkers are a Big Deal: The Relevance of Childhood Studies to Intellectual History’, Modern Intellectual History, 14 (2017): 270.
[7] Anna Mae Duane, ‘Introduction: The Children’s Table – Childhood Studies and the Humanities’, The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, ed. Anna Mae Duane (Athens & London: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 5.
[8] Historians of childhood and youth have produced several stringent critiques of the use of agency in the study of young people. Relevant examples include Stephanie Olsen, Kristine Alexander, Sarah Duff, Mischa Honeck, Susan Miller, Simon Sleight, Karen Vallgårda and Ville Vuolanto, ‘A Critical Conversation on Agency’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (forthcoming 2024); Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen, ‘Against Agency’, Society for the History of Children and Youth Blog (23 October, 2018); Mona Gleason, ‘Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education’, History of Education, 45 (2016): 446-459; Susan A. Miller, ‘Assent as Agency in the Early Years of the Children of the American Revolution’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9, (2016): 48-65;Kristine Alexander, ‘Agency and Emotion Work’, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 7 (2015): 120-128.
[9] Josephine Hoegaerts and Stephanie Olsen, ‘The History of Experience: Afterword’, Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800–2000 eds Ville Kivimäki, Sami Suodenjoki and Tanja Vahtikari (London: Palgrave, 2021), 378.
[10] Catherine Hall, ‘Thinking Reflexively: Opening “Blind Eyes”’, Past & Present, 234 (2017): 254-263, at 259.
[11] Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 17.
[12] Spyros Spyrou, ‘The limits of children’s voices: From authenticity to critical, reflexive representation’, Childhood, 18 (2011): 151-165.
[13] Also see Mona Gleason’s stringent critique of the concept of ‘voice’. ‘Observations on the Limits of “Children’s Voices”’, Society for the History of Children and Youth Blog (2 July, 2013).
[14] Sirkka Komulainen, ‘The Ambiguity of the Child’s “Voice” in Social Research’, Childhood, 14 (2007): 11-28, at 23.