Searching for Muted Voices

Both of the selections I’ve chosen to review for this assignment have made me consider the dearth of events and periods in which children have acted as independent entities, rather than extensions of adults’ wills or social concepts. I hope to pinpoint and study such a period for my research paper.

Carl N. Degler's analysis of corporal punishment, "Introducing Children into the Social Order", suggests that the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries saw a gradual liberalization of child-rearing methods, and specifically links a reduction in the application of corporal punishment with a growing acceptance of and respect for children as independent entities. Earlier forms of corporal punishment sought to make a child fit to enter society, while later parents and educators used whippings and beatings "as much for the future benefit of the child as for any other consideration (212)". By the late nineteenth century, Degler asserts, corporal punishment became a last resort to be used only after the failure of loving remonstrance and reasoning.

Sermons, child-rearing pamphlets and manuals, and private correspondence reveal a shifting approach to discipline in the three centuries discussed in this selection. Earlier sources, such as the anonymous minister referenced in the second paragraph of the selection, recommend physical punishment as a method of breaking and controlling a child's willpower in order to "subdue the child's self-assertiveness (211)". This ideology "persisted well into the eighteenth century (211)", but had subsided to the point of becoming "outmoded (212)" by the 1830s. Parents of the early nineteenth century had largely abandoned the belief that "children were innately depraved"; the letters Degler turns to in this period make a point of noting children's individualities, but most parents still sought to "subdu[e] the will of the child and govern...it properly (213)".

By the middle of the nineteenth century, parenting was predictably influenced by both earlier Romantic "appreciation of children and…sentimentality toward them (213)", as well as the newly feminized homes created by the separate spheres doctrine. Physical coercion became the last in a descending order of persuasive methods: "the first, significantly, was 'love', the second 'reason', and the third 'authority' (213)". Appealing to the child's newly recognized sense of reason, "the Victorian aim was to develop in the child early in its life a proper sense of self that made further correction unnecessary (215)". Degler concludes by recounting a scene from a nineteenth century novel in which an "impetuous" young boy develops self-restraint after a punishment that forces reflection upon "the enormity of his deed (215)".

Karin Calvert’s “Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood” suggests that while childhood itself has always existed as a relatively constant continuum, cultural perceptions of childhood, and its specific paraphernalia, have fluctuated measurably over the last several centuries. Such fluctuations are displayed most prominently in the form of material artifacts such as “forms of costume, furniture, toys, [and] books...(76)”, which reveal three primary paradigms from the Colonial through the Victorian period.

The earliest era examined here begins in the early seventeenth century, when childhood was “such a precarious existence that parents regarded it as essentially a state of illness (77)”. Children were hurried through a brief, protected infancy before “gaining sufficient autonomy to be able to take care of (77)” themselves. Extant artifacts suggest this drive: “swaddling bands, standing stools, and tiny corsets (78)” were among the abandoned devices of the era. The second period, occurring from roughly 1750 to the 1830s and 1840s, viewed childhood as a phenomenon during which children would “grow into healthy adults if the natural process was not interfered with (78)”. Excessive protection was associated with the decadence of the Colonial period and was frowned upon as “overbearing (78)”. Parents in the Victorian era once again sought to protect children from the harshness of the outside world, but these adults viewed childhood as a state of moral innocence, rather than physical frailness, to be cherished and prolonged.

Where Degler mines documents for adult attitudes toward children and child-rearing, Calvert examines material artifacts to gain a sense of the same adult concepts. Both approaches are necessary, of course, due to the relative lack of direct commentary from children, but I would like to find a period or event which has preserved direct testimony from children.