Steven Mintz - Huck's Raft - A History of American Childhood-Belknap Press (2004)

'
AHistmy of Amertcan (hildhood

Huck's Raft
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
Copyright © 2004 by the President and Fellows
of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Title page illustration: Photograph of Charles Lindbergh

at about age ten, rafting on the Mississippi River near
Little Falls, Minnesota, around 1912. Courtesy of the
Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts and Archives,
Yale University Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mintz, Steven, 1953-

Huck's raft: a history of American childhood I Steven Mintz.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-01508-8 (alk. paper)
1. Childhood-United States-History.
2. Child rearing-United States-History.
3. Children-United States-Social conditions.
4. United States-Social life and customs.
I. Title.
HQ792.U5M57 2004
305.23' 0973-dc22 2004042220
Designed by Gwen Nefsky Frankfeldt

Contents
Preface vii
Prologue 1
1 Children of the Covenant 7
2 Red, White, and Black in Colonial America 32
3 Sons and Daughters of Liberty 53
4 Inventing the Middle-Class Child 75
5 Growing Up in Bondage 94
6 Childhood Battles of the Civil War 118
7 Laboring Children 133
8 Save the Child 154
9 Children under the Magnifying Glass 185
10 New to the Promised Land 200
11 Revolt of Modern Youth 213
12 Coming of Age in the Great Depression 233
13 Mobilizing Children for World War II 254
14 In Pursuit of the Perfect Childhood 275
15 Youthquake 310
16 Parental Panics and the Reshaping of Childhood 335
17 The Unfinished Century of the Child 372
Notes 387
Index 437
BLANK PAGE
Preface
FoR MORE THAN three centuries Americans have believed that

the younger generation is less respectful and knowledgeable, and more
alienated, sexually promiscuous, and violent, than previously. Today
adults fear that children are growing up too fast and losing their sense of
innocent wonder too early. Prematurely exposed to the pressures, stresses,
and responsibilities of adult life, the young mimic adult sophistication,
dress inappropriately, and experiment with alcohol, drugs, sex, and to-
bacco before they are emotionally and psychologically ready.
One of the goals of this book is to strip away the myths, misconcep-
tions, and nostalgia that contribute to this pessimism about the young.
There has never been a time when the overwhelming majority of Ameri-
can children were well cared for and their experiences idyllic. Nor has
childhood ever been an age of innocence, at least not for most children.
Childhood has never been insulated from the pressures and demands of
the surrounding society, and each generation of children has had to wres-
tle with the social, political, and economic constraints of its own histori-
cal period. In our own time, the young have had to struggle with high
rates of family instability, a deepening disconnection from adults, and the
expectation that all children should pursue the same academic path at the
same pace, even as the attainment of full adulthood recedes ever further
into the future.
The history of children is often treated as a marginal subject, and there
is no question that it is especially difficult to write. Children are rarely ob-
vious historical actors. They leave fewer historical sources than adults,
viii Preface
and their powerlessness makes them less visible than other social groups.
Nevertheless, the history of childhood is inextricably bound up with the
broader political and social events in the life of the nation-including col-
onization, revolution, slavery, industrialization, urbanization, immigra-
tion, and war-and children's experience embodies many of the key
themes in American history, such as the rise of modern bureaucratic insti-
tutions, the growth of a consumer economy, and the elaboration of a wel-
fare state.
Certain themes and patterns of American childhood will emerge in this
book. The first is that childhood is not an unchanging biological stage of
life but is, rather, a social and cultural construct that has changed radi-
cally over time. Every aspect of childhood-including children's house-
hold responsibilities, play, schooling, relationships with parents and peers,
and paths to adulthood-has been transformed over the past four centu-
ries. Just two hundred years ago there was far less age segregation than
there is today and much less concern with organizing experience by chro-
nological age. There was also far less sentimentalizing of children as spe-
cial beings who were more innocent and vulnerable than adults. This does
not mean that adults failed to recognize childhood as a stage of life, with
its own special needs and characteristics. Nor does it imply that parents
were unconcerned about their children and failed to love them and mourn
their deaths. Both the definition and experience of childhood have varied
according to changing cultural, demographic, economic, and historical
circumstances.
Nor is childhood an uncontested concept. The late twentieth-century
culture war-pitting advocates of a "protected" childhood, seeking to
shield children from adult realities, against proponents of a "prepared"
childhood-is only the most recent in a long series of conflicts over the
definition of a proper childhood. These range from a seventeenth-century
conflict between Anglican traditionalist, humanistic, and Puritan concep-
tions of childhood; to heated eighteenth-century debates over infant de-
pravity and patriarchal authority; and turn-of-the-twentieth-century
struggles between the notion of a useful childhood, which expected chil-
dren to act in a way that repaid their parents' sacrifices, and the ideal of a
sheltered childhood, free from labor and devoted to play and education.
Another major theme is the diversity of childhood. Childhood, the pe-
riod from infancy to eighteen, includes girls and boys at very different
stages of development. It encompasses a wide variety of classes, ethnic
groups, regions, religions, and time periods. During the early seventeenth
century demographic, economic, ideological, and religious factors com-
Preface ix
bined to make geographical subcultures the most significant markers of

childhood diversity. By the mid-nineteenth century, shifts in cultural and
religious values and a highly uneven process of economic development
made social class, gender, and race more salient sources of childhood di-
versity. In recent years social conservatives have tended to fixate on differ-
ences in family structure, while political liberals have tended to focus on
ethnic, gender, and racial differences. In fact social class is the most sig-
nificant determinant of children's well-being. While race, gender, and eth-
nicity exert a powerful influence on children's lives, socioeconomic status
is intimately linked to their health care, schooling, and family stability.
This book also traces the shifting power relationships between parents
and children, especially parents' increasing psychological investment in
their children. The Puritans believed that parents were responsible for
their children's spiritual upbringing; contemporary parents hold them-
selves responsible not only for children's physical well-being but also for
their psychological adjustment, personal happiness, and future success. As
birthrates fell and increasing numbers of mothers entered the paid
workforce, parental anxiety intensified; fears for children's safety esca-
lated, as did concern that they not suffer from boredom or low self-
esteem. Above all, middle-class parents worried that their children would
be unable to replicate their status position.
Then there is the pattern of recurrent moral panics over children's well-
being. Ever since the Pilgrims departed for Plymouth in 1620, fearful that
"their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and be corrupted" in
the Old World, Americans have experienced repeated panics over the
younger generation. 1 Sometimes these panics were indeed about children,
such as the worries over polio in the early 1950s. More often, however,
children stand in for some other issue, and the panics are more metaphori-
cal than representational, such as the panic over teenage pregnancy, youth
violence, and declining academic achievement in the late 1970s and
1980s, which reflected pervasive fears about family breakdown, crime,
drugs, and America's declining competitiveness in the world.
Far from regarding children simply as passive creatures, who are the
objects of socialization and schooling, and consumers of entertainment
and products produced by grownups, this book views children as active
agents in the evolution of their society. The following pages will demon-
strate that children have participated actively in the major events in Amer-
ican history, that child-adult relations have involved a process of contes-
tation and negotiation, and that children have been creators as well as
consumers of culture. The balance between childhood dependence and in-
x Preface
dependence has shifted over time and provides a signifier of childhood

experience as well as the adult perception of, and relation to, that
experience.
In certain respects, today's children are more autonomous than young
people have ever been. They have their own institutions and media, most
now have their own rooms, and many teens have their own cars. Contem-
porary children mature faster physiologically than those in the past and
are more knowledgeable about sexuality, drugs, and other adult realities.
They are also more fully integrated into the realm of consumer culture at
an earlier age. Yet from the vantage point of history, contemporary chil-
dren's lives are more regimented and constrained than ever before. Con-
temporary society is extreme in the distinction it draws between the
worlds of childhood and youth, on the one hand, and of adulthood, on
the other. Far more than previous generations, we have prolonged and
intensified children's emotional and psychological dependence. Children
are far more resilient, adaptable, and capable than our society typically
assumes. We have segregated the young in age-graded institutions, and, as
a result, children grow up with little contact with adults apart from their
parents and other relatives and childcare professionals. Unlike children in
the past, young people today have fewer socially valued ways to contrib-
ute to their family's well-being or to participate in community life. By
looking back over four centuries of American childhood we can perhaps
recover old ways and discover new ways to reconnect children to a
broader range of adult mentors and to expand their opportunities to par-
ticipate in activities that they and society find truly meaningful.
HIS BOOK is a work of synthesis and interpretation, and my

debts are recorded in every note. Certain individuals, however, deserve
special recognition. My colleagues at the Council on Contemporary Fam-
ilies-including Ashton Applewhite, Stephanie Coontz, Carolyn and Phil
Cowan, Frank Furstenberg, John Gillis, Ann Hartman, Roger Lake, Joan
Laird, Larry McCallum, Barbara Risman, Virginia Rutter, Pepper
Schwartz, Arlene Skolnick, and Judith Stacey-taught me that sanctimo-
nious moralizing offers no solution to the problems confronting today's
families. The members of the Society for the History of Childhood and
Youth, esp.ecially LeRoy Ashby, Peter W. Bardalgio, E. Wayne Carp,
Howard Chudacoff, Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Miriam Forman-Brunell,
Harvey Graff, Philip Greven, Joseph Hawes, Ray Hiner, Joseph Illick,
Wilma King, Kriste Lindemeyer, David I. Macleod, James Marten, Susan
Porter, Jacqueline S. Reinier, Eric C. Schneider, and Marie Jenkins
Schwartz, have demonstrated that the history of childhood provides are-
Preface xt
vealing window onto the landscape of historical change. I benefited

greatly from participation in seminars led by Theda Skocpol at Harvard
University's Center for Research on Politics and Social Organization. I am
particularly grateful to David Brion Davis, Linda Gordon, Michael
Grossberg, Lesley Herrmann, Ken Lipartito, Sara McNeil, and Laura
Oren for their ideas, example, and encouragement. I owe a particular debt
to Charles Dellheim and to three extraordinarily helpful outside readers-
Gary Cross, Paula S. Fass, and Jan Lewis-whose advice has left an indeli-
ble imprint on this book. Joyce Seltzer, an editor without peer, was central
in transforming a rough manuscript into a finished work. Words cannot
express my gratitude for her time, patience, and counsel.
Above all, I thank my partner, Susan Kellogg, my sons Seth and Sean,
and my sisters and parents, who remind me each day that parenting's
deepest joy is also its greatest heartbreak: watching one's children head off
on their own to experience new worlds we can scarcely imagine.
BLANK PAGE
Huck's Raft
BLANK PAGE
Prologue
NOWHERE is it easier to romanticize childhood than in

Hannibal, Missouri. In this small Mississippi riverfront town, where Sam-
uel Clemens lived, off and on, from the age of four until he was seventeen,
many enduring American fantasies about childhood come to life. A histor-
ical marker stands next to a white picket fence like the one that Tom Saw-
yer convinced his friends to pay for the privilege of whitewashing for him.
Another marks the spot where Huck Finn's cabin allegedly stood. Then
there is the window that Huck hurled pebbles at to wake the sleeping
Tom. Gazing out across the raging waters of the Mississippi-now, unfor-
tunately, hidden by a floodwall-one can easily imagine the raft excur-
sion that Huck and the fugitive slave Jim took in search of freedom and
adventure.
Hannibal occupies a special place in our collective imagination as the
setting of two of fiction's most famous depictions of childhood. Our cher-
ished myth about childhood as a bucolic time of freedom, untainted inno-
cence, and self-discovery comes to life in this river town. But beyond the
accounts of youthful wonder and small-town innocence, Mark Twain's
novels teem with grim and unsettling details about childhood's underside.
Huck's father, Pap, was an abusive drunkard who beat his son for learn-
ing to read. When we idealize Mark Twain's Hannibal and its eternally
youthful residents, we suppress his novels' more sinister aspects. 1
Clemens' real-life mid-nineteenth-century Hannibal was anything but
a haven of stability and security. It was a place where a quarter of the
children died before their first birthday, half before their twenty-first.
2 Huck's Raft
Clemens himself experienced the death of two siblings. Although he was

not physically abused like the fictional Huck, his father was emotionally
cold and aloof. There were few open displays of affection in his boyhood
home. Only once did he remember seeing his father and mother kiss, and
that was at the deathbed of his brother Ben. Nor was his home a haven of
economic security. His boyhood ended before his twelfth birthday, when
his father's death forced him to take up a series of odd jobs. Before he left
home permanently at seventeen, he had already worked as a printer's ap-
prentice; clerked in a grocery store, a bookshop, and a drug store; tried
his hand at blacksmithing; and delivered newspapers. Childhood ended
early in Clemens' hometown, though full adulthood came no more
quickly than it does today. 2
A series of myths have clouded public thinking about the history of
American childhood. One is the myth of a carefree childhood. We cling to
a fantasy that once upon a time childhood and youth were years of care-
free adventure, despite the fact that for most young people in the past,
growing up was anything but easy. Disease, family disruption, and early
entry into the world of work were integral parts of family life. The notion
of a long childhood, devoted to education and free from adult responsibil-
ities, is a very recent invention, and one that became a reality for a major-
ity of children only after World War II.
Another myth is that of home as a haven and bastion of stability in an
ever-changing world. Through much of American history, family stability
has been the exception, not the norm. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, fully a third of all American children spent at least a portion of
their childhood in a single-parent home, and as recently as 1940, one
child in ten did not live with either parent-compared with one in twenty-
five today. 3
A third myth is that childhood is the same for all children, a status tran-
scending class, ethnicity, and gender. In fact, every aspect of childhood is
shaped by class-as well as by ethnicity, gender, geography, religion, and
historical era. We may think of childhood as a biological phenomenon,
but it is better understood as a life stage whose contours are shaped by a
particular time and place. Childrearing practices, schooling, and the age
at which a young person leaves home-all are the products of particular
social and cultural circumstances.
A fourth myth is that the United States is a peculiarly child-friendly so-
ciety, when in actuality Americans are deeply ambivalent about children.
Adults envy young people their youth, vitality, and physical attractiveness.
But they also resent children's intrusions on their time and resources and
frequently fear their passions and drives. Many of the reforms that nomi-
Prologue 3
nally have been designed to protect and assist the young were also insti-
tuted to insulate adults from children.
A final myth, which is perhaps the most difficult to overcome, is a myth
of progress, and its inverse, a myth of decline. There is a tendency to con-
ceive of the history of childhood as a story of steps forward over time: of ·
parental engagement replacing emotional distance, of kindness and le-
niency supplanting strict and stern punishment, of scientific enlightenment
superseding superstition and misguided moralism. This progressivism is
sometimes seen in reverse, namely that childhood is disappearing: that
children are growing up too quickly and losing their innocence, playful-
ness, and malleability.
The history of American children cannot be forced to fit these facile
myths. Rather, it is a story of far-reaching change, with each historical era
characterized by strikingly different and diverse childhoods. We might
conceive of the history of childhood in terms of three overlapping phases.
The first, premodern childhood, which roughly coincides with the colo-
nial era, was a period in which the young were viewed as adults in train-
ing. Religious and secular authorities regarded childhood as a time of
deficiency and incompleteness, and adults rarely referred to their child-
hood with nostalgia or fondness. Infants were viewed as unformed and
even animalistic because of their inability to speak or stand upright. A
parent's duty was to hurry a child toward adult status, especially through
early engagement in work responsibilities, both inside the parental home
and outside it, as servants and apprentices.
The middle of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of a new set of
attitudes, which came to define modern childhood. A growing number of
parents began to regard children as innocent, malleable, and fragile crea-
tures who needed to be sheltered from contamination. Childhood was in-
creasingly viewed as a separate stage of life that required special care and
institutions to protect it. During the nineteenth century, the growing ac-
ceptance of this new ideal among the middle class was evident in the pro-
longed residence of young people in the parental home, longer periods of
formal schooling, and an increasing consciousness about the stages of
young people's development, culminating in the "discovery" (or, more ac-
curately, the invention) of adolescence around the turn of the twentieth
century.
Universalizing the modern ideal of a sheltered childhood was a highly
uneven process and one that has never encompassed all American chil-
dren. Indeed, it was not until the 1950s that the norms of modern child-
hood defined the modal experience of young people in the United States.
But developments were already under way that would bring modern
4 Huck's Raft
childhood to an end and replace it with something quite different, a new

phase that might be called postmodern childhood. This term refers to the
breakdown of dominant norms about the family, gender roles, age, and
even reproduction as they were subjected to radical change and revision.
Age norms that many considered "natural" were called into question.
Even the bedrock biological process of sexual maturation accelerated. To-
day's children are much more likely than the Baby Boomers to experience
their parents' divorce, to have a working mother, to spend significant
amounts of time unsupervised by adults, to grow up without siblings, and
to hold a job during high school. Adolescent girls are much more likely to
have sexual relations during their mid-teens. 4
Superficially, postmodern childhood resembles premodern childhood.
As in the seventeenth century, children are no longer regarded as the bi-
nary opposites of adults. Nor are t];ley considered naive and innocent
creatures. Today adults quite rightly assume that even preadolescents are
knowledgeable about the realities of the adult world. But unlike pre-
modern children, postmodern children are independent consumers and
participants in a separate, semiautonomous youth culture. We still assume
that the young are fundamentally different from adults, that they should
spend their first eighteen years in the parents' home and devote their time
to education in age-graded schools. But it is also clear that basic aspects of
the ideal of a protected childhood, in which the young are kept isolated
from adult realities, have broken down. 5
Childhood and adolescence as biological phases of human development
have always existed. But the ways in which childhood and adolescence are
conceptualized and experienced are social and cultural constructions that
have changed dramatically over time. To be sure, certain basic biological
facts-such as young people's need for nurturing and training-contribute
to continuities in the experience of childhood across the centuries. Never-
theless, these biological facts are inevitably modified by history and medi-
ated by culture. 6
The pages that follow include accounts of ten- and twelve-year-old in-
dentured servants, apprentices, soldiers, cabin boys, and textile mill oper-
atives. Young people are extraordinarily adaptable, resilient, and capable,
much more than contemporary society assumes. Historically the young
have been exposed to the stresses of child labor, neglect, and malnutrition.
African-American children lived in slavery, history's most extreme form of
dehumanization and exploitation, followed by nearly a century of de jure
and de facto discrimination. Past experience places contemporary prob-
lems of childhood and adolescence in proper perspective. Americans face
Prologue 5
genuine problems today, but nothing that compares to those that past re-
formers faced and overcame.
No single symbol can encompass the diversity of American childhood,
which includes girls and boys of highly varied class, ethnic, and regional
backgrounds. Nevertheless, the image of Huck's raft offers a particularly
appropriate metaphor for a history of children in America. Since Mark
Twain's novel was published in 1884, Huck Finn has served as a remark-
ably malleable emblem of childhood. He has been celebrated as a symbol
of youthful resourcefulness and spirited rambunctiousness and decried as
a rowdy and reckless risktaker. One prominent literary critic argued that
Huck's relationship with the fugitive slave Jim embodied a sublimated
homoerotic strain that runs through classic American literature; another
suggested that he was modeled on a black child named Jimmy, whom
Clemens called "the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever
came across." In our own era of diminishing expectations, Huck has been
interpreted as an abused child-illiterate, homeless, beaten, neglected-
and as a victim of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-
fidgety, impulsive, disruptive, and easily bored. For over a century, Huck
has served as a lightning rod for popular fantasies and anxieties about
childhood. 7
The image of Huck's raft encapsulates the modern conception of child-
hood as a period of peril and freedom; an odyssey of psychological self-
discovery and growth; and a world apart, with its own values, culture,
and psychology. But if Huck's raft represents childhood as a carefree time
of adventure, it also points to another meaning. The precariousness of
Huck's trip down the Mississippi suggests the physical, psychological,
emotional, and socioeconomic challenges of childhood. Much as the raft
is carried by raging currents that Huck can only partly control, so, too,
childhood is inevitably shaped and constrained by society, time, and
circumstances.
BLANK PAGE
chapter one
Children of the Covenant
IN THE PREDAWN darkness of February 29, 1704, 48 French sol-

diers and 200 of their Abenaki, Huron, and Iroquois allies attacked the
frontier settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts. The attackers burned
the village, killing 48 of the 300 inhabitants, and took 111 captives.
For the next eight weeks the captives were forced to march northward
300 miles through the snow to Canada. 1
Among those taken prisoner were seven-year-old Eunice Williams, who
lost two brothers in the attack, her clergyman father, her mother, and two
surviving siblings. Along the way, Eunice saw at least twenty of her fellow
captives executed, including her mother. In Canada the captives were dis-
persed, some to live with the French, others with the Indians. Eunice, sep-
arated from her father and brothers, was taken to a Kahnawake Mohawk
mission village, across from Montreal. Two and a half years later,
Eunice's father, the Reverend John Williams, was returned to New Eng-
land as part of a prisoner exchange. In time, her two siblings were also re-
leased. But despite Reverend Williams' relentless pleas and protracted ne-
gotiations with the French and the Mohawks, Eunice refused to leave the
Kahnawake. She had converted to Catholicism, forgotten the English lan-
guage, adopted Indian clothing and hairstyle, and did not want to return
to Puritan New England. At the age of sixteen she married a Kahnawake
Mohawk named Fran~ois Xavier Arosen, with whom she would live for
half a century until his death. Reverend Williams in his quest to regain his
daughter traveled to Canada and saw her, but she refused to go home
with him. "She is obstinately resolved to live and dye here, and will not so
much as give me one pleasant look," he wrote in shocked disbelief. 2
8 Huck's Raft
We do not know why Eunice decided to remain with the Kahnawake,

separated from her family and friends, but it seems likely that she found
life among the Mohawks more attractive than life among the New Eng-
land Puritans. The Mohawks were much more indulgent of children, and
females, far from being regarded as inferior to males, played an integral
role in Mohawk society and politics. Nor was Eunice alone in choosing to
remain with her captors. A returned captive named Titus King reported
that many young captives decided to become members of their Indian
captors' tribes. "In Six months time they Forsake Father & mother, Forgit
thir own Land, Refuess to Speak there own toungue & Seeminly be
Holley Swallowed up with the Indians," he observed. 3
Eunice Williams was one of many "white Indians," English colonists
who ran away from home or were taken captive by and elected to stay
with Native Americans. Benjamin Franklin described the phenomenon in
1753:
When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language
and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes
one Indian Ramble there is no perswading him ever to return. When white
persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and
lived awhile among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with
all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet
in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care
and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportu-
nity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming
them.
A fourteen-year-old named James McCullough, who lived with the Indi-

ans for "eight years, four months, and sixteen days," had to be brought
back in fetters, his legs tied "under his horse's belly," his arms tied behind
his back. Still, he succeeded in escaping, returning to his Indian family.
When children were "redeemed" by the English, they often "cried as if
they should die when they were presented to us." Treated with great kind-
ness by the Indians (the Deerfield children were carried on sleighs and in
Indians' arms or on their backs), and freed of the work obligations im-
posed on colonial children, many young people found life in captivity
preferable to that in New England. Boys hunted, caught fish, and gathered
nuts, but were not obliged to do any of the farm chores that colonial boys
were required to perform. Girls "planted, tended, and harvested corn,"
but had no master "to oversee or drive us, so that we could work as lei-
surely as we pleased. " 4
A Puritan childhood is as alien to twenty-first century Americans as
an Indian childhood was to seventeenth-century New Englanders. The
Children of the Covenant 9
BLOCKED IMAGE AT THE

REQUEST OF THE PUBLISHER
Benjamin West, "The Indians Delivering Up the English Captives to Colo-

nel Bouquet." From A Love of His Country, by William Smith (1766). Fol-
lowing France's defeat in the French and Indian War in 1763, British set-
tlers seized Indian land in violation of treaties with local tribes. An Ottawa
chief named Pontiac led an alliance of western Indians in rebellion, killing
more than 2,000 colonists and seizing dozens of captives. The British sent
Colonel Henry Bouquet and 1,500 troops to subdue the Indians. In return
for sparing Indian villages, Bouquet demanded the captives' return. Benja-
min West shows a white child recoiling from a British soldier, seeking ref-
uge in the arms of his adopted Indian parents. Courtesy of the Virginia
Historical Society, Richmond.
10 Huck~s Raft
Puritans did not sentimentalize childhood; they regarded even newborn

infants as potential sinners who contained aggressive and willful impulses
that needed to be suppressed. Nor did the Puritans consider childhood a
period of relative leisure and playfulness, deserving of indulgence. They
considered crawling bestial and play as frivolous and trifling, and self-
consciously eliminated the revels and sports that fostered passionate peer
relationships in England. In the Puritans' eyes, children were adults in
training who needed to be prepared for salvation and inducted into the
world of work as early as possible. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to
misrepresent the Puritans as unusually harsh or controlling parents, who
lacked an awareness of children's special nature. The Puritans were
unique in their preoccupation with childrearing, and wrote a dispropor-
tionate share of tracts on the subject. As a struggling minority, their sur-
vival depended on ensuring that their children retained their values. They
were convinced that molding children through proper childrearing and
education was the most effective way to shape an orderly and godly soci-
ety. Their legacy is a fixation on childhood corruption, child nurture, and
schooling that remains undiminished in the United States today. 5
"Why came you unto this land?" Eleazar Mather asked his congrega-
tion in 1671; "was it not mainly with respect to the rising Generation? ...
was it to leave them a rich and wealthy people? was it to leave them
Houses, Lands, Livings? Oh, No; but to leave God in the midst of them."
Mather was not alone in claiming that the Puritans had migrated to pro-
mote their children's well-being. Mary Angier declared that her reason for
venturing across the Atlantic was "thinking that if her children might get
good it would be worthy my journey." Similarly, Ann Ervington decided
to migrate because she feared that "children would curse [their] parents
for not getting them to means." When English Puritans during the 1620s
and 1630s contemplated migrating to the New World, their primary mo-
tives were to protect their children from moral corruption and to promote
their spiritual and economic well-being. 6
During the 1620s and 1630s, more than 14,000 English villagers and
artisans fled their country to travel to the shores of New England, where
they hoped to establish a stable and moral society free from the disruptive
demographic and economic 'transformations that were unsettling Eng-
land's social order. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
England experienced mounting inflation, rapid population growth, and a
sharp increase in the proportion of children in the population. A SO per-
cent decline in real wages between 1500 and 1620 prompted a growing
number of rural sons and daughters to leave their impoverished families
and villages at a very young age to seek apprenticeships or to find employ-
ment as live-in servants or independent wage earners. A resulting problem

of youthful vagrancy and delinquency led to authorities' ambitious plans
to incarcerate idle and disordered youth in workhouses, conscript them
into military service, or transport them overseas. Religious reformers, less
troubled by youthful vagrancy and crime, focused on childish mischief-
making and youthful vice, especially blasphemy, idleness, disobedience,
and Sabbath-breaking. This preoccupation with youthful frivolity, reli-
gious indifference, and indolence shaped the Puritan outlook, with its em-
phasis on piety, self-discipline, hard work, and household discipline.
When they finally achieved power, the Puritans were eager to suppress
England's traditional youthful culture of Maypole dancing, frolicking,
sports, and carnival-like "rituals of misrule" in which young people
mocked their elders and expressed their antagonisms toward adult au-
thority ritually and symbolically. The Puritans aggressively proselytized
among the young, pressed for an expansion of schooling, and sought to
strengthen paternal authority. 7
Against this background of disruptive social change, radically con-
flicting conceptions of the nature of childhood had emerged in Tudor and
Stuart England. Anglican traditionalists regarded childhood as a reposi-
tory of virtues that were rapidly disappearing from English society. For
them, the supposed innocence, playfulness, and obedience of children
served as a symbolic link with their highly idealized conception of a past
"Merrie England" characterized by parish unity, a stable and hierarchical
social order, and communal celebrations. At the same time, humanistic
educators, who invoked the metaphors of "moist wax" and "fair white
wool" to describe children, expressed exceptional optimism about chil-
dren's capacity to learn and adapt. For them, children were malleable, and
all depended on the nature of their upbringing and education. 8
Unlike the early humanists or Anglican traditionalists, who believed
that children arrived in the world without personal evil, Puritan sermons
and moral tracts portrayed children as riddled by corruption. Even a new-
born infant's soul was tainted with original sin-the human waywardness
that caused Adam's Fall. In the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth's words,
babies were "filthy, guilty, odious, abominable . . . both by nature and
practice." The Puritan minister Cotton Mather described children's innate
sinfulness even more bluntly: "Are they Young? Yet the Devil has been
with them already ... They go astray as soon as they are born. They no
longer step than they stray, they no sooner lisp than they ly." For Puritans,
the moral reformation of childhood offered the key to establishing a godly
society. 9
The New England Puritans are easily caricatured as an emotionally cold
12 Huck"'s Raft
and humorless people who terrorized the young with threats of damna-
tion and hellfire and believed that the chief task of parenthood was to
break children's sinful will. In fact the Puritans were among the first
groups to reflect seriously and systematically on children's nature and the
process of childhood development. For a century, their concern with the
nurture of the young led them to monopolize writings for and about chil-
dren, publish many of the earliest works on childrearing and pedagogy,
and dominate the field of children's literature. They were among the first
to condemn wetnursing and encourage maternal nursing, and to move be-
yond literary conceptions that depicted children solely in terms of inno-
cent simplicity or youthful precocity. Perhaps most important, they were
the first group to state publicly that entire communities were responsible
for children's moral development and to honor that commitment by re-
quiring communities to establish schools and by criminalizing the physical
abuse of children. 10
The Puritan preoccupation with childhood was a product of religious
beliefs and social circumstances. As members of a reform movement that
sought to purify the Church of England and to elevate English morals and
manners, the Puritans were convinced that the key to creating a pious so-
ciety lay in properly rearing, disciplining, and educating a new generation
to higher standards of piety. As a small minority group, the Puritans de-
pended on winning the rising generation's minds and souls in order to pre-
vail in the long term. Migration to New England greatly intensified the
Puritans' fixation on childhood as a critical stage for saving souls. Deeply
concerned about the survival of the Puritan experiment in a howling wil-
derness, fearful that their offspring might revert to savagery, the Puritans
considered it essential that children retain certain fundamental values, in-
cluding an awareness of sin.
In New England, the ready availability of land and uniquely healthy liv-
ing conditions, the product of clean water and a cool climate, resulted in
families that were larger, more stable, and more hierarchical than those in
England. In rural England, a typical farm had fewer than forty acres, an
insufficient amount to divide among a family's children. As a result, chil-
dren customarily left home in their early teens to work as household ser-
vants or agricultural laborers in other households. As the Quaker William
Penn observed, English parents "do with their children as they do with
their souls, put them out at livery for so much a year." But in New Eng-
land, distinctive demographic and economic conditions combined with a
patriarchal ideology rooted in religion to increase the size of families, in-
tensify paternal controls over the young, and allow parents to keep their
children close by. A relatively equal sex ratio and an abundance of land
made marriage a virtually universal institution. Because women typically

married in their late teens or early twenties, five years earlier than their
English counterparts, they bore many more children. On average, women
gave birth every two years or so, averaging between seven and nine chil-
dren, compared with four or five in England. These circumstances allowed
the New England Puritans to realize their ideal of a godly family: a patri-
archal unit in which a man's authority over his wife, children, and ser-
vants was a part of an interlocking chain of authority extending from God
to the lowliest creatures. 11
The patriarchal family was the basic building block of Puritan society,
and paternal authority received strong reinforcement from the church and
community. Within their households, male household heads exercised un-
usual authority over family members. They were responsible for leading
their household in daily prayers and scripture reading, catechizing their
children and servants, and teaching household members to read so that
they might study the Bible and learn the "good Iawes of the Colony."
Childrearing manuals were thus addressed to men, not their wives. They
had an obligation to help their sons find a vocation or calling, and a legal
right to consent to their children's marriage. Massachusetts Bay Colony
and Connecticut underscored the importance of paternal authority by
making it a capital offense for youths sixteen or older to curse or strike
their father. 12
The Puritans repudiated many traditional English customs that con-
flicted with a father's authority, such as godparenthood. The family was a
"little commonwealth," the keystone of the social order and a microcosm
of the relationships of superiority and subordination that characterized
the larger society. Yet even before the first generation of settlers passed
away, there was fear that fathers were failing to properly discipline and
educate the young. In 1648 the Massachusetts General Court repri-
manded fathers for their negligence and ordered that "all masters of fami-
lies doe once a week (at the least) catechize their children and servants in
the grounds and principles of Religion." Connecticut, New Haven, and
Plymouth colonies followed suit in 1650, 1655, and 1671 with almost
identical injunctions to ensure that "such Children and Servants may
[not] be in danger to grow barbarous, rude and stubborn, through
ignorance. " 13
Toward the end of the seventeenth century, however, rapid population
growth, increasing geographic mobility, and the emergence of a more
commercial economy combined to erode patriarchal authority. While
many sons continued to live in their parents' household into their twen-
ties, a growing number began to leave home intermittently during their
14 Huck"'s Raft
teens to attend school, undertake an apprenticeship, or perform seasonal

labor. Some moved permanently to fresh lands in western or northern
New England, and an increasing number took their inheritance in the
form of education or property instead of waiting to inherit land, further
diminishing fathers' economic leverage over their offspring. Meanwhile,
daughters as well as sons gained greater independence from parental over-
sight, and peer relationships grew more important. As young people grew
more assertive, adult anxieties rose, provoking the first of many moral
panics that would characterize American attitudes toward the young. To
ensure proper family government, Massachusetts Bay Colony established
a system of tithingmen, who watched over ten or twelve families and re-
ported on stubborn children, unruly servants, and negligent fathers.
Churches established youth groups to encourage the young "to avoid
those temptations ... that by Sad Experience we find our Youth to be ex-
posed or inclined to." Dependency was giving way to new forms of youth-
ful assertiveness. 14
When the Mayflower left Plymouth, England, on September 16, 1620,
3 of its 102 passengers were pregnant. Elizabeth Hopkins and Susanna
White were seven months pregnant. Mary Norris Allerton was in her sec-
ond or third month. Their shipboard pregnancies were excruciatingly
difficult. During "fierce storms" that lasted for six of the voyage's nine
and a half weeks, the passengers were confined between decks while high
winds scattered their clothing and supplies. While still at sea, Elizabeth
Hopkins delivered a baby boy, named Oceanus after his birthplace. Two
weeks later, while the Mayflower was anchored off Cape Cod, Susanna
White gave birth to another boy, christened Peregrine, a name that means
"pilgrim." He lived into his eighties, but Oceanus Hopkins died during
the Pilgrims' first winter in Plymouth. Mary Norris Allerton died in child-
birth; her baby was stillborn.
Childbirth in colonial New England was a difficult and sometimes life-
threatening experience. During the seventeenth century, between 1 and
1.5 percent of births ended in the mother's death, the result of exhaustion,
dehydration, infection, hemorrhage, or convulsions. Since the typical
mother gave birth to ;between seven and nine children, her lifetime
chances of dying from childbirth ran as high as one in eight. Understand-
ably, many Puritan women regarded childbirth with foreboding, describ-
ing it as "that evel hour I loock forward to with dread." Likewise, the
death of infants and children was common. The Puritan minister Cotton
Mather said that a dead child was "a sight no more surprising than a
broken pitcher," and almost all families experienced the loss of at least
two or three children. Of the fourteen children Samuel Sewall had with
his first wife, only six reached adulthood. In New England's healthiest
communities, around 10 percent of children died in their first year, and
three of every nine died before reaching their twenty-first birthday. In sea-
ports like Boston or Salem, death rates were two or even three times
higher. Epidemics of smallpox, measles, mumps, diphtheria, scarlet fever,
and whooping cough were special sources of dread. During a 1677 small-
pox epidemic, a fifth of Boston's population, mainly children, died. Cot-
ton Mather saw eight of his fifteen children die before reaching the age of
two. "We have our children taken from us," he cried out, "the Desire of
our Eyes taken away with a stroke." 15
According to Puritan doctrine, infants who died unconverted were
doomed to eternal torment in hell. Although parents were supposed to ac-
cept these deaths with resignation, many could barely contain their grief.
Over time the Puritans softened the Calvinist emphasis on infant deprav-
ity. By the end of the seventeenth century, a growing number accepted the
possibility that baptism washed away a child's sins and protected it from
damnation. On the day his son was baptized in 1706, Richard Brown, the
minister of Reading, Massachusetts, expressed this hope: "Thou has given
him to me, 0 Lord, and I have given him up to thee, in the ordinance [of
baptism] & I pray that thou wouldst take him ... into covenant with
thyselfe, cleanse him with the blood of Jesus from his original unclean-
ness, and keep him whilst in the world from the evil of it." 16
A Puritan childhood was enveloped in religion. Within two weeks of
birth, a father brought his infant to the meetinghouse to be baptized. At
this ceremony, a father renewed his covenant with God and promised him
his seed. It was the father's duty to baptize the newborn because "the
mother at that time by reason of her travail and delivery is weake, and not
in case to have her head much troubled with many cares." It was at the
baptismal ceremony that the child's name was announced. Although some
parents bestowed common English names on their children, many first-
generation Puritans, who had joined the movement after breaking with
their parents, underscored this new beginning by choosing names with re-
ligious and moral significance. Some drew names from scripture (such as
Zachariah) or their English equivalents (like "Thankful"); others chose
phrase names (such as "lf-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-
damned"). Roger Class and his wife named their children Experience,
Waitstill, Preserved, Hopestill, Wait, Thanks, Desire, Unite, and Supply.
These names gave tangible expression to the first generation's basic values
and religion's importance in their lives. 17
Many New Englanders relied on the Bible for guidance and inspiration
in naming their children. More than 80 percent of seventeenth-century
New Englanders had an Old or New Testament name. But family names
were also important, underscoring the significance that New Englanders
attached to kinship ties. In contrast to England, where it was common for
godparents to name children, parents in New England typically named the
first-born son after the father and the first-born daughter after the mother,
while later-born children received the names of other kin. 18
A mixture of religious beliefs and novel circumstances led New England
Puritans to reject the English customs of wetnursing and swaddling. Al-
though it was customary for another lactating woman to suckle a new-
born child for the first four or five days-out of a belief that the mother's
first milk (colostrum) was bad for a child-paid wetnursing was less com-
mon in New England than in the Old World. The Puritans were the first
sect to condemn wetnursing out of fear that negligent nurses passed on
undesirable traits through their milk. The Puritans also believed that new-
borns nursed by their own mothers were less likely to die in infancy. Cot-
ton Mather was one of many Puritan theologians to criticize wetnursing,
arguing that a mother had a religious duty to nurse her children: "You
will Suckle your Infant your Self if you can; Be not such an Ostrich as to
Decline it, merely because you would be One of the Careless Women, Liv-
ing at Ease." All this despite the fact that Mather, like most of his class,
was wetnursed, as were his children. 19
There was no single prescribed time for weaning, though it usually took
place in the second year of life. Maternal illness, a new pregnancy,
conflicting demands on a mother's time, or a child's acquisition of teeth,
which could make nursing painful, led a mother to wean her children. For
Puritan parents, weaning was a time of considerable anxiety, since chil-
dren, once weaned, were more susceptible to disease. For this reason, chil-
dren were rarely weaned in the summer, when disease was especially prev-
alent. Weaning was an abrupt process, with either the mother or child
leaving home for a while to stay with relatives. Once weanlings left the
breast for good, they were regarded as children and true family members,
referred to by name rather than the appellation "it. " 20
The Puritans regarded childhood as a time of deficiency, associating an
infantile inability to walk or talk with animality, and considered it essen-
tial to teach children to stand upright and recite scripture as quickly as
possible. Both were associated with morality and propriety. To prevent in-
fants from crawling, they dressed young children, regardless of sex, in
long robes or petticoats and placed them in wooden go-carts, similar to
modern-day walkers. Neck stays kept infants' heads upright, while young
girls wore leather corsets to encourage an erect and mature bearing.
Wooden rods were sometimes placed along children's spines to promote

proper posture. 21
In Europe infants were wrapped tightly in swaddling bands to ensure
that children's bones grew straight and that they did not get into their par-
ents' way. There is no conclusive evidence that the New England Puritans
swaddled children. In New England's larger families, older siblings or ser-
vants were assigned to watch infants. Still, many young children experi-
enced accidents that indicate a lack of close supervision. Children suffered
burns from candles or open hearths, fell into rivers and wells, ingested
poisons, broke bones, swallowed pins, and stuffed nutshells up their
noses. Unlike parents today, Puritan parents did not "baby-proof" their
homes by screening fireplaces, covering wells, or blocking stairways.
Stoically accepting accidents as a fact of life, parents instead stressed
safety through obedience and assumed that a child's well-being was best
served by teaching a child the skills and rules necessary to function in the
adult world. 22
The Puritans were set apart from other religious sects by their emphasis
on household religion. Although the meetinghouse was the place for pub-
lic worship (the term church referred to the congregation's members, not
to the physical structure), the household was the place for young people's
initial religious and moral instruction. In 1650 the Connecticut General
Court gave "Masters of families" responsibility to "once a week at least
catechize their children and servants in the grounds and principles of reli-
gion." Bible readings, prayers, self-examination, psalm-singing, and fam-
ily instruction formed the household curriculum designed to lead children
and servants to faith. 23
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Puritans wrote
twice as many books in English on proper methods of rearing children as
all other groups combined. Precisely because of their belief that children
were born in sin, parents had to raise them with great care. Among the
Puritans' most important legacies are the beliefs that early childhood is
life's formative stage, that children are highly malleable and need careful
training, and that parents should be preoccupied with children's spiritual
well-being. A godly education was to start as early as possible. "Parents,"
declared one minister, "ought to begin to nurture their children, as soone
as they are capable of any instruction." Unlike evangelical Protestants of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Puritans did not emphasize a
sudden, dramatic conversion experience. Rather, children's religious edu-
cation was a gradual process in which fathers instilled a capacity for grace
within their offspring through appeals to their affections and reason. Con-
18 Huck's Raft

The Mason Children: David, ] oanna, and Abigail, by the Freake-Gibbs

Painter, 1670. The children of a Boston baker are dressed like adults.
Eight-year-old David Mason holds a silver-topped cane and gloves, a
symbol of high social status. Joanna holds a fan and red coral necklace,
which was thought to ward off disease. Abigail carries a rose, a symbol
of innocence. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift
of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III, 1979.7.3.
ceiving of children's socialization in religious terms, Puritan parents sur-

rounded their offspring from birth with prayer and psalm-singing. In de-
vout households, scripture readings took place daily and family prayers
were held twice a day. Parents encouraged their children to read "as early
as May be" through recitation of catechisms and Bible stories. Even
young children were taken to Sabbath observances, where sermons might
last six hours. 24
The emphasis on early moral instruction led the Puritans to view chil-
dren's play with ambivalence. Puritan children had swings, rode hobby-
horses, and drew on slates. Girls cut out paper dolls with scissors, recited
poetry, and played with dollhouses and cradles. Boys flew kites, sailed toy
boats, constructed wigwams and played at being Indians, collected rocks
and bird eggs, and made pets of squirrels, dogs, and cats. Seventeenth-
century records provide a litany of complaints about children playing ball
or flying kites in the streets, robbing birds' nests and orchards, and throw-
ing stones and snowballs at passersby. Yet the dominant view was that
play was a sinful waste of time, "a snare of the Old Deluder, Satan." Sam-
uel Sewall and Cotton Mather complained about their children's
"inordinant love of play" and worried about the energies diverted to it.
They especially abhorred game-playing on the Sabbath and any games in-
volving cards and dice. 25
The Puritans did not mistake children for angels. Unlike the Romantics,
who associated childhood with purity and innocence, the Puritans
adopted a fairly realistic view, emphasizing children's intransigence, will-
fulness, and obstinacy. They worried that if indolence, selfishness, and
willfulness were not overcome in childhood, these traits would dominate
adulthood. The Reverend Thomas Cobbett said that too many insolent
and unruly children "carry it proudly, disdainfully, and scornfully toward
parents," and that their mother and father should require them to bow
before them and stand bareheaded in their presence. Nonetheless, most
Puritan authorities were highly critical of harsh physical punishments,
convinced that corporal discipline only induced resentfulness and rebel-
liousness in children. Parents were told to avoid excessive severity and al-
ways to explain the reasons for a punishment. Ministers said that correc-
tion of error should never be inflicted arbitrarily or capriciously, and that
parents should never discipline a child in anger. Parents were also advised
to avoid the indiscriminate use of verbal or physical chastisement and to
adapt correction to the child's age, temperament, understanding, and to
the nature of the infraction. As the poet Anne Bradstreet explained, "Di-
verse children have their different natures; some are like flesh which noth-
ing but salt will keep from putrefecation; some again like tender fruits
which are best preserved with sugar: those parents are wise that can fit
their nurture according to the Nature. " 26
Puritan parents, relatively isolated in a new and difficult land, were in
closer and more constant contact with their children for more years than
their counterparts in England. Interacting with them more frequently and
intensely, they tried to inculcate religious understandings to encourage in-
ternal restraints. Joseph Green recalled that when he "was about 4 or 5
years at most," his "father used to tell me I must be a good boy and must
service God, and used to ask me whether I went alone and prayed to God
to bless me & to pardon my sins." By building up a child's awareness of
sin, parents sought to lead children along the path toward salvation.
Children's early consciousness of their mortality and of the severity of di-
vine judgment was considered a particularly useful tool for shaping be-
havior. John Norris' Spiritual Counsel advised the young to "be much in
20 Huck's Raft
contemplation of the last four thyngs, Heaven, Hell, Death and Judgment.
Place yourself frequently on your death beds, in your Coffins, and in your
Graves. Act over frequently in your Minds, the solemnity of your own
funerals; and entertain your Imaginations with all the lively scenes of
Mortality. " 27
As early as possible, children were taught to prepare for death. Minis-
ters admonished children to reflect on death, and their sermons contained
graphic descriptions of hell and the horrors of eternal damnation. Cotton
Mather offered this advice: "Go into Burying-Place, CHILDREN; you
will there see Graves as short as your selves. Yea, you may be at Play one
Hour; Dead, Dead the next." With his own family, he seized on opportu-
nities to reinforce this lesson. In one incident, he explained, "I took my lit-
tle daughter, Katy, into my study, and there I told my child, that I am to
die shortly, and she must, when I am dead, remember every thing, that I
said unto her." Awareness of death was inculcated by showing young chil-
dren corpses and hangings. References to death pervaded children's prim-
ers. In illustrating the use of the letter "T," the New England Primer
noted: "Time cuts down all I Both great and small." Far from being a sign
of parental insensitivity, exposing children to the idea and reality of death
was a way to instill in them an awareness of sin and to encourage them to
reflect on divine judgment. At least some Puritan children picked up the
message that they needed to recognize their sinfulness and strive for re-
pentance and salvation. Samuel Sewall's daughter Betty "burst out" after
dinner "into an amazing cry ... Her Mother ask'd the reason; she gave
none; at last said she was afraid she could goe to Hell, her Sins were not
pardon' d. " 28
Even sickness offered practical religious lessons. During the seventeenth
century, physicians were unable to diagnose or treat scarcely any diseases,
and the Puritans regarded illnesses as divinely administered afflictions.
"What are sickness," one Puritan divine explained, "but the Rods where-
with GOD counts His own offending Children?" To cope with their chil-
dren's illnesses, many Puritan parents, like Increase Mather, turned to reli-
gious ritual. In 1676, when his son Samuel "was near to death again
about a fortnight agoe, I Fasted & prayed for his Life, & God hath heard
me." Others worried that their unrepented sins caused their children's ill-
nesses. When his eldest son Ebenezer accidentally fell into a fire while
napping, Samuel Sewall noted that "for his relief I immediately killed a
cat and he washed his hands in the blood." Some children considered ill-
nesses providential signs. Recalling a bout with measles in 1714, when he
was eleven, Ebenezer Parkman wrote that his illness "set me upon think-
ing upon what would be the estate of my soul after my Dissolution, which
was apprehended by all to be Nigh, often in my mind repeating the Psalm-

ists words Blessed is he whose Transgression is forgiven whose Sin is
Covered. " 29
The Puritan family was not only a little church; it was also a little
school. During the early seventeenth century it was within the household
that Puritan children gained basic literacy. In general, mothers were re-
sponsible for teaching their children to read, while fathers taught writing.
Puritans regarded education as critical to salvation, calling education
"God's ordinary way for the conveyance of his grace." In teaching chil-
dren to read, Puritan mothers did not divide reading and religion.
Children were expected to learn to read by listening to others read aloud
and then by memorizing the Lord's Prayer, psalms, hymns, catechisms,
and scripture passages. Nathaniel Eaton explained: "My education was in
a religious manner from a cradle that I was trained to read Scripture." Af-
ter his mother's death, John Paine of Plymouth wrote: "She was unto her
children all teaching them God's word to read as they were but Small." As
in England, parents bought primers, catechisms, and hornbooks to teach
their children to read. Households educated not only children but also
servants and apprentices. Contracts between masters and apprentices
obliged masters to make sure that servants learned how to read. And all
imbibed religion along with literacy. 30 _
During the seventeenth century, a growing perception that parents were

failing to properly educate their children led many communities to trans-
fer instructional responsibilities to schools. In 164 7 Massachusetts Bay
Colony had ordered every town of fifty families to "appoint one within
their own towne to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write
and reade." In 1670 the Massachusetts General Court described a "great
& generall neglect of instructing & governing the rising generation, both
in familyes & churches." By the end of the century, young New England-
ers increasingly went to school to learn to write and cipher. This early rise
of public schooling has been seen as a Puritan innovation, but it would be
a mistake to exaggerate the Puritans' commitment to formal schooling.
The Massachusetts school law was not rigidly enforced, and many towns
failed to regularly provide teachers. All eight towns required to maintain a
grammar school did so, but only a third of the smaller towns required to
establish reading and writing schools obeyed the law, and no statute re-
quired children to attend school. While Puritan New Englanders had a
much higher rate of literacy than the English, this phenomenon primarily
reflected the lack of a large population of illiterate laborers rather than the
Puritan belief that access to books distinguished Protestantism from the
tyranny of Catholic priests. 31
22 Huck's Raft
Formal school terms were often quite brief, sometimes no more than a
few months, and literacy was highly gendered. The Puritans were gener-
ally content to teach girls only reading, while encouraging boys to learn
both reading and writing. Among the early settlers, about 60 percent of
the men and 30 percent of the women could sign their own wills. By the
end of the colonial period, 90 percent of the males and 50 percent of the
females signed their wills. Grammar schools and Latin schools were re-
served almost exclusively for boys. 32
The Salem witch scare provides a glimpse into the world of Puritan girl-
hood. Early in 1692 eight girls, including the nine-year-old daughter and
eleven-year-old niece of Salem Village minister Samuel Parris, attempted
to gaze into the future, hoping to catch a glimpse of their husbands. Lack-
ing a crystal ball, they suspended the white of a raw egg in a glass of wa-
ter. Assisting them was the Reverend Parris' slave, Tituba, whom he had
brought to Massachusetts from the West Indies and who captivated the
girls with forbidden tales of witchcraft. Rather than seeing an image of
her husband-to-be, one of the girls spied "a specter in the likeness of a
coffin." Soon afterward a number of the girls were afflicted with un-
known "distempers," including garbled speech, odd gestures, and convul-
sive fits. They went into trances, suffered seizures, spat food, shouted
blasphemies, and made strange animal sounds. 33
To determine whether the girls had been bewitched, Tituba baked a
"witch cake" out of rye and the urine of the afflicted girls, which she
planned to feed to a dog. But before the experiment was completed, the
Reverend Parris caught wind of what was going on. Alarmed, he con-
sulted a local doctor. Unable to diagnose the girls' condition, the physi-
cian described their conniptions as the devil's handiwork. With other min-
isters, Reverend Parris tried unsuccessfully to heal the girls through
prayer. Finally the girls were pressed to name their tormentors. In June
1692 a newly created court was convened to try the accused. Because the
judges admitted spectral evidence-testimony in which witnesses asserted
that they had seen apparitions of the alleged witches doing the work of
Satan-convictions were much more easily obtained than in earlier witch-
craft cases. In all, more than 150 people from twenty-four towns were
eventually accused of witchcraft, 14 women and 5 men were hanged, and
another man was crushed to death by stones. Five others died in jail
awaiting trial. There is no evidence that the. girls who touched off the
witch scare were mischiefmaking, play-acting attention seekers. Rather, it
seems likely that their convulsions and hallucinations were related to the
increasingly precarious status of young women in late seventeenth-century
New England and the drudgery and repressiveness of the life that they
faced. 34
It was not accidental that the girls were trying to divine their marriage
prospects. Young women's prospects for marriage were growing increas-
ingly uncertain as a result of a growing shortage of young men. Casualties
suffered in a war against the French Canadians and the migration of many
young men to western and northern New England and New York in
search of land diminished the supply of potential suitors. Several girls, or-
phans whose inheritances were tied up in litigation, had special reason to
worry about their marriage prospects. Without a dowry, they were un-
likely to find a husband. Uncertainty is likely to have played a role in the
accusations as well as the girls' relative powerlessness in Puritan society.
As young female servants, many of the girls occupied the lowest status
level in their society. Witchcraft accusations gave therr:t a degree of power
that no female of their age would otherwise have.
HE NEW ENGLAND Puritans demarcated the stages of growing up

very differently than we do today. The period in which a child was pri-
marily under a mother's care (a stage that early Americans called "in-
fancy") was brief, lasting until the age of six or seven. During this period
both boys and girls wore dresses or gowns, a visual symbol of their de-
pendent status. In New England as in the Old World, the end of infancy
was marked by a ceremony called breeching, in which a boy began to
wear pants. Breeching not only marked the transfer of supervision and
control over boys from mothers to fathers; it also signaled an increase in
work responsibilities, as boys began to fetch water, tend livestock, and
perform other chores, either for their family or as a servant in another
household. Although girls did not undergo a symbolic shift in status
equivalent to breeching, they also took on increased responsibilities for
housework, including spinning, cooking, and gardening. 35
Infancy was followed by childhood and youth, prolonged transitional
periods stretching from seven or eight to the early or mid-twenties. In
England these were years when many young people lived, at least tempo-
rarily, outside their parental home as servants or apprentices, as their fam-
ilies tried to alleviate crowdedness and surplus labor within the family.
Conversely, they might take children in to care for or to replace grown
children who had left the household. In New England, fostering out was
usually limited to children between the ages of seven and twelve, while
older youths generally lived with their parents. Whereas in England ser-
vants were highly mobile and frequently changed employers and even
24 Huck"s Raf~
towns, most older youths in New England remained under their parents'
watchful eyes. 36
Youth was a period in which young people became sexually and physi-
cally mature, acquired adult skills, and gradually gained autonomy from
their parents. It was the "chusing time" when the young were to "putt
away Childish things" and find a calling or vocation. Laws in Massachu-
setts in 1643 and 1646 specifically charged "parents and masters" to
"breed and bring up their children and apprentices in some honest calling,
labor or employment." During youth, boys and girls were to abandon the
frivolities of early childhood and to make decisions that would shape their
adult lives. "Now you commonly chuse your trade," explained Benjamin
Colman in 1720. "Now you chuse your master and your education or oc-
cupation. And now you dispose of yourself in marriage ordinarily, place
your affections, give away your hearts, look out for some companion of
life, whose to be as long as you live." Unlike early childhood, when young
children "spend much time in pastime and play, for their bodies are too
weak to labour" and their minds "are too shallow" for serious study,
youth was a time of heightened seriousness, according to the Puritan di-
vine John Cotton. When his fourteen-year-old son was admitted to Har-
vard College in 1672, the Reverend Thomas Shepard urged him to "Re-
member . . . that tho' you have spent your time in the vanity of
Childhood; sports and mirth, little minding better things, yet that now,
when come to this ripeness of Admission to College, that now God and
man expects you to putt away Childish things: now is the time come,
wherein you are to be serious, and to learn sobriety, and wisdom." 37
Choice of a calling was often fraught with tension. In his autobiogra-
phy, the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin described how he became an ap-
prentice printer. When he was eight, his father sent him to a grammar
school to prepare for the ministry. His father could not afford the school-
ing, and at ten Benjamin was withdrawn and began to assist his father in
the manufacture of candles and soap. Bored by dipping wicks into wax,
the boy hoped to go to sea, but his father rejected this option. Fearing that
Benjamin would run away, as another son already had, the father "took
me to walk with him, and see joiners, bricklayers, turners, braziers, etc.,
at their work, that he might observe my inclination, and endeavor to fix it
on some trade or other on land." Finally the elder Franklin decided his
son should become a cutler, who would make, repair, or sell knives, and
sent him to live with an uncle's son who was practicing that trade. But
when the man demanded a fee, Benjamin returned home and was appren-
ticed to a much older brother, a master printer. 38
In addition to being a time when a young man chose a vocation, youth
was also the stage of life when females and males were expected to pre-
pare for conversion. Young people in seventeenth-century New England
carried an enormous psychological burden. They were reminded con-
stantly about their responsibility for perpetuating their society's faith.
Many kept diaries for spiritual account-keeping, a Puritan counterpart to
the Catholic confessional, and those that survive record intense anxiety
about their spiritual state. In these journals, Puritan youths laid out their
guilt, anguish, and tortured self-examination. Preoccupation with judg-
ment and the difficulties of salvation mark these personal accounts. The
fourteen-year-old Increase Mather wrote that his conscience was stricken
by "terrible convictions and awakening" and he plunged into the "ex-
tremity of anguish and horror in my soul." Similarly Roger Clap's diary
reveals how after he left his apprenticeship and father's family, he medi-
tated on his own sinfulness. Samuel Mather, age twelve, was fearful that
he might "belong not unto the election of grace": "Though I am well in
my body, yet I question whether my soul doth prosper as my body doth."
Other diaries reveal a similar preoccupation with sin and salvation. John
Clap had a "thorow conviction of his misery by reason of sin both origi-
nal and actual" when he was eleven. Priscilla Thornton at eleven declared
that "she knew she was made up of all manners of sin." Nathanael
Mather at thirteen wrote: "I confess, 0 Lord, I have fallen from thee by
my iniquity, and am by nature a son of hell. " 39
Through the seventeenth century the passage of young New Englanders
toward adulthood grew increasingly problematic. Young men, in particu-
lar, experienced greater educational and occupational choices and greater
privacy. Geographic mobility increased as parents no longer had sufficient
land to provide their sons with a farmstead nearby. Youth acquired a new
potential for creating tension, ambiguity, and uncertainty in the Puritan
community as the young struck off on their own. 40
Toward the end of the century, Puritan ministers of the s~cond genera-
tion developed a new literary form known as the "jeremiad." Named for
the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, who had pointed out the ancient
Hebrews' evil ways, the jeremiad was a prolonged lamentation and com-
plaint about the rising generation. Jeremiads foresaw a calamitous future
for New England unless young people obeyed God's laws and accepted
their parents' faith. In 1657 Ezekiel Rogers spoke out in typical terms: "I
find greatest Trouble and Grief about the Rising Generation. Young Peo-
ple are stirred here; but they strengthen one another in Evil, by Example,
by Counsel." In heated terms, ministers denounced filial disobedience, im-
modest dress, youthful frolics and dalliances, and masturbation. Cotton
Mather, writing anonymously in 1723, was one of the first moralists in
26 Huck's Raft
the western world to attack adolescent masturbation, condemning the "li-

bidinous practices" of those "who do evil with both hands" and "have
the cursed way of procuring a discharge, which the God of nature has or-
dered to be made in a way which a lawful marriages leads unto." "Self-
pollution," he and other Puritan ministers feared, "is consecrating the
best of our bodyes to the divell. " 41
Contributing to fears of decline was a recognition that young people
were falling away from the founders' faith. As early as the 1660s, Puritan
church membership was declining. Fear that young people were not being
converted led to enactment of school laws designed to spread proper reli-
gious views and to overcome the indifference of many families toward re-
ligion and household education. The falling number of conversions also
led to adoption of a religious reform, the Half-Way Covenant of 1662,
which allowed unconverted children of church members to baptize their
own children in church. Although the Half-Way Covenant did not in-
crease church membership, it did increase the potential for more church
members in the future. 42
First-generation New England Puritans upheld strict standards for ad-
mission to church membership. Their churches demanded that sons and
daughters stand up before the adult male community and testify to an ex-
perience of regeneration, that is, of reborn faith. It required great courage
to undergo the scrutiny of one's parents and community, and most young
people were unwilling to do this before their father's death, when they
achieved full adult status. The result was a growing number of young peo-
ple who were unable to become full communicants. Over time some
churches relaxed their restrictive requirements for membership. While
most churches still required a full public narration of saving grace, others
began to offer the options of a private hearing before the minister and
deacons or a written relation to be read by the minister before the congre-
gation. ~ore than a few churches, following the example of the congrega-
tions in the Connecticut River Valley, dropped the relation altogether as a
condition of full membership. 43
Males were especially unlikely to testify to an experience of regenera-
tion, and by the late seventeenth century church membership became in-
creasingly feminized, although church leadership remained in the hands of
male elders and deacons. By the 1690s women made up 70 percent or
more of church members, and the typical household contained a churched
wife and an unchurched husband. Cotton Mather believed that young
women were more likely than young men to become church members out
of fear of dying in childbirth: "The Curse both of Subjection and of Child
bearing which the Female Sex is doom'd unto, has been turn'd into a
Children of the Covenant 2 7
Blessing, by the Free Grace of our Most Gracious God." It also seems
likely that this was related to the greater geographic mobility of women
(who often moved to a new town upon marriage) and their greater isola-
tion from extended kin. 44
The feminization of New England religion carried profound social and
religious consequences. It was apparent in ·a theological shift away from
an emphasis on a vengeful God the Father, demanding obedience and sub-
mission to his laws, toward an emphasis on the figure of Christ, protect-
ing his followers. It was also evident in a shift away from a stress on the
patriarchal household as the central social institution. No longer able to
trust male household heads with properly educating and catechizing their
children and servants, New Englanders placed greater emphasis on cate-
chism within churches, on public schools, and on maternal nurture. Min-
isters increasingly argued that the pious, virtuous mother should assume
primary responsibility for educating young children. 45
For much of the seventeenth century, paternal control over property
had strengthened a father's authority over his offspring. In England the
practice of primogeniture had restricted the prospects of land to the eldest
son, but in New England all sons expected to inherit land. Having far
more acres than people, the first settlers in New England fell into a pat-
tern of distributing their estates among all male heirs, with generous por-
tions for their daughters, too. New England fathers used their control
over property to influence their children's choice of vocation and decisions
about the timing of marriage and the marriage partner. Paternal control
over property also ensured that children took care of their parents in their
old age. Typically fathers retained legal title to their land until their death,
delaying their children's achievement of full adulthood until a relatively
late age. Fathers controlled family assets to ensure that their sons labored
for them productively and maintained them and their widows in old age.
The strength of paternal authority extended to daughters as well. In the
seventeenth century, daughters generally married in strict birth order to
alleviate the father's fear that if younger daughters married earlier, it
would be more difficult for older daughters to find husbands. 46
By the end of the seventeenth century, however, paternal authority had
noticeably weakened. No longer was there sufficient land to sustain its
distribution to all heirs. Geographic mobility increased markedly in the
last two decades of the seventeenth century, as growing numbers of young
people in their mid to late teens or early twenties left home for eastern
seaports or commercial towns or newly settled frontier regions to find
new opportunities. At the same time, nonagricultural employment ex-
panded, particularly in household manufacturing, shipping, and trade,
28 Huck!1s Raft
helping to draw young people off the land. An increase in geographic mo-
bility and occupational opportunities allowed men and women to marry
at an earlier age without a father's permission. The patriarchalism so
dominant in early New England faded considerably during the early eigh-
teenth century. Rather than wait for their inheritance, sons increasingly
bought their portions, and hence their economic independence, from their
father or siblings and left to farm on available land on the frontier or to
make a new start in other towns. Although parents often aided them in
this resettlement process, sons were removed from day-to-day paternal
and church supervision, something their seventeenth-century counterparts
had rarely managed. As a result, paternal control of marital decisions
weakened significantly. During the early eighteenth century a growing
number of youth also engaged in sexual activity before marriage. From
the late seventeenth through the late eighteenth centuries, the proportion
of brides who were pregnant before marriage rose from less than 10 per-
cent to about 30 percent. 47
Further adding to fears of moral decline was the emergence of a distinc-
tive youth culture. In the early seventeenth century there were few com-
munal recreations for youthful New Englanders. Whereas early modern
England offered a range of rituals, festivities, and folk customs for young
people who lived in a hierarchical, adult-dominated society, New England
did not. The Puritans looked upon early modern England's festive culture
with scorn. Not only did these recreational activities violate the Puritan
taboo against leisure on the Sabbath; they also were seen as relics of Ca-
tholicism or paganism that provided the occasion for sinful drinking,
swearing, and fornication. The boisterous, drunken, unruly celebration of
Christmas in England, during which young men dressed up in women's
clothing and animal skins, drew particular ire. Very few of these folk cus-
toms made it to New England. To be sure, bands of young people roamed
the streets of Boston on Guy Fawkes Day (November 5), firing guns and
destroying fences to get wood for bonfires. Yet although there were iso-
lated instances of Maypole dancing or young people playing tricks on
April Fool's day, the Puritans were largely successful in suppressing this
traditional English folk culture and reorganizing the year around the Sab-
bath and fast days. In seventeenth-century New England there were no
saints' days, no public celebration of Christmas, no pre-Lenten carnival,
no celebration of St. Valentine's Day, and no church ales. 48
However, as early as the 1660s new kinds of rituals, such as militia
training days, had arisen that provided opportunities for young people to
congregate. Militias customarily trained eight times a year, and these mus-
ters bound young men together and became, as one critic wrote in 1677,
"days to meet on, to smoke, to carouse, to swagger and dishonor God

with the great bravery." An increase in youthful independence was evi-
dent in the proliferating complaints about night-walking, frolicking, com-
pany-keeping, carousing, merry-meeting, dancing, and singing. The num-
ber of sexual offenses by young people also rose. In one county near
Boston there were 250 cases of sexual offenses in the second half of the
seventeenth century, most involving youths. 49
To ensure that young people remained on the side of godliness and mo-
rality, a 1672 Massachusetts statute forbade "youth, maids and other per-
sons uncivilly walking in the streets and fields of Saturday and Sunday
nights." It was at this time of increasing anxiety over youth that Massa-
chusetts Bay Colony instituted tithingmen as overseers of family govern-
ment and regulators of youthful behavior. Other measures intended to
harness youthful energies ranged from legislation requiring the establish-
ment of schools to the creation of catechism classes and "Associations of
Young Folks." Ministers encouraged the formation of young men's socie-
ties, where youth could meet regularly to pray, sing psalms, hear sermons,
and discuss religious subjects. 50
As early as the 1720s a growing number of religious leaders adopted a
new strategy to instill discipline in the young. This was an evangelism that
sought to convert young people in their teens and bring them into church
membership. Typically, full church membership came at the same time
that an individual passed into full adulthood: the time of betrothal, mar-
riage, economic independence, and the prospects of parenthood. By the
1730s, however, proponents of religious revival were convinced that the
best way to protect youth from vice was to promote religious conversion
at an early age. Rejecting the older Puritan aversion to youthful conver-
sion, ministers during the Great Awakening, the emotional religious reviv-
als of the 1730s and 1740s, stressed the idea that divine grace could save
the young. 51
A majority of those converted during the Great Awakening were single
young men and women; a quarter were in their teens. During the 1740s
nearly 50 percent of female converts in New England were under the age
of twenty, compared with 26 percent in the previous decade. Many of the
young people attracted by the revivals were poor youth from inland mar-
ket towns and coastal seaports who had suffered dislocation from family
households as a result of wars with the Indians and the French and rapid
commercialization. 52
Part of the impulse for the Awakening came from young people them-
selves. In towns like Milford, Connecticut, as early as 1726 young people
"set up private Meetings, which they carried on by praying, reading good
30 Huck's Raft
Books, singing, etc. The Meetings were chiefly of the younger Sort of Peo-
ple; of Children about five or six Years of Age, and so upwards to about
twenty one, or two." Although the Great Awakening has sometimes been
described as a generational conflict, pitting the young who favored it
against older opponents who resented the erosion of their authority, there
is no correlation between the age and attitudes of ministers. Nevertheless,
the Great Awakening did reinforce a trend toward greater youthful auton-
omy. Over time many young people turned away from the local churches
that had sought their membership. Youthful piety increasingly. found ex-
pression in religious ceremonies that took place outside the established
churches, sometimes led by lay preachers. Many churches responded by
prohibiting teenage members. The fervor and enthusiasm of the religious
revival had drawn youth to it as a possible way to assert an independent
identity, but it failed to contain the restless energies and passions of the
young. 53
In 1669, when Richard Mather was on his deathbed, his son asked him
if he had any special charge to give to him. The elderly Mather replied: "A
special thing which I would commend to you, is care concerning the rising
generation in this country, that they be brought under the government of
Christ in his church." Early New England was intellectually preoccupied
with children and youth because the survival of the community depended
upon them. And yet it was hard to keep them within the Puritan fold.
Children were ignorant, even animalistic, and easily led astray. Youth was
dominated by pride and sensuality, evident in Sabbath-breaking, night
revels, blasphemy, fornication, rebellion against family government, and
even masturbation. Rising adult concern with youthful sensuality shows
up in the court records, especially in prosecutions of fornication and bas-
tardy, which increased dramatically over time. 54
The Puritan obsession with children and youth was not, however, lim-
ited to concern about sin. It also expressed fear for the survival of the Pu-
ritan faith. With the death of the first generation of New Englanders, with
the rapid decline in conversions relative to population growth, how could
the younger generation be nurtured in the faith that had motivated their
parents? Freed of the experience of persecution and the struggles of mi-
gration, how could the young ensure the survival of the Puritan enter-
prise? While Puritanism in England originated in part in a generational re-
volt against the Anglican Church, in New England it seemed necessary to
ensure that the younger generation sustained loyalty to their parents'
faith. To perpetuate their religion, the Puritans instituted mechanisms for
indoctrinating youths, including youth-specific catechisms, covenant-
renewal ceremonies in churches and homes, private religious societies,
catechetical exercises, lectures, and covenant renewals, in which groups

of youths were assembled on the Sabbath to renew their parents'
covenants. 55
No earlier people had ever invested greater responsibilities or higher ex-
pectations in their children than did the New England Puritans, but this
heavy investment produced intense anxiety. The survival and success of
the Puritan enterprise hinged on the willingness of the "rising generation"
to maintain their parents' religious beliefs and ideals. The Reverend
Eleazer Mather put the point bluntly. "There is no little Expectation con-
cerning you," he declared, "your predecessors ... [and] all of their expec-
tations under God himself, are in you." Beginning in the 1660s and
1670s, Puritan presses and pulpits produced a stream of jeremiads la-
menting the sins of the rising generation and the degeneration of the
young from the religion and godliness of their forebears. Young people
were made to carry an awesome psychological burden. Morality, religion,
indeed the future, depended on them. In secularized form, it is this mix-
ture of hope and fear about the rising generation that remains Puritan-
ism's most lasting legacy. 56
chapter two
Red, White, and Black

in Colonial America
His BOYHOOD served as an inspiration for Kidnapped, Rob-

ert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of abduction, betrayal, and adventure on
the high seas. Peter Williamson was just thirteen years old when he was
abducted from Scotland, transported to America, and sold into inden-
tured servitude. A tenant farmer's son, Peter had attended school in
Aberdeen, where he lived with an aunt. One day in 1743, while playing
on an Aberdeen pier, two men who worked for a local magistrate enticed
him aboard a ship. Taken into the vessel's hold, he was entertained with
music and card-playing, but soon discovered that he was not allowed to
leave. After a month of confinement, when seventy other boys had been
brought aboard, the vessel set sail for Virginia. 1
In Aberdeen men hired by local merchants and public officials patrolled
the streets, looking for orphans, runaways, and vagrant children. "The
trade of carrying off boys to the plantations in America, and selling them
there as slaves, was carried on at Aberdeen ... with amazing effrontery,"
Peter later wrote. "It was not carried on in secret, or by stealth, but pub-
licly, and by open violence." Many parents refused to allow their children
to go into the town for fear that they would be kidnapped. 2
After nearly three months at sea, Peter's ship ran aground off c·ape
May, New Jersey. The boys were taken to Philadelphia and sold at public
auction. "Thus," Peter later wrote, "we were driven through the country
like cattle to a Smithfield market, and exposed to sale in public fairs, as so
many beasts." Young Peter was bought for a seven-year term by a planter
named Hugh Wilson, who had himself been abducted from Scotland and
Red, White, and Black in Colonial America 33
sent to America. "Commiserating my condition," Peter recalled, "he took

care of me, indulged me in going to school, where I went every winter for
five years, and made a tolerable proficiency." 3
Dependency and subordination were common features of life for many
children in early America. Elizabeth Sprigs, a young servant in Maryland,
ran away from her home in England and financed her passage to the colo-
nies by agreeing to serve a term as an indentured servant. In a 1756 letter
to her father, she complained bitterly of mistreatment by her master and
begged for forgiveness and clothing:
What we unfortunate English People suffer here is beyond the probability of

you in England to Conceive, let it suffice that I, one of the unhappy Number,
am toiling almost Day and Night ... and then tied up and whipp'd ... [and
have] scarce any thing but Indian Corn and Salt to eat and that even be-
grudged ... I beg if you have any Bowels of Compassion left show it by send-
ing me some Relief, Clothing is the principal thing wanting, 4
Nine-year-old Sally Dawson had no say in her future service. In 1793

her father brought her to the home of Henry and Elizabeth Drinker, a
prominent Philadelphia Quaker family. After a fifteen-day trial period,
Sally was indentured to an eight-year-term. In exchange for arranging her
indenture, Sally's father received a bonding fee; the girl was to receive
"meat, drink, lodging and washing," and six months of instruction in the
"art, craft, and mystery of housewifery. " 5
In addition to the half-million Africans brought to the colonies in
chains, more than half of the 307,000 white migrants who arrived in the
colonies between 1700 and 1775-most in their teens or twenties-were
unfree. They came as indentured servants or bound or convict laborers
and were expected to work four or more years of service before attaining
their freedom. Meanwhile many young native-born colonists, like
Benjamin Franklin, who was indentured to an older brother as a printer's
apprentice when he was twelve, also experienced a period of subordina-
tion to a master. The experience of indentured servitude gave words like
liberty and tyranny a visceral meaning for many colonists. It bred a suspi-
cion of arbitrary authority and unchecked power and invigorated the
antipatriarchal ideology of the American Revolution. 6
Colonial childhood varied starkly by class, ethnicity, gender, geographic
region, religion, and race. Indian children in the Eastern Woodlands en-
joyed a degree of freedom from corporal punishment and household labor
that was unimaginable to enslaved children, young indentured servants,
or youthful apprentices and household servants. In contrast to New Eng-
land, where stable, patriarchal households structured young people's lives
34 Huck,s Raft
well into the eighteenth century, childhood in the Chesapeake colonies of

Maryland and Virginia and the colonies farther south was characterized
by highly unstable families, the prevalence of indentured servitude, and,
increasingly, by chattel slavery. Only in the Middle Colonies, especially
among the Pennsylvania Quakers, did a pattern of childhood premised on
affection and an acceptance of early independence emerge by the mid-
eighteenth century. For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
dependency characterized the lives of most colonial children, and it gave
added resonance to the revolutionary struggle for freedom in the 1770s
and 1780s. Yet throughout the colonial period indentured servitude and
apprenticeship gradually weakened, and as the nation moved toward rev-
olution, new patterns of childhood, emphasizing greater autonomy and
youthful assertiveness, had begun to arise for white children throughout
the colonies.
David Zeisberger was about eighteen years old when he migrated in
1739 from central Europe to a Moravian community in Georgia. For
sixty-two years, from the 1740s to the early nineteenth century, he served
as a missionary to the Creek, Iroquois, and Delaware Indians in New Eng-
land, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. As required by his church, he
kept a daily diary, which provides a detailed account of Indian childhood
in the Eastern Woodlands. Zeisberger was struck by both the similarities
and the marked contrasts between childrearing in his culture and among
Native Americans. Like Europeans, the Indian peoples of eastern North
America surrounded pregnancy with many taboos to ensure the baby's
well-being. Newborns underwent a series of initiation rituals, which
Zeisberger considered a mockery of the baptism ceremony (such as rub-
bing newborns with grease) or circumcision (such as the piercing of an in-
fant's ears or nose). Much as Europeans announced a child's formal name
at baptism, Indians conferred a newborn's public name at a formal cere-
mony (although this public name was not necessarily a personal name but
rather a description of the child's place in a clan). Much as Europeans
used swaddling cloths to ensure that a child's bones grew straight, the
eastern Indians placed infants on cradleboards until their "Bones begin to
harden, the Joynts to knit, and the Limbs grow strong." 7
In his diary Zeisberger noted that the Indian peoples, like Europeans,
raised boys and girls very differently, to prepare them for distinct adult
roles. Boys, almost as soon as they were able to walk, were trained to
hunt "squirrels, birds and even raccoon with their bows and arrow" and
to spear fish. Young girls, in contrast, were trained in "cooking, bread-
making, planting, making of carrying-girdles and bags, the former used
to carry provisions and utensils on their backs while journeying and the
latter to hold the provisions." Zeisberger was especially intrigued by the

contrasts between European and indigenous childhood. One difference in-
volved breast-feeding of infants. "The native Indian women of every
grade always nurse their own children," rather than relying on wetnurses,
and nursed their offspring much longer than did European women, for
four years or even more. The result was that Indian women in the Eastern
Woodlands bore relatively few children-usually just three or four-and
were very attached to them. Especially striking was Indian mothers' emo-
tional response to their children's death. Unlike European parents, who
were expected to show resignation upon a child's death, Indian mothers
responded to children's death with "unfeigned tears, and even for months
after their decease will weep at the graves of their departed children. " 8
Zeisberger was surprised by the amount of freedom given to Indian
children. Unlike European children, Indian boys were not obligated to
perform farm chores, nor were girls expected to spin, sew, or knit. To fos-
ter independence and initiative, Native American parents rarely restrained
their children. "They follow their own inclinations," he wrote, and "do
what they like and no one prevents them." The fact that children ran
about nearly naked astonished and appalled Europeans. Girls wore "a lit-
tle frock" while boys wore "little or nothing" until at the age of five or six
"a flap of cloth" was worn around the waist. The lack of confining cloth-
ing was one of the ways that the Indian peoples of the Eastern Woodlands
inured their children to a harsh environment and instilled the stoicism
that they highly valued. 9
Unlike European parents, who considered physical punishment essen-
tial to rearing properly disciplined adults, Indian parents eschewed the use
of straps and rods. Even when their children committed serious misdeeds,
"they are not punished, being only reproved with gentle words." Threats,
coercion, and physical punishment, it was feared, would make children
timid and submissive; parents' goal was to foster pride, independence, and
courage. They did so by honoring certain rites of passage that demarcated
the passage from childbirth to adulthood. Newborn children were dipped
in cold water or rubbed in animal oil "to make them strong brave men
and hardy hunters." Several months later, newborns underwent a special
initiation ceremony, in which a child was given a name from a wealth of
family names. Because this was a clan name and not a personal name,
many Europeans concluded that the Indians lacked a sense of children as
individuals. Among many native peoples, young children also underwent
a rite involving the piercing of the nose or earlobes, so that they could
wear decorative and symbolic jewelry. 10
Young women, at the time of first menstruation, underwent a special
36 Huck's Raft
initiation ceremony that marked their exit from girlhood and their en-
trance into womanhood and eligibility for marriage. "Generally between
the twelfth and sixteenth year," Zeisberger wrote about the Delaware, at
the onset of her first menses, a young woman separated herself from her
community and stayed in a special menstrual cabin for the menstrual pe-
riod, where she was cared for by her mother and other older female ac-
quaintances. Her head is covered with a blanket, and "she is given little to
eat, but regularly dosed with emetics. She is not allowed to do any work."
At the end of her ritual seclusion, she wore special clothing and a veil and
was subsequently told that she might marry. For an Indian boy, there were
ceremonies to mark his first tooth, first steps, and the killing of his first big
game. Young men underwent a "vision quest" that took place between
the ages of twelve and fourteen. The boys go "alone in the forest in appre-
hension and in need." Following a period of fasting and sensory depriva-
tion, a guardian spirit (a Manitou) appeared who promised to protect
them. "If an Indian has no Manitto," Zeisberger went on, "he considers
himself forsaken ... has no hope of any assistance and is small in his own
eyes. " 11
During adolescence some young men (and, in the Carolinas, young
women as well) went through a ceremony that involved the symbolic
death of childhood and rebirth as an adult. Among the Pokanokets of
New England, this rite of passage entailed ingestion of a noxious sub-
stance that caused vomiting. In Virginia this special initiation ritual, called
huskanaw~ involved the seclusion of young men for eighteen or twenty
weeks and use of a hallucinogenic drug intended to make them forget
"they ever have been Boys." In the Carolinas, a much larger number of
young people were subjected to huskanaw, which took place every year or
two, rather than the decade or two that might separate huskanaws in Vir-
ginia. Adolescents were confined in a darkened structure for five or six
weeks and were provided with little food. They were given hallucinatory
plants that led them to "make the most dismal and hellish Cries, and
Howlings, that ever humane Creatures express'd." After their confine-
ment ended, they were not to speak for a month. John Lawson, an English
visitor, was told that the ritual "hardens" the young "ever after to the Fa-
tigues of War, Hunting, and all manner of Hardship, which their way of
living exposes them to. Besides, they add, that it carries off those infirm
weak bodies that would have been only a Burden and Disgrace to their
Nation." Through these sets of rituals, youths' childish identity was shed
and they were reborn as adults. 12
Indian cultures served as a mirror that allowed Europeans to perceive
the distinctiveness of their own customs. Practices that Europeans had

considered to be God-given no longer appeared inevitable and inescap-
able. If, on the one hand, contact with the Indian peoples reinforced Euro-
pean ethnocentrism, it also freed a few European thinkers, such as Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, to contemplate alternative ways of bringing up the
young, ways that they regarded as freer and more natural.
Unlike Indian children, who experienced relative freedom in childhood,
or children in New England, where an ascetic moralism and stable, patri-
archal families, reinforced by the church and community, shaped their ex-
perience, family instability and indentured servitude structured childhood
in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Mary-
land. In New England, migration in family units, a healthful environment,
and a balanced sex ratio had encouraged the development of large, hierar-
chical families, in which patriarchal fathers used their control of land to
postpone the independence of sons well into their twenties or early thir-
ties. In the Chesapeake, in stark contrast, where a high mortality rate and
a sharply skewed sex ratio inhibited the formation of stable families, espe-
cially exploitative forms of servitude shaped the experience of young
white colonists. 13
In the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, male immigrants outnumbered
females by four to one. In consequence, young women tended to marry at
a very early age, generally in their mid or late teens, while males did not
marry until relatively late, often in their late twenties or early thirties. Life
in early Virginia and Maryland was deadly and chaotic. In this region's
endemic malarial environment, infant and child mortality rates were ex-
tremely high, two or even three times the rate in England and New Eng-
land. The high death rate stunted family size, limiting most parents to
four or five children, only two or three of whom survived to maturity. In
contrast to New England, where grandparenthood was common and pa-
triarchal fathers dominated decisions about their children's choice of vo-
cation and marriage partner, family life in the seventeenth-century Chesa-
peake was fragile and precarious. In one Virginia county, over 73 percent
of children lost at least one parent before they reached the age of twenty-
one, and a third lost both parents. Since adults lived only into their mid-
forties, contact between parents and their children was relatively brief. Be-
cause of the high death rate, the average marriage lasted just seven years,
and as a result the typical household in Virginia or Maryland in the seven-
teenth century contained orphans, half and stepbrothers and sisters of all
ages growing up under the care of an uncle, brother, or friend as a father
figure, or an aunt, an elder sister, or a stepmother as the female caretaker.
38 Huck's Raft
For many children, a father's death resulted in the breakup of the family.
Before remarrying, many widowed mothers pushed their daughters into
household servitude and their sons into apprenticeships. 14
To protect the interests of young heirs, communities took on the re-
sponsibilities of caring for children traditionally performed by the family.
Kin networks provided support, supervision, and education for orphaned
youth. Orphan courts were established to manage properties inherited by
youthful minors and to oversee the treatment of orphaned youths bound
out to labor until their majorities. That such orphan courts often felt com-
pelled to scrutinize the activities of guardians and masters suggests wide-
spread abuse of the system and of the children dependent on it. 15
Indentured servitude was the defining experience in the lives of immi-
grant youth. South of New England, two-thirds of all immigrants arrived
in various forms of unfreedom: as indentured servants, apprentices, con-
victs, or slaves. A prominent example was George Washington's name-
sake, a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses named George
Erskine, who served as Washington's mother's legal guardian. He had
been kidnapped as a boy in Wales, and sold as a servant in Virginia. Un-
like service in New England or the Old World, where servants were con-
sidered additional family members, servants in the Chesapeake were re-
garded as commodities or chattels who could be bought, sold, leased, and
cruelly punished. In a letter written to his parents in 1623, Richard
Frethorne, a young indentured servant in Virginia, described his miserable
circumstances. His diet consisted of nothing but peas and gruel, and as for
his clothing, "I have nothing at all-no, not a shirt to my back but two
rags (2), nor clothes but one poor suit, nor but one pair of shoes, but one
pair of stockings, but one cap, [and] but two bands [collars]." Indentures
in Virginia and Maryland were harsher and far longer than in England,
and more than half of all indentured servants died before their term of
service expired. Planters could sell a servant's contract (a practice that had
become illegal in England), restrict a servant's travel, whip servants, and
extend their term of service as a form of punishment. There were in-
stances in which servants received 500 lashes at a time and were beaten
with rakes. Female servants were especially vulnerable to sexual exploi-
tation, with a third becoming pregnant before their term of service
expired. 16
After 1640, as profits from tobacco cultivation fell, exploitation of the
labor of indentured servants intensified. Planters extended the term of ser-
vice from four to seven years, and master-servant conflict escalated. Rates
of suicide and crime rose, as did the number of runaways. In response,
Virginia required servants to carry a pass whenever they traveled in the
colony. Servant unrest culminated in Bacon's Rebellion, a power struggle

between Virginia's governor and his opponents. Arising out of warfare
against neighboring Indians in 1675, Bacon's Rebellion quickly escalated
into a wholesale uprising against Virginia's planter elite. During the tur-
moil, in which Jamestown was burned to the ground, both Virginia's gov-
ernor and Nathaniel Bacon, the rebellion's leader, promised freedom to
servants who joined their cause. Although most of the servants who
joined the rebellion were young and the governor's supporters were older,
Bacon's Rebellion was not perceived in generational terms. Age conscious-
ness was low in the Chesapeake because most young people lived outside
of family unit. Class, not age, defined status in the early Chesapeake re-
gion, and Bacon's Rebellion was interpreted as a class struggle. 17
Bacon's Rebellion hastened the transition away from indentured servi-
tude and its replacement with racial slavery. Even before the rebellion, the
supply of youthful indentured servants from England had fallen. The Eng-
lish Civil War of the 1640s depressed England's birthrate, while the Great
Fire of London in 1666 created a heightened demand for labor in the Eng-
lish capital. Meanwhile the founding of new colonies, such as Pennsylva-
nia, offered much more attractive alternatives to newcomers than migra-
tion to the Chesapeake. Between 1680 and 1720 more-stable family
patterns emerged among the Chesapeake's white inhabitants. With the de-
cline of indentured servitude, the sex ratio equalized. Life expectancy rose
as the number of native-born children, who had been exposed to New
World diseases during infancy, increased. Marriages lasted longer, parent-
child ties grew more stable, and kinship networks grew more extensive.
Families expanded to seven or eight c~ildren, with five or six of these nor-
mally reaching adulthood, twice the size achieved by seventeenth-century
families. Life expectancy rose to the mid-fifties for adult males, and
grandparenthood, a rarity in the seventeenth century, became a central
feature of family life by the mid-eighteenth century. Among the region's
planter elite, patriarchal family patterns slowly emerged, in which fathers
exercised control over their sons' careers and their children's choice of
marriage partners. Modeling itself after the English gentry, with its values
of leisured sociability, classical education, and gentility, the planter class
established families that combined a high degree of formality and rigid
sex roles with parental indulgence. 18
Compared with their counterparts in New England, planter families in
the eighteenth-century Chesapeake were much more relaxed about their
children's upbringing. There were few work responsibilities for sons under
the age of twelve or thirteen, and religious instruction, though advocated
by ministers and authors of childrearing manuals, appears to have been
40 Huck"'s Raft
largely nonexistent. In the absence of strong religious influences, parents

exhibited little concern about instilling a moral code in the young, nurtur-
ing their conscience, or preparing them for conversion. Since much of the
day-to-day care of planters' children was left in the hands of slaves, par-
ents could coddle and spoil their children. Especially toward the end of
the eighteenth century, relations within families grew more openly affec-
tionate. Parents increasingly displayed undisguised fondness for young
children, who were regarded as a source of pleasure and diversion. In
well-to-do families, infants and small children became the centerpiece of
family attention and affection, as childhood was perceived as a distinct
stage of life characterized by innocence and delightful "prattling."
Whereas the loss of a child in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centu-
ries had produced studied resignation, a death in the family after
midcentury tended to unleash powerful anxiety and sorrow among the
survivors. 19
Planters' sons attained independence at a very early age. Although they
remained at home until they married, usually in their mid-twenties, plant-
ers' sons enjoyed considerable freedom of movement. Usually by their
early teens, planters' sons had entered the adult world, serving as messen-
gers between plantations and participating in their fathers' business trips.
One traveler in the late eighteenth century commented: "A Virginia youth
of 15 years is already such a man as he will be at twice that age. At 15, his
father gives him a horse and a Negro, with which he riots about the coun-
try, attends every fox-hunt, horserace, and cock-fight, and does nothing
else whatever." Although parents and kin organized dances and parties
for their offspring, dances, drinking, hunting, sports, and courtship gener-
ally took place without close parental supervision. Premarital intercourse
seems to have been relatively common, and bridal pregnancy rates rose
steadily during the eighteenth century. Between 1749 and 1780 from one-
fourth to one-third of all brides in one Virginia parish were pregnant on
their wedding day. 20
Given the relative isolation of farms and plantations, sibling relations
were more intense in the Chesapeake than in New England, with young
women developing especially close attachments to their brothers. Never-
theless, sibling relations were less egalitarian than in the northern colo-
nies. In about four out of five planter families, the eldest son inherited the
home plantation, and younger sons received other land, often unim-
proved, in outlying ·areas. Daughters rarely inherited real property. On the
few occasions when they did receive landed portions-usually when their
were no sons or grandsons-the legacy often contained a reversion clause
returning the land at their death, if they died childless, to a nephew or

some other male relative. In their letters to their daughters, planter fathers
were much more likely than their northern counterparts to stress gender
hierarchy. A letter from Thomas Jefferson to his daughter, Martha,
typifies the idea that a woman needed to subordinate herself to her hus-
band. "The happiness of your life now depends on the continuing to
please a single person," he wrote. A woman's willingness to obey her hus-
band was "the keystone of the arch of matrimonial happiness." In fact
there was a growing emphasis on family lineage and family honor. South-
ern sons were much more likely than their northern counterparts to re-
ceive a surname as a first name and to marry among their kin. In one
Maryland county the percentage of marriages between cousins and other ·
blood relatives almost tripled from the first third of the eighteenth century
to the last third. An elaborate cousinry developed, which offered marital,
economic, and, at least among the elite, political opportunities. 21
Discipline in the Chesapeake colonies was directed toward slaves, not
white children. Compared with New England, the problems of adoles-
cence and the rising generation were rare topics of discussion, and there
was little outcry about youthful drinking and carousing. Discipline ap-
pears to have been very inconsistent in the Chesapeake region, with indul-
gence and rigorous displays of authority existing side by side. Many ob-
servers, especially stepfathers, complained bitterly about the effects of
premature independence, which they felt produced undisciplined, disso-
lute young people. One man described his future stepson as "a young
Wilde and dissulute person much given to Company Keeping," who was
"letting his estate fall to Ruine and decay for want of Management." But
such complaints resulted in few tangible efforts to discipline the young. 22
The direction of familial change in the Chesapeake colonies was the re-
verse of that found in New England. In the Chesapeake region, family life
grew more stable over time and, among the planter class, more hierarchi-
cal and patriarchal. Yet the prevalence of slavery produced patterns of
parenting decisively different from those in New England by diverting pa-
ternal discipline from children onto slaves. Meanwhile planter families
placed far less emphasis on shaping a child's conscience. Despite certain
trends toward uniformity over the eighteenth century, regional difference
remained a defining feature of colonial childhood. 23
No colonial children experienced a harsher childhood than those of Af-
rican descent. Put to work from a very early age, they suffered from ex-
hausting labor, high mortality rates, and frequent separation from family
members. The English alone imported 1.5 million Africans into their New
42 Huck's Raft
World colonies (including the West Indies) during the eighteenth century,
more than three times the number of white immigrants, including a
sharply increasing number of enslaved children. 24
The Dutch West India Company brought the first slaves to New Am-
sterdam in 1626, eleven young men from the Congo River basin. Since
few Europeans were willing to build the forts, houses, and roads of the
new colony, or to labor in the fields or run the mills, the Dutch relied
heavily on slave labor. By 1664, when the Dutch ceded New Amsterdam
to the British, 40 percent of the colony's population consisted of enslaved
Africans. While a few Dutch slaves owned land and businesses and at-
tended church services in the Dutch Reformed Church, most worked as
laborers, cargo loaders, construction workers, farmers, and sailors. In
1697 the English in New York allowed enslaved Africans-who now
made up about 20 percent of the population-to be buried in a desolate
six-acre plot of land outside Manhattan's town limits. 25
Studies of the remains present a harsh picture of childhood in bondage.
They reveal very high death rates for both male and female slaves in in-
fancy and between the ages of fifteen and nineteen. Eighteen percent of
the skeletons belong to children under the age of two, and most had died
within six months of birth. Altogether, more than 40 percent of the re-
mains belonged to children under the age of twelve. Skeletal evidence of
malnutrition was common among the enslaved children's remains. One
chronicle of slave life indicates that slaves usually ate two quarts of but-
termilk mixed with cornmeal and a little bread daily, and received meat
just once a month. As a result, anemia was rampant, and enslaved chil-
dren were extremely vulnerable to infectious disease, especially tuberculo-
sis, cholera, and influenza. Many of the children's skeletons reveal bone
breaks that did not heal. In some cases the children's backbones were
found jammed into the braincase, probably the result of a stumble or fall
while carrying a heavy load upon the head. In other cases, bones were
broken during fatal beatings. One child, known only as "Burial 39," died
around the age of six. Circular fractures of the neck bones and enlarged
muscle attachments in the arms suggest that she or he had to carry ex-
tremely heavy burdens. The child also shows evidence of cranial
synotosis, a premature closure of the sutures in the skull, possibly as are-
sult of carrying heavy loads on the head. Pitting around the eye orbits sug-
gests how much the child, already weakened from infections, mal-
nourishment, and anemia, suffered from this labor. Yet this child was
buried by people who cared deeply. Even though the child was stacked
with five other, bodies in a cedar coffin, the corpse was wrapped in white
linen fastened with a copper shroud pin. In a sign that those in bondage
retained strong cultural ties with Africa, the vast majority of bones were
buried in simple wooden coffins with their heads to the west. Like those
of their West African ancestors, their bodies were aligned so that the de-
ceased were facing in the direction of sunrise. 26
Otto bah Cugoano was about thirteen years old when he was kidnapped
from his home on the Gold Coast in present-day Ghana. He and some
eighteen or twenty other boys and girls were playing in a field "when sev-
eral great ruffians came upon us" with pistols and swords. Distraught af-
ter his abduction, young Ottobah refused to eat or drink for several days.
The horrors he saw and felt, he later wrote, "cannot well be described; I
saw many of my miserable countrymen chained two and two, some
handcuffed and some with their hands tied behind." When a slave ship ar-
rived off the coast to take them away to the New World, "it was a most
horrible scene; there was nothing to be heard but rattling of chains,
smacking of whips, and the groans and cries of our fellow men." Aboard
the vessel, there was an aborted attempt at a revolt. "Death," Ottobah
wrote, seemed "more preferable than life," and the boys and women, who
were not shackled, plotted to "burn and blow up" the ship "and to perish
all together in the flames." A woman who was sleeping with a member of
the ship's crew betrayed the scheme, resulting in a "cruel bloody scene. " 27
Although most enslaved Africans, especially in the fifteenth, sixteenth,
and seventeenth centuries, were in their late teens or early twenties, a
growing number were much younger. By the late eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, many were young children. They were acquired in a vari-
ety of ways. About half were captured during wars. Others were taken as
a result of judicial proceedings or repayment for debt. A fifteen-year-old
known only as Eve told the doctor aboard the slave ship Ruby that her fa-
ther had been accused of theft and was forced to give one of his daughters
as compensation. A significant number of enslaved African girls served as
collateral for a debt, working for a creditor until a debt was paid. If the
debt went unpaid, the child might be sold into slavery. That is what hap-
pened to Kagne, a ten-year-old from Sierra Leone who was taken on a
Portuguese slave ship to Cuba. Any child, regardless of status, was vulner-
able to enslavement. Twelve-year-old Salih Bilali, who was born around
1770 to a prominent family in Mali, had studied in an Islamic school be-
fore he was abducted in 1782 and taken to Georgia. 28
Initially most were enslaved along the coast of West or West Central Af-
rica, but over time captives were taken from farther inland, 500 or even
1,000 miles from the Atlantic. Torn from kin and their homeland, the
captives felt a deep despair. The Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who trav-
eled to Africa in the late eighteenth century, described one girl's misery
44 Huck-'s Raft
following her capture: "Never was 'a face of serenity more suddenly
changed into one of the deepest distress. The terror she manifested in hav-
ing ... the rope fastened round her neck, and the sorrow with which she
bade adieu to her companions, were truly affecting." Some enslaved chil-
dren, including Ottobah Cugoano, feared that the Europeans were canni-
bals who planned to eat them and believed that the wine that the Euro-
pean slave traders drank was blood. 29
Before being transported to the New World, the captives were placed in
pens guarded by dogs. One captive described the conditions they faced:
The slaves were all put into a pen and placed with our backs to the fire, and
ordered not to look about us, and to insure obedience, a man was placed in
front with a whip in his hand ready to strike the first who should dare to dis-
obey orders; another man then went round with a hot iron, and branded us
the same as they would the head of barrels or any other inanimate goods or
merchandise.
During the Middle Passage across the Atlantic, younger children were of-
ten left unfettered and allowed to spend more time on deck than older
captives. Still, much of their time was spent in the cramped, befouled
hold, usually in the crowded steerage section in the vessel's rear, where
they had little space to move. Generally each child had a space only five
feet by twelve to fourteen inches-a fraction of the space provided to con-
victs on prison ships or galleys. Rations were sparse: a pint of water a day
and two meals consisting of beans or mush. 30
Revolts erupted on about 10 percent of the slave voyages, and at least
one owner warned a captain not to put "too much confidence in the
Women nor Children lest they happen to be Instrumental to your being
surprised which might be fa tall." As many as 40 percent of the captives
died during the Middle Passage during the sixteenth century, 15 percent
during the seventeenth century, and between 5 and 10 percent in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries. The main cause of death was dehydra-
tion, although epidemic diseases sometimes took large numbers of lives on
individual voyages and many suffered from dysentery on arrival, leading
some ship captains to plug their anuses with molten lead so that potential
buyers would not see their bloody discharge. The cramped, oppressive
conditions on shipboard left many captives barely able to stand upright.
One child recalled on arriving in Charleston harbor: "I was not able to
stand. It was more than a week after I left the ship before I could
straighten my limbs. " 31
About 6 percent of the eleven to sixteen million Africans forcibly trans-
ported to the Americas were brought to what is now the United States.
Red!' White, and Black in Colonial America 45
Their labor played an indispensable role in the settlement and develop-

ment of the colonies, as they cleared land, constructed buildings, worked
as household servants, tended livestock, and raised foodstuff and staple
crops such as tobacco, rice, and indigo. Black slavery developed slowly in
colonial America. Though Africans were brought to South Carolina by
the Spanish as early as 1526 and imported into Virginia even before 1619,
the colonists initially relied primarily on white indentured servants and In-
dian captives as a source of labor. The status of the first blacks in the colo-
nies was uncertain. Some were permanently unfree; others were treated
like white indentured servants; and a few were assigned plots of land re-
mote from their master's homes and were allowed to raise tobacco and
other crops and purchase their own freedom. As early as the late 1630s,
however, the English colonists began to make a clear distinction between
the status of white servants and black slaves. In 1639 Maryland became
the first colony to state specifically that baptism as a Christian did not
make a slave a free person. Around the same time, the colonists broke
with English custom and traced slave status exclusively through the
mother. Any child born to a slave woman, regardless of the child's father,
was automatically classified as a slave. 32
During the colonial era it was extremely difficult for enslaved Africans
and their descendents to create and sustain families. About three of every
five Africans brought in chains to the colonies were male, and on individ-
ual farms and plantations the ratios were even more distorted, making it
hard for men to find a spouse. In the northern colonies, where many
slaves were domestic servants and were forced to live in attics or cellars, it
may have been equally difficult to marry. As late as 1730, surviving inven-
tories identify just 6 percent of the slaves in South Carolina as living in in-
dividual family units; and even in 1790 the figure was only 30 percent. In
the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, the figures were mod-
estly higher. A study of Prince George's County, Maryland, in 1776 con-
cluded that a fifth of the population on smaller farms lived in two-parent
families, a third in single-parent families, and 40 percent in no family at
all. Especially common in the Chesapeake colonies were "abroad" mar-
riages, where spouses lived on separate plantations and could visit family
members only with their masters' permission. One observer in the late
1790s reported that husbands sometimes borrowed horses and traveled
"ten to fourteen miles" to visit their families. 33
Not until the middle of the eighteenth century did sex ratios in Virginia
and Maryland equalize, allowing a majority of enslaved Africans and Af-
rican Americans to form families. Beginning in the 1720s, African Ameri-
cans in the Chesapeake region became the first slave population in the
46 Huck's Raft
New World able to reproduce their own numbers. By the 1760s, slaves in
North and South Carolina and Georgia were also able to reproduce natu-
rally. With a more equal sex ratio and greater immunities to New World
diseases, American-born slaves had a lower death rate, with a greater
number living into adulthood. Masters began to recognize that a "Great
Encrease in Children" was a source of wealth, and that slaves with fami-
lies were likely to be more productive workers. Thus, they encouraged
marriage and pregnancy among slaves. 34
Enslaved children, however, were extremely vulnerable to separation
from their parents. Children might be separated as a result of a debt, a
sale, an owner's death, or a planter's decision to move or to transfer slaves
among his various properties. One eighteenth-century record describes a
one-and-a-half-year-old slave named Stephen taken away from his
mother. He was one of thousands. Still, slave couples created de facto
marriages and sought to raise their children according to their own stan-
dards. As Johann Bolzius, a mid-eighteenth-century traveler, remarked,
enslaved African Americans "have to take as their wives or husbands
whomever their masters give them without ceremonies," but they "love
their families dearly and none runs away from the other." 35
In the eighteenth century it was not uncommon for slaveowners to sell
or remove adolescent slaves to a new plantation, since clearing land
required physical strength and stamina. During the 1750s Peyton
Randolph, a Virginia planter, moved a number of young slaves to a unit a
hundred miles from the home plantation. In the early nineteenth century,
as the nation expanded west in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase and
the War of 1812, about a million slaves, many of them young, were
moved from eastern parts of the South into the cotton kingdom of Ala-
bama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, as well as into Arkansas and
Missouri, disrupting parent-child ties. 36
The French immigrant J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur contended that
slaves "have no time, like us, tenderly to rear their helpless offspring, to
nurse them on their knees, to enjoy the delight of being parents. Their pa-
ternal fondness is embittered by considering, that if their children live,
they must live to be slaves like themselves." He was wrong. Charles Ball,
a slave in western Maryland, described a slave mother who carried her
child on her back while she toiled because she could not stand to hear the
child's cries if left alone. Ball also described a child's funeral, which incor-
porated African traditions. The "father buried with it, a small bow and
several arrows; a little bag of parched meal; a miniature canoe, about a
foot long, and a little paddle, (with which he said it would cross the ocean
to his own country) ... and a piece of white muslin, with several curious
and strange figures painted on it in blue and red, by which, he said, his re-
lations and countrymen would know the infant to be his son, and would
receive it accordingly, on its arrival amongst them." This ceremony under-
scores the depth of parent-child attachments. 37
Despite the threat of sale and separation, African-American parents in-
stilled a strong sense of family identity in their children. Fathers pur-
chased or made gifts for their children and passed down craft skills to
their sons. To sustain a sense of identity over time, slave parents com-
monly named their eldest son for fathers and paternal grandfathers. Noth-
ing better illustrates the strength of family ties than the number of run-
away ads that describe enslaved children running away to visit a father or
a mother. These include ads describing a ten-year-old, a twelve-year-old,
and a fourteen-year-old who fled to find their parents. The fragility of the
nuclear slave family gave special significance to the extended kinship
group. By the mid-eighteenth century, the enslaved had created dense net-
works of family and surrogate families. Slave children were encouraged to
refer to older slaves as "aunt" and "uncle" and to younger slaves as "sis-
ter" and "brother." Kin, including aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, cousins,
and in-laws, as well as friends, served as substitute parents in the event
of family separation. Together, the bonds of family and the extended
kin group sustained African-American children through the travails of
slavery. 38
The Middle Colonies, from New York southward to Delaware, were
more pluralistic than any other portion of colonial America. Embracing
the principle of religious toleration, this region attracted a diversity of im-
migrants who spoke a variety of languages. It was here, especially among
the Quakers, that patterns of childhood and family life emerged that an-
ticipated those that became common among the middle class during the
nineteenth century. 39
When George Mittelberger, a schoolteacher from the German duchy of
Wurttemberg who sailed to Pennsylvania in 1750, departed his ship, he
witnessed a shocking scene. To pay for their passage to the New World,
many German immigrants sold their children into service "like so many
head of cattle" so that "the parents can leave the ship free and unre-
strained." Children from five to fifteen years in age were bound out to ser-
vice until they were twenty-one. Frequently, Mittelberger observed, the
parents "do not know where and to what people their children are go-
ing." He wrote that it "often happens that such parents and children, af-
ter leaving the ship, do not see each other again for many years, perhaps
no more in all their lives. " 40
Alongside the indentured children that Mittelberger described, another
48 Huck's Raft

De Peyster Boy, with a

Dog, attributed to
Gerardus Duyckinck I,
1730-1734. Modeled on
an eighteenth-century Brit-
ish portrait, the boy's rigid
posture, outstretched arm,
, and calf turned to the side
emphasize his high social
status. Courtesy of the
New-York Historical Soci-
ety, New York City.
pattern of childhood arose in the Middle Colonies, decisively different

from those in New England and the Chesapeake. Especially pronounced
among the Quakers, this family pattern was characterized by unusually
intense emotional bonding between parents and children, indulgent
childrearing, and an acceptance by parents of early youthful independ-
ence. In the Middle Colonies, most families lived in small nuclear house-
holds isolated from extended kin and free from the community controls
found in New England. It was within these private, inward-turning house-
holds that new patterns of childhood were pioneered. Today we custom-
arily distinguish between two-parent families, single-parent families, and
extended families in which two-parent or single-parent families are aug-
mented by other kin. Three centuries ago, very different conceptions of
families prevailed. The gentry family-a unit based on lineage and owner-
ship of a landed estate, passed down from generation to generation
through the eldest son-proved difficult to sustain in the American colo-
nies. Even the great landed families of New York and the southern colo-
nies abandoned primogeniture and provided large inheritances to every
one of their children. A second kind of family-the farm or artisanal
household-was a unit of production that included not only a husband,

wife, and their children but also the servants, apprentices, laborers, and
other dependents. Common in New England, this was a patriarchal unit
in which proprietors and masters exercised direct command over their de-
pendents' labor. A third familial model-the clan-consisted of a group of
interrelated families that lived in separate households but interacted so-
cially and economically. Especially in seventeenth-century New England,
it was not uncommon for the sons and daughters of one family to marry
the children of another. Indeed, whole communities in early New England
often consisted of a small number of intermarried families. 41
It was during the eighteenth century in the Middle Colonies that that a
fourth kind of family emerged: the private family, consisting of a father,
mother, and children bound together by ties of affection. Not simply a
unit of production or a vehicle for transmitting property or craft skills, the
private family was an emotional entity and an instrument for shaping
children's character. Within the private family, space was restructured;
particular areas were set aside for cooking, eating, sitting at ease, and
sleeping. The shift toward a privatized family was also apparent in burial
practices; rarely did inhabitants of the Middle Colonies bury their dead
alongside extended family members. Language, too, reflected the empha-
sis on the private family. Settlers in the Middle Colonies rejected the cus-
tom of referring to distant relatives as aunts, uncles, and cousins. Indeed,
the very spelling of the family's surname varied from one household to
another. 42
Favorable circumstances, such as the sheer abundance of arable land,
encouraged the development of private families in the Middle Colonies, as
did religion. Much more than the Puritans, the Quakers and other reli-
gious sectarians in the Middle Colonies sought to keep children isolated
from the corruptions of the outside world. The Quakers, in particular,
were convinced that the best way to promote children's religious salvation
was to maintain "holy conversation" with their parents, who had already
learned religious truth. More than any earlier group of English immi-
grants, the Quakers extolled a family life centered on the affection and
companionship between a husband and wife and the love, care, and emo-
tional support of their children. Unlike the Puritans, the Quakers empha-
sized equality over hierarchy, gentle guidance over strict discipline, and
early autonomy for children. Precisely because the Quaker Meeting exer-
cised strong communal control over marriage, parents could afford to be
more indulgent. Nor did Quaker fathers govern children through the in-
heritance system. They generally gave their sons outright gifts of land at
the time of marriage without any restrictions or stipulations. Sons of the
first settlers received an average of over 200 acres of land, and daughters
received the equivalent in cash and goods. 43
The steady influx of new immigrant families into the Middle Colonies,
which slowed the development of dense extended family networks, also
encouraged the growth of private families. Unlike New England, where
immigration declined after 1640, or the Chesapeake, where most new ar-
rivals came as forced laborers, either as indentured servants or as slaves,
the Middle Colonies attracted many non-English immigrants, particularly
Germans and Scots-Irish. Many of the first immigrants arrived as single
young men or teenagers and usually lived with a master's family. Begin-
ning in the 1730s, however, poor economic conditions in Germany, Scot-
land, and Ireland led to the migration of entire families, usually consisting
of a young married couple with one or two children or an older couple
and their teenaged children. Even poor tenant families maintained sepa-
rate households. Private families were especially common in the growing
towns and seaports, like Philadelphia, where few journeymen resided in
the homes of their masters and few laboring families took extended kin or
nankin into their homes. 44
In contrast to New England, where paternal control of land allowed fa-
thers to exert a powerful influence on their sons' lives well into their twen-
ties or even thirties, in the Middle Colonies a large proportion of sons
moved away from their parents in their teenage years. Even Quaker par-
ents found it difficult to ensure that their children married within the faith
and stayed close by. During the mid-eighteenth century, there was a sharp
increase in marriages "out of union" as sons and daughters increasingly
took non-Quaker mates. The Middle Colonies served as the prototype for
the nineteenth-century middle-class family. In their emphasis on familial
privacy and an affectionate relationship between parents and children, as
well as the early adoption of birth control, which was practiced among
Quaker families during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, families
in the Middle Colonies pioneered practices and attitudes that would sub-
sequently spread across the middle class. 45
During the second half of the eighteenth century, regional variations in
childhood narrowed as increasing geographic mobility, new employment
opportunities, evangelical religious revivals, and military conflict contrib-
uted to greater youthful autonomy. Dwindling land supplies in New Eng-
land and soil exhaustion of the tobacco lands of the Tidewater and
Piedmont encouraged many sons to leave family farms for western lands
or fresh starts in towns and cities. As a result, boys got their start in life
considerably earlier than before and had more occupational choices.
Meanwhile the emotional evangelical religious revivals sweeping through
the colonies challenged older forms of authority and allowed youths to as-
sert an independent religious identity much earlier. The Great Awakening
of the 1730s and 1740s had pronounced effects on the young, encourag-
ing new childrearing practices, reducing the age of conversion, and pro-
moting a new code of values among many. Evangelical families placed a
heavy emphasis on suppressing children's willfulness, shaping their con-
science, and disciplining their passions to prepare them for the experience
of religious rebirth. The age of religious conversion fell sharply, often into
the teen years, and young people in increasing numbers decided inde-
pendently which churches to join. Especially in the Chesapeake colonies,
the religious revivals led many teens to embrace a set of values emphasiz-
ing self-restraint, including restraints on drinking and other forms of
amusement. 46
Young men's participation in military combat dramatically altered the
experience of adolescent white males. Warfare was common during the
mid-eighteenth century. Roughly 30 to 40 percent of adolescent males
saw action in warfare in the period from 1740 to 1781, against either the
Indians, the French, or the British. Wars drew youth away from their par-
ents' homes and accelerated the process by which young people attained
independence and adult status. 47
Even before the Revolution, a new ideology highly critical of patriar-
chal authority had begun to circulate throughout the colonies. Much
more widely read than political discourses such as John Locke's Second
Treatise on Liberty were childrearing tracts, like his Essay Concerning
Human Understanding and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. In widely
read works of fiction by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richard-
son, Laurence Sterne, and numerous lesser-known writers, the patriarchal
family came under attack as unduly repressive and incompatible with the
spirit of the times. Readers learned that parental example was more effec-
tive than coercion in governing children; that the ideal parent sought to
cultivate children's natural talents and abilities through love; and that
young people had a right to choose an occupation and a spouse free from
parental intrusion. 48
The growing emphasis on youthful independence represented a striking
reversal in public attitudes. During the seventeenth century most young
colonists, regardless of region and social class, had lived in a state of de-
pendency upon their parents or upon a master and a mistress. Through
their control over dowries, inheritance, landed property, and access to
training and apprenticeships, fathers and masters determined when young
people were able to leave home, marry, and achieve the independence of
full adulthood. It is not an accident that the very terms used to describe
52 Huck~s Raft
young people-boy and girl-were words also applied to servants, re-

gardless of age, since subordination and dependency characterized both
the condition of service and the condition of childhood and youth. Noth-
ing symbolized this emphasis on domestic hierarchy better than the prac-
tice among young people of uncovering their heads and bowing in the
presence of their parents. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, adult
control over young people's access to economic independence had dimin-
ished, and young people were exercising greater autonomy over their lei-
sure activities and courtship practices. A flood of advice books, philo-
sophical treatises, novels, plays, and poems condemned prolonged
submission to paternal rule and defended youthful freedom as a natural
right. This antipatriarchal, antiauthoritarian ideology helped to sensitize
the colonists to arbitrary British colonial authority. In defending the colo-
nists' struggle for independence from British colonial rule, the radical
pamphleteer Thomas Paine drew a pointed analogy to the importance of
granting children early autonomy. "Nothing hurts the affections both of
parents and children so much," he wrote in The Crisis in 1778, "as living
too closely connected, and keeping up the distinction too long. " 49
chapter three
Sons and Daughters of Liberty
NOT ALL of those who participated in the American Revolu-

tion were grownups. Sybil Luddington, the "female Paul Revere," was
just sixteen years old when she roused the local militia in 1777 in an un-
successful attempt to save Danbury, Connecticut, from a British attack.
The eldest of eight children and the daughter of a New York militia
officer, she rode more than forty miles from her home in Fredericksburg,
New York, to spread the alert. 1
Joseph Plumb Martin was only fifteen when he joined the Continental
Army in 1776. Poor, without prospects for acquiring land, he enlisted as a
substitute for a local Connecticut gentlemen, with visions of martial glory
in his head. During seven years of service as a private, he experienced all
the Revolution's hardships, including the terrible winter at Valley Forge,
Pennsylvania, where 2,500 soldiers, a quarter of the Continental Army,
died of disease, exposure, and malnutrition. He slept on the wet ground
without a blanket, marched shirtless and barefoot, and went days without
food except "a little black birch bark." At the battles of Brooklyn, Har-
lem Heights, White Plains, and Yorktown, he dug trenches, dragged can-
nons, and faced musket balls and bayonets. He also vented his "spleen at
our country and government ... [and] officers" who refused to support
and supply the army properly. 2
James Forten, also fifteen, served as a powder handler on Stephen
Decatur's twenty-two-gun privateer, Royal Louis. A free black whose
great-grandfather had been one of the first slaves in Pennsylvania to pur-
chase his freedom, Forten had attended a school led by the early Quaker
54 Huck's Raft
abolitionist Anthony Benezet. In a naval engagement with the British ship

Lawrence, he was the only survivor at his gun station. On his next voy-
age, after the British captured his ship, Forten expected to be sold into
slavery in the West Indies, but the British captain's son befriended him
and persuaded his father to offer the American free passage to England.
"No, No!" young Forten replied, "I am here a prisoner for the liberties of
my country; I never, NEVER, shall prove a traitor to her interests." The
British captain then consigned Forten to the prison ship Jersey anchored
in New York harbor, where about 11,000 sailors died of disease and mal-
nutrition during three years of the Revolutionary War. Forten spent seven
months on the ship before he was set free in a prisoner exchange. 3
The American Revolution had far-reaching effects on children's lives.
Many, like Luddington, Martin, and Forten, were drawn into the conflict.
The war disrupted thousands of families, greatly increasing the number of
widows, single-parent households, and orphans and forcing the new
states to institute radically new approaches to the care of dependent chil-
dren. The Revolution also ended indentured servitude, weakened appren-
ticeship, and contributed to the emergence of more companionate and
egalitarian relations within individual households. Most important, it
popularized an antiauthoritarian ideology highly critical of patriarchal
authority, social hierarchy, and deference. In 1799 the British moralist
Hannah More described the radical implications of the ideas popularized
during the Age of Revolution. "The rights of man have been discussed till
we are somewhat wearied with the discussion," she wrote. "To these have
been opposed, as the next stage in the process of illumination, the rights
of women. It follows, according to the natural progression of human
things, that the next influx of that irradiation which our enlighteners are
pouring in upon us, will illuminate the world with grave descants on the
rights of youth, the rights of children, and the rights of babies." As she
understood, the language of liberty and equality could not be confined
solely to politics; it inevitably also influenced ideas and behavior in the
private realm of family. 4
The disruptions of the revolutionary era provoked a sharp reaction. In
the immediate postrevolutionary period, childhood, for the first time in
American history, became the object of political discourse. Convinced that
the stability of the new republic depended on a virtuous citizenry, the
postrevolutionary generation called for more intensive styles of child-
rearing and more prolonged and systematic forms of education. Primary
responsibility for instilling republican virtues in children rested with
mothers, who required better education to meet this high responsibility.
Sons and Daughters of Liberty 55
Thus maternal nurture had to be supplemented with an expanded system

of schooling that would not simply transmit skills and knowledge but also
shape children's moral character. 5
The popular image of youth during the era of the American Revolution
was formed by the historical novel Johnny Tremain. Written by Esther
Forbes, and published in 1943 in the midst of World War II, it tells the
story of a fictional fourteen-year-old Boston orphan, a talented but arro-
gant silversmith's apprentice whose life is turned upside down when he in-
jures his hand. In time he becomes a messenger boy on horseback for the
Sons of Liberty and meets many of the nation's founders. He later be-
comes a spy, takes part in the Boston Tea Party, and struggles with loss at
the battles of Lexington and Concord. For younger readers, Johnny
Tremain offers a succinct overview of the events leading up to the Decla-
ration of Independence, and a compelling story of a young boy who
learned valuable lessons about pride and overcoming obstacles. Yet the
novel only hints at the complex role of young people in the American
Revolution.
In a famous 1818 letter John Adams wrote: "The Revolution was ef-
fected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and
Hearts of the People." He proceeded to invoke an analogy repeatedly
voiced by patriots: that the colonists, like children, had rights that had to
be respected, and that Britain, like an abusive parent, had violated those
rights through the exercise of arbitrary authority. As Adams put it:
The People of America had been educated in an habitual Affection for Eng-
land as their Mother-Country; and while they thought her a kind and tender
Parent (erroneously enough, however, for she never was such a Mother,) no
Affection could be more sincere. But when they found her a cruel Beldam
[older woman], willing, like Lady Macbeth to "dash their Brains out," it is
no Wonder if their filial Affections ceased and were changed into Indignation
and horror.
The American Revolution was both the product of and catalyst for far-
reaching shifts in ideas, values, and behavior. One of the most significant
shifts involved a growing rejection of patriarchal rule. 6
In describing imperial authority and colonial obligations, American pa-
triots and loyalists invoked metaphors relating to childhood and parent-
hood. Loyalists said that the colonists, like children, owed gratitude and
loyalty to the mother country and risked severe chastisement if they re-
volted. The patriots, in contrast, used the language of nurture and matu-
ration and called upon the colonies to break free from dependence and
subordination. As one patriot proudly declared, "The day of independent
manhood has arrived." Both Whigs and Tories likened the British empire
to a family, but they drew very different conclusions from this analogy.
Invoking the ideas of John Locke and the Scottish philosopher Francis
Hutcheson, the patriots argued that parliamentary authority, like a par-
ent's powers over children, was limited and temporary, and that the colo-
nists, no less than children, had a right to independence when they
achieved maturity or if their parents abused their power. Tories, framing
their argument in more traditional patriarchal terms, argued that force
alone could restore respect for British authority, much as a parent might
use corporal punishment to correct a rebellious or disobedient child. 7
The parent-child analogy provided the language through which the pa-
triots defended their rights. In the wake of the Boston Massacre of 1770,
in which British soldiers fired on a protesting mob and killed five men and
boys, a patriot drew upon the Lockean notion that fatherhood was a trust
to explain why the colonists rightfully protested violations of their rights:
"We swore allegiance to him as a King, not as a Tyrant-as a Protector,
not as a Destroyer-as a Father, not as a Murderer." More than a mere
metaphor, the parent-child analogy gave expression to the patriots' sensi-
tivity to dependence and degradation, evident in the restrictions that Brit-
ain placed on colonial manufactures and the taxes it imposed on colonial
commerce. In The Crisis, Thomas Paine asserted the colonies' right to in-
dependence. "To know whether it be the interest of this continent to be
independent," he declared, "we need only to ask this simple question: Is it
the interest of a man to be a boy all his life?" Meanwhile British officials
and loyalists also drew upon the parent-child analogy. One Englishman,
writing in 1768, likened the colonists to an unruly boy, "growing more
imperious, haughty, nay insolent every day." Loyalists, in stark contrast to
the patriots, dwelt on the colonists' deficiencies and weaknesses and their
need for protection from a powerful mother country. 8
The patriots' sensitivity to colonial subjection was connected to a
broader cultural movement away from patriarchal ideas about deference.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, a combination of pressures-
demographic, economic, political, and religious-had eroded earlier as-
sumptions about patriarchal authority. The revolutionary struggle for na-
tional independence was, in part, fueled by a desire for personal auton-
omy, shared by many young men and women in the American colonies.
The social history of mid-eighteenth-century America presents a paradox.
In certain respects, colonial society was becoming more like English soci-
ety. The power of royal governors was increasing, social distinctions were
hardening, lawyers were paying closer attention to English law, and a
more distinct social and political American elite was emerging as a result
of the expansion of Atlantic commerce, the growth of tobacco and rice
economies, and the sale of land. Yet the eighteenth century also witnessed
growing claims of "English liberties" against all forms of subservience, in-
cluding independence from the arbitrary authority of fathers. Opposition
to Parliamentary measures restricting colonial trade and imposing taxes
on colonial commerce acquired added resonance because the colonists
were already highly sensitive to any exercise of authority that they consid-
BLOCKED IMAGE AT THE'

In this 1784 engraving, children and youth participate in the 1774 tarring and feathering
of John Malcom, a British customs official in Boston. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
58 Huck~s Raft
ered arbitrary, demeaning, or constraining of their opportunities to exer-

cise free choice in how to live and work. 9
Even before the end of the seventeenth century, patriarchal authority
had come under fire. Defenders of royal authority, such as Thomas
Hobbes and Sir Robert Filmer, compared the relationship between a king
and his subjects to that between a patriarchal father and his children.
Filmer, the Crown's most extreme advocate, argued that monarchical au-
thority received divine sanction in the Fifth Commandment, which en-
joined children to honor their father, and that the English monarchy de-
rived its right to rule from God's grant of authority to Adam. Advocates
of parliamentary supremacy and constitutional monarchy, who sought to
impose limits on royal power, such as John Locke, rejected Filmer's anal-
ogy between the family and the polity. In his Two Treatises on Govern-
ment~ Locke repudiated Filmer's belief in the absolute, God-given author-
ity of monarchs and argued that government was a human institution that
citizens had the right to modify. Against Filmer's emphasis on patriarchal
authority, Locke upheld a theory of natural rights, arguing that the laws
of nature endow individuals with certain inalienable rights. Locke con-
tended that a king's power was limited by natural law; that his powers
were given to him as a trust for the good of the people; that legitimate
government rests on the consent of the governed; and that if a ruler
breaks that trust, his powers can be taken away. Whereas Filmer had em-
phasized the commandment to honor one's father, Locke pointed out that
the biblical commandment was to "honor thy father and thy mother." Re-
jecting the idea that authority had to be strictly hierarchical, Locke sug-
gested that if familial authority could be shared, then governmental power
could be shared between the Crown and Parliament. Locke's childrearing
philosophy was connected to his political theories. Rejecting the patriar-
chal emphasis on subordination, Locke instead stressed that childhood
was a temporary stage of human development. Parental authority was a
trust and duty that rested on children's temporary incapacities and weak-
nesses. The primary purpose of parenthood was not to impose obedience,
but rather to nurture children's powers of reason in order to prepare them
to become self-governing adults. 10
Today Locke is best known for his emphasis on children's malleability
and his description of their nature as a blank slate. By this he meant that
children's socialization could not be left to nature, but required close adult
supervision and a carefully considered plan. A crusty bachelor, Locke
offered numerous suggestions for producing independent but self-
disciplined children, ranging from daily footbaths in cold water to the use
of fables rather than adult books in instruction. Instead of relying on cor-
poral punishment, he favored psychological manipulation of a child's

"Love of Credit" and "shame of doing amiss." Ideas somewhat similar to
Locke's were widely disseminated in eighteenth-century British America.
The Scottish moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson, whose ideas were
highly influential in American colleges, emphasized that children had
rights that needed to be respected. A child was not simply parents' prop-
erty, but "a rational agent with rights valid against the parents; tho' they
are the natural tutors or curators and have a right to direct the actions,
and manage the goods of the child, for its benefit, during its want of
proper knowledge." 11
These new ideas about children were not mere abstractions; they were
evident in everyday behavior. One sign of change involved a shift in nam-
ing patterns. In the seventeenth century, naming practices emphasized the
continuity of a lineage. Parents customarily named older sons and daugh-
ters for themselves or grandparents and gave younger children the names
of recently deceased siblings. By the mid-eighteenth century, names were
increasingly individualized; fewer children were named for grandparents
or for brothers or sisters who had recently died. Meanwhile an increasing
number of mothers and fathers bestowed middle names on their children,
signifying greater appreciation of children's individuality. A similar shift
in sensibility was apparent in the tendency of wealthy parents to buy toys
and books for children, on the ground that they would help educate their
offspring rather than assuming that children's innate qualities would
emerge and suffice. At the same time, rituals of subordination that had
symbolized paternal authority and familial hierarchy gradually disap-
peared. By the mid-eighteenth century, children were no longer expected
to bow before their parents, ask their blessings each morning, stand dur-
ing meals, or doff their hats before them. 12
By the second half of the eighteenth century, respect for hierarchy was
becoming difficult to sustain. Colleges had long been among the colonies'
most hierarchal institutions. Before enrolling (usually around the age of
sixteen), students were required to transcribe the institution's rules. De-
portment and language symbolized rank and status. At Yale, freshmen
had to remove their hats as a sign of respect whenever they encountered a
superior. On stairways or in narrow hallways, freshmen must "stop and
give way, leaving the most convenient side." Students were required to ad-
dress tutors and graduates as "sir" and masters of arts as "Mr." (the new
term that served as a substitute for "master"). College customs reinforced
the emphasis on hierarchy. "Fagging" required freshman to perform er-
rands for more senior students. This obligation to serve upper classmen
led one freshman to exclaim: "A Soph[omore] is absolute and despotic as
60 Huck"'s Raft
the great Mogul." Meanwhile college authorities were extremely sensitive

to disobedience, slights, improper demeanor, and acts of contempt. Ap-
pearing without a hat, making an unseemly gesture, or even signing one's
name in "an odd and ludicrous manner" could result in expulsion. 13
In the middle of the eighteenth century, resistance to arbitrary college
rules mounted. The first student rebellions on colonial college campuses
took place in the 1740s. One of the earliest occurred at Yale College in
1745, where fierce religious struggles had grown out of the religious reviv-
als of the Great Awakening. When two brothers were expelled, their class-
mates protested by publishing John Locke's Essay on Toleration. In 1759
a letter writer sought to explain the outbreak of student rebellions at Yale
College. "Can you wonder, Sir," he wrote to a member of the Connecticut
Assembly, "that there has been of late Years, such loud Murmuring and
Complaints of the Scholars against the College and Government . . . so
frequent Tumults and insurrections? ... Oppression will make a wise
man mad, how much more a Company of unwise and giddy Youth." The
cause of student rebelliousness seemed self-evident: it was a reaction
against arbitrary authority and denial of personalliberty. 14
Over the next few years, disorders erupted at the College of Rhode Is-
land (later Brown University), King's College (Columbia), Dartmouth
College, the College of New Jersey (Princeton), Harvard College, and the
College of William and Mary. Some of the issues that sparked revolts,
such as quality of food at Harvard, seem trivial, and the worst violence in-
volved stoning the college president's house. Nevertheless, there was little
doubt in the eyes of contemporary observers that these protests reflected a
fundamental shift in social values. In 1772 John Witherspoon, the presi-
dent of the College of New Jersey, offered his explanation: "the spirit of
liberty" had led students into "outrage and sedition." Similar sentiments
were voiced at Harvard. In 1769 the college secretary observed that
the students "have imbibed the Spirit of the Times. Their declamations
and forensic disputes breathe the Spirit of Liberty. This has always been
encouraged, but they have sometimes wrought themselves up to such a
pitch of Enthusiasm it has been difficult to keep them within due
bounds. " 15
Charity Clarke, a young New York woman whose son, Clement Clarke
Moore, wrote the celebrated poem The Night before Christmas, was one
of many young people politicized by the events leading up to the Revolu-
tion. In letters to a cousin, a London lawyer, written between 1768 and
1774, she expressed the growing impulse for independence found among
many young patriots. In 1768, a month after British soldiers landed in
Boston to quell disorders produced by the imposition of customs duties

on imports, including tea, she warned her cousin that such acts would
only generate resistance. "When there is the least show of oppression or
invading of liberty," she wrote, "you may depend on our working our-
selves to the utmost of our power." The next year she reiterated her warn-
ing and announced that she would join "a fighting army of Amazones"
who would resist British oppression. "If you English folks won't give us
the liberty we ask," she declared, "I will try to gather a number of ladies
armed with spinning wheels who shall all learn to weave & keep sheep,
and will retire beyond the reach of arbitrary power." In 1774, a year after
the Boston Tea Party, she informed her cousin to expect open resistance if
British authorities continued to attempt to centralize authority over the
colonies. "Though this body is not clad with silken garments," she wrote,
"these limbs are armed with strength. The soul is fortified by Virtue, and
the love of Liberty is cherished within this Bosom." 16
It is not accidental that early participants in the Revolutionary cause
called themselves "sons" and "daughters" of liberty. The phrase "Sons of
Liberty" grew out of the debate on the Stamp Act in Parliament in 1765.
Charles Townshend, speaking in support of the act, spoke contemptu-
ously of the American colonists as being "children planted by our care,
nourished up by our indulgence ... and protected by our arms." Isaac
Barre, a member of Parliament and friend of the colonists, responded to
this condescending remark with outrage, declaring that the Americans
were not children but "Sons of Liberty." Sons of Liberty chapters formed
in Boston and New York early in 1765. Growing out of the Committees
of Correspondence that had been established in Massachusetts, New
York, and Rhode Island in 1763 and 1764 to organize public opinion and
coordinate patriotic actions against Britain, the Sons of Liberty organiza-
tions sought to prevent enforcement of the Stamp Act of 1765. 17
Young people played an active role in the ferment leading up to the
Revolution. Teenage apprentices engaged in many mob actions that pre-
ceded the outbreak of war. Girls demonstrated their patriotism by partici-
pating in campaigns against the importation of British goods and in the
production of homespun cloth. In an entry in her diary in February 1772,
Anna Green Winslow, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Boston, described
herself as "a daughter of liberty." "I chuse to wear as much of our own
manufactory as pocible," she added. In 1770 in Boston, more than a hun-
dred "young ladies" signed an agreement to refrain from buying or con-
suming imported tea. Betsy Foote, a Connecticut farm girl, was one of
many young women politicized by Parliament's actions. She recorded that
62 Huck"'s Raft
after mending, spinning, milking, and performing various other chores,

she carded two pounds of wood and "felt Nationly. " 18
Resistance to British imperial authority escalated rapidly during the
1760s. There were at least 150 riots in the thirteen colonies between 1765
and 1769, and the mobs included many teenage apprentices as well as
youthful laborers. "Unruly" apprentices played a key role in the events
that culminated in the Boston Massacre, one of the pivotal events on the
road to revolution. The train of events began when a sixteen-year-old bar-
ber's apprentice named Edward Garrick insulted Hugh White, a soldier of
the 29th Regiment on sentry duty in front of Boston's Customs House.
The sentry gave the apprentice a knock on the ear with his musket and a
jab with his bayonet. The boy ran off and later returned with a sizable
and unruly crowd, consisting chiefly of boys and youths. After someone
rang the bells in a nearby church, drawing more people into the street, the
sentry found himself confronting an angry mob. He stood his ground and
called for the main guard. Six men, led by a corporal, responded, with
guns unloaded but with fixed bayonets. They were soon joined by the
officer on duty, twenty-year-old Captain John Preston.
The crowd soon swelled to almost 400 people, who began pelting the
soldiers with snowballs and chunks of ice. The soldiers loaded their guns.
Instead of drawing back, the crowd dared the soldiers to fire their weap-
ons, reportedly saying: "Come on you rascals, you bloody backs, you lob-
ster scoundrels, fire if you dare, God damn you, fire and be damned, we
know you dare not." The soldiers fired, killing three people outright and
mortally wounding two others. Six others were wounded but survived.
Among those killed were two teenaged apprentices. 19
As the conflict between Britain and the patriots grew violent, boys in
their early and mid-teens played active roles. James Collins, eleven years
old in 1775, served as an informal scout, a "collector of news," who pro-
vided information on the location of bands of loyalists. Israel Trask, who
was ten in 1775, served in the Continental Army as a messenger and cook
alongside his father. Boys as young as twelve served as drummers, spies,
and even as soldiers. Others served as sailors on privateers-privately
owned ships commissioned to attack British shipping. Although the Con-
tinental Congress set sixteen as the minimum age of service, the heavy de-
mand for soldiers led recruiting agents to admit boys below that age. With
half the population younger than sixteen, teenagers offered a valuable
pool of potential recruits. In a society without reliable birth records, a boy
could simply lie about his age or find an adult who would testify that he
was sixteen or older. About 10 percent of New Jersey's soldiers were
younger than eighteen; 5 percent of Virginia's troops were fourteen or
fifteen. Privateers actively sought recruits among disgruntled teenaged ap-

prentices. An officer of the Massachusetts ship Protector sang:
All you that have bad masters,

And cannot get your due;
Come, come my brave boys,
And join with our ship's crew.
Boys who were attending school or working as apprentices or assisting on

their parents' farm suddenly found themselves thrust into positions of re-
sponsibility. Some enlisted to escape their harsh masters or the drudgery
of farm work. Others, like Joseph Plumb Martin, were inspired by fanta-
sies of military glory. 20
The popular image of American revolutionaries is the citizen soldier
modeled on the Minutemen who fought at Lexington and Concord. In
fact, apart from officers, most long-term soldiers consisted of the poor,
the young, the marginal, and the unfree. For many poor boys, the chief in-
ducement to serve was monetary. Lacking property of their own, many
were attracted to service by the promise of cash bounties or land. In
Maryland the bounty for enlisting was equal to a quarter of the taxable
property of the typical recruit. Peer pressure induced some to enlist.
Ebenezer Fox was just twelve years old when the Revolution began. Ala-
borer on a neighbor's farm, he recalled that "almost all of the conversa-
tion that came to my ears related to the injustice of England and the tyr-
anny of government." The talk proved contagious. "It is perfectly
natural," he wrote, "that the spirit of insubordination that prevailed
should spread among the younger members of the community." He and a
friend applied "the doctrines that we daily heard, in relation to the op-
pression of the mother country, to our own circumstances; and thought
we were more oppressed than our fathers were ... and that the time was
come, when I should liberate myself from the thralldom of others, and set
up a government of my own." On the very night that Paul Revere rode
to Concord and Lexington, Fox and a friend fled their apprenticeships to
enlist. 21
Teenaged boys from poorer families were regarded as more expendable
than older brothers or more prosperous adults. By 1777 each town had an
enlistment quota to fill, and many turned to the poor and the young as a
pool of substitutes. The Connecticut Courant reported that "the inhabi-
tants were busily employed in recruiting the children and servants of their
neighbors, and forbidding their own to engage." Daniel Granger was thir-
teen years old when he arrived at the camp of the Continental Army near
Boston in November 1775 in search of an older brother who was sick.
64 Huck~s Raft
Daniel wound up sending his brother home and taking his place. When
Ebenezer Fox's master was called to serve in the local militia, the boy was
chosen to serve as his substitute. 22
A number of boy soldiers such as Joseph Plumb Martin recorded their
experiences in their memoirs. They told of marching across miles of coun-
tryside without shoes, of lacking blankets and uniforms, of subsisting on
horsemeat. They described fear, battlefield bravery, and, in many cases,
disillusionment that stemmed from a lack of public support. "Great men
get great praise, little men, nothing. But it always was so and always will
be," Martin observed. During the Revolution the young assumed adult re-
sponsibilities at an early age. The conflict intensified and accelerated the
erosion of social hierarchy and deference. In the northern and middle
states the Revolution sharply reduced indentured servitude, precisely be-
cause many servants fought in the war and thereby won their freedom. By
increasing the mobility of the young and encouraging early independence
in thought and action, the Revolution was a powerful destabilizing
force. 23
The Revolution brought many children face-to-face with danger and
death. Susan Lyttle was just ten years old in August 1777, about a month
before the Continental Army defeated a British Army at the Battle of
Saratoga in upstate New York. She and her sister Rebecca went outside
their farmhouse after dinner to pull flax that could be spun into thread.
"A Hessian soldier with his gun and military clothes came along," Susan
later recalled. "He was deserting from the British at Fort Edward and
finding his way through the country to New England. Eager to get all the
news from him we could, we followed him-conversing with him." At
that moment, Susan "heard a crackling among the bushes. A party of To-
ries were secreted east of the road. They rushed upon the Hessian, took
away his gun, pinioned him, and said they should take him back to the
camp to be shot for deserting. They also said we girls had got to go with
them, too, for we were traitors showing a deserter the road for him to
escape." Fortunately for Susan and her sister, a neighbor secured their
release. 24
Girls as well as boys got caught up in the conflict. Observed Abigail Ad-
ams: "At every house Women & children making Cartridges, running
Bullets, making Wallets, baking Biscuit, crying & bemoaning & at the
same time animating their Husbands & Sons to fight for their Liberties,
tho' not knowing whether they should ever see them again." As armies
occupied towns and cities, hungry troops foraged for supplies in the coun-
tryside, and bitter partisan conflict pitted loyalist against patriot militias,
families were displaced from their homes and suffered severe property
losses. Noncombatants also suffered from spiraling prices and a depreci-

ating currency. More than 25,000 people died in the conflict-over one
percent of the entire population-making the Revolution the second cost-
liest war in U.S. history relative to the size of the population. The traumas
of war-its unpredictability, disruptions, and upheavals-inflicted a heavy
physical and emotional toll on many families and their children. 25
Civilians quickly found their lives turned upside down. To sustain its
35,000-man army, the British resorted to foraging-taking food, wood,
livestock, and other provisions from the civilian population. Soldiers
chopped down trees and pulled down fences for firewood. Despite some
efforts by British officers to suppress the practice, red-coated soldiers also
looted civilians' personal possessions, seizing spinning wheels and wag-
ons, bond certificates, and "Wearing Appararel, Money, Furniture and
Bedding." The situation was particularly bad in Connecticut and New
Jersey, where officers found it difficult to maintain discipline over their
troops. There were documented reports of rape of married women, single
women, and teenaged girls. In one of the most horrendous incidents, in
December 1776 British troops broke into Abigail Palmer's farmhouse and
raped the thirteen-year-old three times. Over the next three days they re-
turned and repeatedly raped the girl; "the said Soldiers" also "Ravished"
two neighbors, fifteen-year-old Elisabeth Cain and her sister Sarah, and
forced them to go to a British encampment, where they were repeatedly
raped until a British officer released the girls. Although British troops ap-
pear to have done greater damage to civilian property than did the patri-
ots, American soldiers, too, were frequently forced to live off the land and
forage for supplies. General Washington permitted scouting parties to
seize enemy stores and supplies, and in 1778 he reported that his soldiers
looted "cloth, linens, rib bands, some cases of knives and forks, [and] wine
glasses," which they pretended was "the property of tories. " 26
The war produced massive numbers of refugees, many of whom were
children. Sieges, retreats, and occupations left many women and children
displaced and homeless. During the British occupation of Boston, the ci-
vilian population fell from about 15,000 to around 5,500 as people fled to
the surrounding countryside. Those who remained were "totally destitute
of vegetables, flour and fresh provisions" and were "obliged to feed on
horse flesh." When the British seized Newport, Rhode Island, in Decem-
ber 1776, half the city's population fled to the countryside. During Brit-
ain's seven-year occupation of New York, Staten Island, and Long Island,
thousands of loyalists sought asylum. Between 1776 and 1781 New York
City's population increased fivefold, excluding the city's 10,000 British
regulars. The results were severe housing and food shortages and out-
66 Huck's Raft
breaks of such diseases as smallpox, dysentery, and typhus. "Whole Fam-

ilies, once in Affluence, are reduced to Wretchedness and Beggary," the
New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury reported in 1777. 27
Since soldiers were paid sporadically during the Revolution, wives had
to support their families on their own. The Revolution produced young
widows on an unprecedented scale, leaving tens of thousands of children
fatherless. Although no accurate statistics exist, it seems plausible that as
many as 8,000 to 12,000 women lost their husbands during the conflict,
the equivalent of a million women today. These widows faced enormous
financial difficulties, and their appeals for relief frequently mention in-
fants and young children. Unlike earlier widows, most of whom were
middle-aged or older and had grown children to support them, these wid-
ows were much younger and were the sole providers for their families.
Traditionally widows had relied for support upon their adult children and
upon property that was legally reserved for them. Under the principle of
dower, a widow had a legal right to one third of her husband's property.
But a system that worked for older women proved inadequate for youn-
ger widows with dependent young children. Restrictive dower laws made
it difficult for widows to sell their property. Even widows of officers, who
were supposed to receive half of their husband's pay for seven years,
found it difficult to secure a pension. 28
Unable to rely on traditional methods of support, these women and
their children turned to poor relief, which was quickly overwhelmed by
the burden. Many widows' children were auctioned off to families that
would accept the lowest amount of money, a system known as public
vendue. To deal with the burgeoning numbers of poor people, the nation's
first benevolent societies arose, establishing sewing rooms for needy
women. Towns also experimented with institutionalized systems of sup-
port, including almshouses and workhouses. In Philadelphia one resident
in six accepted public relief in 1783; in New York the figure was one fam-
ily in twelve. Not until1818 did Congress enact pensions for Revolution-
ary War veterans and their widows. 29
In addition to creating unprecedented problems of child welfare, the
Revolution also challenged the institution of slavery. In a letter written in
1774, when she was around the age of twenty, Phillis Wheatley, the first
published African-American poet, illustrated how the colonial struggle
against British imperial authority raised fundamental questions about
freedom, equality, and natural rights. "In every human breast," she wrote,
"God has implanted a Principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impa-
tient of Oppression and pants for Deliverance." Born most likely in the
Senegambia region of West Africa, Wheatley was purchased by the wife of
a wealthy Boston tailor when she was no more than eight. Educated in
Latin, literature, and philosophy, she published her first poem when she
was about seventeen. The next year she was taken to a Boston courthouse
where a group of prominent citizens met to determine whether she had
written a collection of poems that she and her master claimed as hers. Af-
ter she answered a series of questions about classical mythology and Eng-
lish literature, the company agreed that she had indeed written the poems.
At the time Phillis Wheatley arrived in Boston in 1761, there were
about 230,000 African Americans in the British colonies and 16,000
slaves in New England. The Revolution enabled thousands of enslaved
women and children to secure their freedom. In some cases they were
emancipated by their owners, like Wheatley, who was freed after her mis-
tress's death in 1774. But in many instances wartime disruptions allowed
mothers and their children to flee from bondage. During the Revolution a
third of the slaves in Georgia and a quarter in South Carolina freed them-
selves by running away. Equally important, the Revolution politicized
many African Americans, as it did fifteen-year-old James Forten, who
would draw on the revolutionary ideology to denounce the contradiction
between American ideals of freedom and equality and the base reality of
slavery.
Young African Americans played a crucial role on both sides of the
conflict. African-American soldiers fought for the patriot cause in every
major battle of the Revolution, including the engagements at Concord
and Lexington. Cuff Smith, who was born into slavery in Rhode Island in
1769, enlisted in the Continental army in his early teens. Festus Smith, a
free black born in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1763, also enlisted in the
Continental Army as a young teenager, one of 5,000 African Americans
who served in the army or navy during the Revolution. Other young Afri-
can Americans were convinced that the prospects for freedom were
greater on the loyalist side. Even before Virginia's royal governor, Lord
Dunmore, issued a proclamation promising freedom to slaves who
reached the king's forces, a young New Jersey slave named Titus escaped
from his owner, a Quaker who had ignored his sect's prohibitions against
owning slaves. Renaming himself Colonel Tye, he led guerrilla raids in
northern New Jersey. Boston King, a teenage apprentice carpenter in
Charleston, South Carolina, who had been born around 1760, was one of
3,000 African Americans whom the British transported to Nova Scotia
following the war, where he served as a preacher among the black loyal-
ist refugees. For him, as for thousands of other African-American youth,
the Revolution offered a moment of fluidity when they were able to liber-
ate themselves from bondage. Revolutionary ferment temporarily dis-
68 Huck's Raft
rupted established patterns of authority, including hierarchies based on

race and age.
Many of the nation's founders, who later drafted the Constitution and
led the government through its earliest years, were remarkably young
when the Revolution began. Alexander Hamilton was only fifteen when
friends in the West Indies sent him to New York for schooling. At nine-
teen, while still a college student, he became a noted pamphleteer; at
twenty-one he served with distinction as a captain in an artillery company,
and at twenty-two he joined Washington's general staff as a lieutenant-
colonel. In 1775 Henry Knox, who became one of Washington's most
trusted officers, was twenty-five; James Madison, twenty-four; and James
Monroe, just seventeen. To be sure, many of the leading revolutionaries
were not young. In 1775 Jefferson was thirty-two, Washington was forty-
three, and Franklin sixty-nine. Yet even these men had got their start at a
remarkably early age. Franklin, who had become a printer's apprentice at
twelve and run away from Boston to Philadelphia at seventeen, became
part owner of a print shop when he was twenty-two. Washington, whose
formal education lasted just seven or eight years, lost his father when he
was eleven. At seventeen he was appointed official surveyor for Culpeper
County, Virginia; and by twenty he helped manage his family's plantation
and was commissioned as a major in the militia. Jefferson, who lost both
parents by the time he was fourteen, entered the College of William and
Mary at sixteen. These were young men assuming major adult responsi-
bilities. 30
Surprisingly few of these men were born into gentility. Hamilton had
been born out of wedlock in the West Indies, "the bastard brat of a Scotch
pedlar," in John Adams' cutting words. Others, too, had risen far above
their father's status. Adams himself was a farmer's son whose two broth-
ers followed in their father's footsteps. Despite growing up in a hierarchi-
cal, deferential society in which the theological doctrine of predestination
had strong support, these men developed an intense desire for fame. The
mid-eighteenth century provided many opportunities for teenagers of am-
bition and talent to leave a mark on the world. By the time he was four-
teen, Hamilton yearned to escape from his "gov'ling" position as a mer-
chant's clerk, and had taken General James Wolfe, who had defeated a
French army at the Plains of Abraham in the Seven Years' War, as his
model. These ambitious young men developed an almost obsessive con-
cern with honor and reputation. Correct facial expression, posture, and
speech were essential parts of the rituals of deference and the code of gen-
tlemanly behavior. As a schoolboy Washington copied rules of behavior in
an exercise book that helped him learn how to behave like a gentleman.
Years earlier Franklin had also laid out rules for self-improvement, culmi-
nating in the admonition to imitate Jesus and Socrates. For young men
whose fathers had died or who, like Franklin, had broken away from their
fathers, the lessons of gentility were largely self-taught. The fact that they
were self-made gentlemen may have made them especially sensitive to
matters of public honor. 31
In what was still a patronage society, there were a variety of avenues for
rapid advancement. In Washington's case, a stepsibling provided a con-
nection to the influential and wealthy Fairfax family, and his stepbrother's
death allowed him to inherit Mount Vernon. For Hamilton, the patronage
of wealthy benefactors permitted him to leave the British West Indies and
attend college in New York City. In retrospect, it is striking how many
characteristics the founders shared. Most were born between 1730 and
1760. Few were born into wealthy, aristocratic families. Many of the
younger revolutionary leaders served their political apprenticeship in the
resistance movement of the 1770s. And many of the founders were
the first members of their family to attend college. It was there that many
were politicized and introduced to republican ideas.
In the years preceding the Revolution, the colonies' nine colleges under-
went a profound transformation. Their curricula and libraries no longer
focused exclusively on theology; instead the students encountered a "cur-
riculum of independence," reflecting the naturalistic and humanistic em-
phases of enlightened thought. The colleges' courses of study increasingly
included moral philosophy and ancient and modern history, including the
history of the Greek and Roman republics. Students were also exposed to
English common law, Enlightenment rationalism, and economic liberal-
ism. A disproportionate number of future leaders attended Princeton, a
"nursery for republicanism." There they read the republican writings of
classical Greece and Rome, Enlightenment notions of the social contract
and of natural rights, and the views of defenders of the Commonwealth
experiment of Oliver Cromwell. Through these readings students were in-
troduced to basic republican principles, including the superiority of a re-
publican form of government to anarchy, democracy, or oligarchy; and
the notion that a republic's health depended upon civic virtue and was
threatened by corruption. Meanwhile, outside classes, students formed
militias and established literary societies in which they debated politically
charged issues. 32
It appears that the revolutionaries were indeed younger than their loyal-
ist counterparts. In provincial Massachusetts, rebel leaders averaged four-
teen years younger than loyalist leaders. Many of these young men were
convinced that their desires for land, families, and career were thwarted
70 Huck's Raft

Liberty in the Form of the Goddess of Youth: Giving Support to the Bald Eagle, by
Edward Savage, 1796. During the late eighteenth century, youth became a potent symbol
of innovation and social change, a notion captured in this image, in which liberty is per-
sonified as a young woman. Courtesy of the Worcester (Massachusetts) Art Museum.
by "a government monopolized by elderly men who insisted on deference

but proved unwilling to fulfill its obligations." A revolution was essential
if they were to fulfill their ambitions. 33
With the end of the Revolution, many of the nation's founders worried
deeply about the survival of republican government, a fear intensified by
the spread of a democratic, egalitarian ideology that seemed to threaten
all forms of authority. Mercy Otis Warren, who was active in the patriot
cause and later became one of the first historians of the Revolution, lik-
ened the newly independent states to a restless youth "prematurely eman-
cipated from the authority of a parent." The only contemporary examples
of republican government-the Netherlands and Switzerland-were far
smaller geographically than the United States and even then had proven
unstable. Deeply fearful of untethered liberty, many ministers and moral-
ists turned to maternal nurture and education, regarding them as the key
to the success of the new nation's experiment with self-government. Only
by implanting a capacity for self-discipline, a respect for authority, and a
deep regard for civic virtue in the depths of the individual personality
could republican society survive. 34
The newfound significance of children for the future republic put pri-
mary responsibility for securing the social order and preserving republi-
can values on two institutions: the home and the school. Dr. Benjamin
Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, expressed the convic-
tion that social stability depended on proper parenting and schooling in
particularly ringing' terms. "Mothers and school-masters plant the seeds
of nearly all the good and evil which exist in our world," he declared. The
conspicuous emphasis on the maternal role in shaping children's character
was novel. Although mothers had always been responsible for the day-to-
day care of young children, earlier childrearing literature had been ad-
dressed to fathers as the ultimate caregivers. As late as 1776 the Scottish
Presbyterian president of Princeton, John Witherspoon, had begun his
volume of childrearing advice with "Dear Sir." But after the Revolution,
ministers and other moralists invested mothers with primary responsibil-
ity for inculcating republican values and virtue in the young and teaching
them to be responsible and patriotic citizens, reflecting a growing recogni-
tion of young children's vulnerability, malleability, and educability. The
emerging view was that children's character was shaped in their earliest
years, when the young were mostly in their mother's care. Samuel Harri-
son Smith made this point bluntly, insisting that the "virtue or the vice of
an individual, the happiness or the misery of a family, the glory or the in-
famy of a nation, have had their sources in the cradle, over which the prej-
udices of a nurse or a mother have presided. " 35
72 Huck's Raft
Proper childrearing alone, Noah Webster insisted, would not be enough

to "make good citizens." Improved schooling was also necessary, and the
main purpose of education was, in the words of Benjamin Rush, to "con-
vert men into republican machines." "Knowledge and virtue are the basis
and life of a Republic," Samuel Stillman remarked; "therefore, the educa-
tion of children and youth, should be the first object of the attention of
government, and of every class of citizens." Since women were going to
play a crucial role in forming children's character, it was essential that
they be properly prepared for this task. Noah Webster was one of many
who argued that in constructing an educational system the "female sex"
must "claim no inconsiderable share of our attention." No longer would
it be sufficient for female education to be essentially ornamental. Along-
side the study of music, drawing, and dancing, young women needed to
study subjects that would enable them as mothers to "implant in the ten-
der mind such sentiments of virtue, propriety, and dignity as are suited to
the freedom of our governments." This meant that their education had to
include such subjects "history, philosophy, poetry, and the numerous
moral essays." 36
By weakening earlier forms of patriarchal authority, the Revolution en-
hanced the importance of childrearing and education in ensuring social
stability. But the erosion of earlier forms of dependence also left young
people, especially young women, more vulnerable to exploitation. Su-
sanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, published in Britain in 1791, was not
only the first novel set during the American Revolution; it was also the
most popular novel in the United States before Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin. Subtitled A Tale of Truth, the novel drew upon the
experiences of Charlotte Stanley, the fifteen-year-old daughter of an Eng-
lish clergyman. In 1774 a British army officer, Colonel John Montressor,
persuaded Charlotte to elope with him to America, and subsequently im-
pregnated and abandoned her. She died at the age of nineteen and was
buried in New York's Trinity churchyard. A cautionary tale intended to
warn young women to protect their chastity and beware of the methods
unscrupulous men used to seduce them, Charlotte Temple was the first of
many sentimental novels of the early national period to advocate im-
proved female education to help young women resist seduction. Such ad-
monitions were not confined to works of fict~on. During the years imme-
diately following the Revolution there were real-life episodes that sent a
similar message. One of the best-known involved Nancy Shippen, the
upper-class daughter of a Philadelphia doctor.
Born in 1763, Nancy received the kind of ornamental education in
singing, dancing, and fine embroidery that was common among Philadel-
phia's elite. In her mid-teens a number of young men began to court her.
Her favorite was a young French diplomat, but he had only modest eco-
nomic prospects. Her father, William Shippen, pressured her to marry
William Beekman Livingston, a member of one of New York's richest
families. Nancy gave in to her father's wishes, prompting the young
Frenchman to ask: "For what reason in this free country [must] a lady ...
be married to a man whom she dislikes?" Her marriage was unhappy
from the start. Within months she fled with her newborn baby to her par-
ents' house. She later described herself as "a wretched slave-doom'd to
be the wife of a Tyrant I hate." In 1791 her husband won a divorce on
grounds of her desertion. The lessons of this unhappy experience were
self-evident. The author of "A Friend to Family Government" insisted
that parents had "no right to act the part of tyrants toward their chil-
dren," because "the imbecility of youth and infancy does not take away
their natural rights." Nancy deserved the right to choose her mate. 37
The Revolution's most lasting legacy was an ideology emphasizing inde-
pendence and equal rights-an ideology that was embraced by a growing
number of young women as well as young men. Before the Revolution
few parents raised their children to be independent adults. Benjamin
Franklin underscored this point in ironic terms. He condemned his daugh-
ter for wanting to marry a poor but ambitious young printer-someone
just like himself. Eliza Wilkinson, a young South Carolina woman who
had run her father's plantation during the war and was responsible for
demonstrating that indigo could be successfully cultivated in the colony,
gave pointed expression to the emphasis on female independence that be-
came a key component of the revolutionary ideology: "I won't have it
thought that because we are the weaker sex as to bodily strength ... we
are capable of nothing more than minding the dairy, visiting the poultry
houses, and all such domestic concerns; our thoughts can soar aloft, we
can form conceptions of things of higher natures; and we have as just a
sense of honor, glory, and great actions as these 'Lords of Creation. "' 38
The Revolution unleashed a new stress on female education. In 1798
Judith Sargent Murray, in a pioneering essay on the equality of the sexes,
wrote: "Female academies are everywhere establishing and right pleasant
is the appellation to my ear ... I may be accused of enthusiasm; but such
is my confidence in THE SEX that I expect to see our young women form-
ing a new era in female history." At the beginning of the eighteenth cen-
tury, about two-thirds of adult women in the colonies were unable to
write their own name. By the early nineteenth century, two-thirds could.
Young women celebrated the new educational opportunities open to them
in ringing terms. In 1797, while attending school in Massachusetts, Eliza
74 Huck's Raft
Southgate wrote to her parents in Maine: "to think that here I may drink
freely of the fountain of knowledge ... writing, reading, and ciphering ...
French and Dancing ... Geometry ... Geography. " 39
At the end of the eighteenth century an elderly congressman, Paine
Wingate, expressed dismay at the changes in private life that had occurred
as a result of the Revolution. He was displeased at seeing "parents & chil-
dren ... as familiar as brothers & sisters." "Fathers, mothers, sons &
daughters, young & old, all mix together, & talk & joke alike so that you
cannot discover any distinction made or any respect shewn to one more
than to another. I am not for keeping up a great distance between Parents
& Children, but there is a difference between staring & stark mad." An
older world of deference and patriarchal authority had truly been turned
upside down. 40
chapter four
Inventing the Middle-Class Child
LDAY THE PASSAGE through childhood and adolescence is

highly predictable. Children enter preschool around the age of three or
four, enroll in kindergarten at five and first grade at six, enter middle
school around eleven or twelve, and graduate from high school at seven-
teen or eighteen. Two centuries ago the sequence was far less regularized
or uniform. Unpredictability was the hallmark of growing up, even for the
children of professionals and merchants. By the time Herman Melville
had reached the age of twelve, his father, an importer of French dry
goods, had gone bankrupt, become insane, and died. Forced to withdraw
from school, the author of Moby-Dick worked in his uncle's bank, as a
clerk in a hat store, as a teacher, a farm laborer, and a cabin boy on a
whaling ship-all before the age of twenty. As for Ralph Waldo Emerson,
before he was fifteen, he had experienced the death of his brother and his
father and had entered Harvard College. And Harriet Beecher Stowe, one
of eleven brothers and sisters, was just five years old when her mother
died and twelve when she left home to live with an older sister. 1
Idyllic images of childhood past, in which young people moved
seamlessly toward adulthood, are invariably misleading, but for no period
is this more mistaken than the early nineteenth century, when the path-
ways to adulthood were exceedingly uncertain. Especially in their teens,
many young people underwent a protracted period of doubt, restlessness,
and confusion. New opportunities for employment, schooling, and reli-
gious choice were opening up, and rates of geographic mobility were
sharply rising, with growing numbers of teenage girls and boys leaving
rural farms and villages for larger towns and expanding cities. At few
times in American history was adolescence filled with greater uncertainty. 2
It was, however, at this very moment that modern childhood was in-
vented. Confined at first to the urban middle class, and initially limited to
the years from birth to thirteen or fourteen, modern childhood was to be
free from labor and devoted to schooling. Urban middle-class mothers as-
sumed exclusive responsibility for childrearing, which they exercised with
a growing self-consciousness and sense of responsibility. Middle-class par-
ents sheltered their children from the workplace and economic struggles
and kept them in school and the family home longer than in the past. As a
result, the stages of middle-class childhood were more carefully delin-
eated, and passage through these stages became more predictable.
This new ideal of a sheltered childhood drew upon several sources.
These included the enlightened conception of a child as a blank slate wait-
ing to be shaped by parental and environmental influences; the liberal
Protestant ideal that granted children innocent souls and assigned parents
the task of turning their redeemable, docile wills toward God; and the
evangelical stress on childhood development as proceeding through a se-
ries of stages, much as religious conversion required passage through such
stages as sanctification and justification. The newest and most influential
conception of childhood was a Romantic vision, which viewed children as
symbols of purity, spontaneity, and emotional expressiveness, who were
free from adult inhibitions and thus required parents who would ensure
that their innocence was not corrupted. At a moment when the pre-
industrial social order was breaking down, Romantics idealized children
as emblems of wholeness and intuitive thinking. Bronson Alcott described
the child as "a Type of Divinity." "Herein," he wrote, "is our nature yet
despoiled of none of its glory." Rather than a condition to be passed
through as rapidly as possible, childhood was a stage of life to be enjoyed
and prolonged. Childhood became life's formative stage, a highly plastic
period when character and habits were shaped for good or ill. In the poet
William Wordsworth's famous line, "The child is father of the man." Bi-
ographies and autobiographies gave expression to childhood's heightened
significance. Instead of beginning with a genealogy, these volumes now
began with an account of a subject's childhood. 3
The Romantic conception of childhood drew on many earlier sources,
from such obscure seventeenth-century English writers as Henry Vaughan
and John Earle, who had stressed children's spiritual insight; to John
Locke's emphasis on children's malleability; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's
notion that children had not yet been corrupted by social artifice and
should be encouraged to express their inner selves. The influence of the
Inventing the Middle-Class Child 77
Romantic conception of childhood was apparent in art and parental be-

havior. Stiffly posed portraits depicting children as miniature adults gave
way to more romantic renderings emphasizing children's playfulness and
innocence. A profusion of toys and books intended specifically for chil- ,
dren highlighted the new focus on, and respect for, the child. 4
The Romantic vision of childhood encouraged the notion that children
needed to be sheltered from adult realities, such as death, profanity, and
sexuality, in order to preserve their childish innocence. Ironically, it con-
tributed to a moral severity toward actual children who failed to live up
to the Romantic ideal. The new stress on children's fragility, malleability,
and corruptibility resulted in the establishment and construction of an ar-
ray of institutions for children, from Sunday schools and public schools to
orphanages, houses of refuge, reform schools, and children's hospitals.
Mandatory school attendance laws and child labor restrictions were pre-
mised on the idea that children were fragile, innocent, and vulnerable
creatures who needed adults' paternalistic protection. Overall, childhood
dependency was prolonged, childrearing became a more intensive and
self-conscious activity, and schooling was extended. Instead of moving
back and forth from their parental home and work experiences outside
the home, children resided continuously under the family roof into their
late teens or early twenties. 5
A sharp reduction in the birthrate provided the essential foundation for
a new kind of upbringing. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the
typical American mother bore seven to ten children. She had her first child
in her early twenties, and gave birth every two years or so until meno-
pause. At the end of the eighteenth century the Quakers became the first
group to deliberately limit births, and by 1810 the impulse to control
births spread to all parts of the country. Relying primarily upon absti-
nence, coitus interruptus, and the rhythm method, supplemented by abor-
tion (usually chemically induced or a result of trauma to the uterus), ·par-
ents dramatically reduced the birthrate. The average number of births fell
to five per family in 1850 and to just three in 1900. At first mothers in-
creased the spacing between births, but by midcentury parents concen-
trated childbirths in the early years of marriage. Women who married in
the 1820s and 1830s had their last child three or four years earlier than
those who wed in the 1780s and 1790s. 6
In part, the reduced birthrate was a matter of economics, as middle-
class parents regarded their children not as sources of labor but as "social
capital" requiring substantial investments of time and resources. As a re-
sult of rapid changes in manufacturing, transport, and marketing, adults
could no longer rely on passing on their farms or shops or imparting their
78 Huck's Raft
skills to their children, who increasingly needed formal education. No

longer economic assets who could be put productively to work, children
required expensive investments in the form of education. But the drop in
the birthrate also reflected new cultural ideas, including a rejection of the
view that women were chattels who should devote their adult lives to an
endless cycle of pregnancy and childbirth, and the belief that children
needed more care and attention than in the past.
The reduction in the birthrate was not a response to falling death rates.
Despite the introduction of smallpox inoculations, which virtually elimi-
nated this disease among the middle and upper classes by the 1820s, in-
fant and child death rates remained high. In urban areas mortality rates

The Westwood Children, by Joshua Johnson, ca. 1807. These boys were the sons of a
Baltimore stagecoach builder. Despite differences in their age and size, their dress and hair
styles are identical, reflecting the view that children share the same distinctive nature.
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Letitia Grace McCurdy,

by Joshua Johnson, ca.
1800-1802. The four- or
five-year-old girl depicted
in this painting wears an
unadorned gown, which
the postrevolutionary gen-
eration associated with re-
publican ideals of simplic-
ity, liberty, and a classless
society. Courtesy of the
Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco.
actually rose as a result of crowded conditions, poor sanitation, and pol-

luted drinking water. The declining birthrate drastically altered family re-
lations. The colonial family had encompassed a wide age range, with the
oldest children two decades older than their youngest siblings. But with
fewer children in the family, siblings were closer in age. More than in the
past, families were clearly divided into two generations/
Nowhere was the Romantic conception of childhood more starkly evi-
dent than in infancy. Artistic renderings of colonial infants had been any-
thing but childlike. With their rigid posture and elongated bodies, infants
appeared stiff and doll-like. In part, this reflected the artists' desire to see
in infants such adultlike characteristics as an upright posture and a ma-
ture bearing. But these images also reflected the way that infants were
dressed. Infant girls wore corsets (made out of quilted or corded cloth
rather than bones) or had a rod along their spine, giving them a firmer,
more mature posture. In the early nineteenth century, in line with a new
association of children with sexless innocence, infant girls and boys were
dressed identically in loose muslin frocks and gowns, usually white in
color, and wore similar androgynous hairstyles. 8
In contrast to seventeenth-century Puritans, who had regarded young
children as dangerously unformed, even animalistic, in their inability to
speak and their impulse to crawl, the postrevolutionary generation viewed
childhood in much more positive terms. Even orthodox Calvinists and
evangelical Protestants came to consider early childhood a stage of life
valuable in itself. Childish behavior was increasingly accepted and even
admired. Almira Phelps, an educator of girls, wrote in her journal in 1835
that she had not intended to allow her son "to learn to creep." But when
her child was between six and nine months, she changed her mind after
deciding that crawling was "nature's way." Meanwhile, novels began to
include examples of baby talk and treated it as endearing. 9
The growing appreciation· of young children as special beings with their
own distinct needs and nature was readily apparent in the appearance of
separate nurseries in middle-class homes. Loose, naturally fitting garments
replaced the heavy clothing intended to restrict children's movement, es-
pecially thumb-sucking. Furniture specifically designed for children,
painted in pastel colors and decorated with pictures of animals or figures
from nursery rhymes, began to be widely produced. In colonial America,
young children had been left by themselves or held on a lap during meals,
but in the early nineteenth century high chairs allowed children to sit in a
position of prominence at the family dinner table.
Following the War of 1812, pious mothers in the Northeast formed ma-
ternal associations to discuss such topics as the most effective methods for
taming children's willfulness. At the same time, the nation's first extensive
body of advice literature on childrearing appeared, built around the theme
of shaping children's character. A growing sense of cultural nationalism
convinced Americans that they needed advice that addressed distinctly
American problems. Written by ministers, physicians, educators, and
other moralists from the Northeast, this literature taught that children
were infinitely plastic creatures who needed to be shaped into responsible
citizens. A key theme in their writings was that the success of America's
republican experiment depended on the ability of parents to implant
checks and balances in the moral character of future generations. Instead
of regarding children as inherently vicious, the advice literature taught
that young children were as pliable as fresh clay and that their well-being
depended on developing strong moral character, regular habits, and a ca-
pacity for self-control during the first five or six years of life. In a journal
in which she recorded her children's early lives, Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick,
the wife of a New York attorney, gave pointed expression to this new
view: "At this period, which seems at first glance a blank, impressions are
received which are the germs of future character." 10
As the birthrate fell and such domestic tasks as fabricating cloth, mak-
ing soap, and brewing beer moved outside the household, middle-class
mothers gave their children more concentrated and exclusive care. Inten-
sive mothering became an essential part of middle-class women's self-
image and altered the preferred methods of discipline. A paternal empha-
sis on physical punishment gave way to a new stress on the efficacy of
maternal tenderness, patience, and love. Nevertheless, middle-class child-
rearing practices spanned a wide spectrum closely linked to theological
beliefs. At one pole were religious liberals, who embraced the Romantic
emphasis on children's innocence and promise. Lydia Maria Child, a
Boston Unitarian, gave pointed expression to this view when she wrote in
her Mother's Book that children "come to us from heaven with their ·souls
full of innocence and peace ... under the influence of angels." The liberal
style of childrearing emphasized the power of maternal influence-" meth-
ods silent and imperceptible," involving moral suasion, tenderness, and
guilt. Liberal mothers rejected corporal punishment in favor of psycholog-
ical techniques intended to cultivate a child's capacity for self-control.
These techniques-which included confining children in their room, re-
voking their privileges, and threatening to withdraw love from them-
were intended to strengthen a child's conscience. 11
At the spectrum's other end were orthodox Calvinists and evangelicals,
who stressed the importance of breaking a child's sinful will and instilling
respect for divinely instituted authority. Evangelical households empha-
sized early piety, early discipline, and eliciting an early conversion experi-
ence. Religious instruction began in infancy. Martha Laurens Ramsay, a
member of a wealthy and influential Charleston, South Carolina, family,
taught her children from an early age about "their miserable and cor-
rupted state by nature; that they were born into a world of sin and mis-
ery-surrounded with temptations-without the possibility of salvation,
but by the grace of God." Around the age of eight or nine, evangelical
children were expected to enter a stage of religious anxiety, lying awake at
night, pondering salvation and death. A contributor to the Mother's Mag-
azine stressed the importance of submission to parental and divine au-
thority: "Every mother is solemnly bound to form in her children the
habit of unconditional and instant submission to her authority, as a means
of leading them to exercise the same disposition in view of the authority
and law of God." In order to instill obedience, evangelical parents were
much more willing to use physical punishment than were theological lib-
erals. However, by the 1830s a belief in children's sinful nature had
eroded, and even evangelical families emphasized moral suasion by ap-
pealing to children's affections rather than to their intellect or to fear. 12
82 Huck~s Raft
For all their differences, evangelicals and nonevangelicals shared a con-

viction that the primary purpose of childrearing was to instill habits of
regularity and self-control through techniques emphasizing tenderness,
love, and patience. The ability to regulate and channel aggressive im-
pulses, including the ability to apply oneself steadily to a task and follow
a regular routine, was regarded as an essential ingredient for future suc-
cess. Parents reinforced childrearing lessons through a highly moralistic
children's literature. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, books cre-
ated specifically for children were limited to primers, catechisms, gram-
mar books, and battledores, folded sheets of stiff paper containing letters
and simple phonics lessons. In 1856 Samuel Goodrich, who wrote and ed-
ited 157 books for children, observed: "It is difficult now ... to conceive
of the poverty of books suited to children" during his youth, "except for
the New England Primer ... and some rhymes, embellished with hideous
[wood]cuts of Adam's Fall, in which 'we sinned all."' 13
Throughout the postrevolutionary era, most children's reading material
was intended for their moral or intellectual edification. These included di-
dactic, cautionary tales distributed by the American Sunday School
Union; Noah Webster's Grammatical Institute of the English Language
(known as the "Blue-backed Speller" because of its blue cover); Samuel
Goodrich's Peter Parley stories (featuring an elderly man who tells moral
tales to children, and who served as the prototype for Uncle Remus); and
Jacob Abbott's Rollo tales, "intended to explain and illustrate, in a simple
manner, the principles of Christian duty." William McGuffey's six
Readers, published between 1836 and 1857, epitomized the didacticism
and heavy-handed moralism that dominated books for children. They
contained such simple moral lessons as "Good boys do not play in a rude
way, but take care not to hurt anyone" and "Bad boys lie, and swear, and
steal." Postrevolutionary authorities were highly critical of fairy tales and
fantasy literature, such as ghost stories, with the exception of those that
"impress upon" children's "minds the great truth, that disobedience and
deception are very wicked and very dangerous." The perceived brevity of
mothers' hold on children encouraged a determination to use children's
literature to shape character and deliver moral messages to the young. 14
A host of gender-specific assumptions about behavior, attitudes, emo-
tional sensibilities, and aspirations pervaded the middle-class home. Gen-
der determined the kind of games children played and the chores they per-
formed, and shaped expectations about their education and likely future.
Although boys and girls increasingly attended the same schools, the cul-
tures of boyhood and girlhood were defined in opposition to each other.
Boys and girls were assumed to differ in their constitution, stature, tern-
perament, and behavior. Femininity was defined in terms of self-sacrifice

and service; masculinity, in terms of aggressiveness and daring. 15
In sharp contrast to the works of Charles Dickens, which depicted both
boys and girls as fragile, vulnerable creatures in need of adult protection,
nineteenth-century American boys were considered adventurous, re-
sourceful, and self-reliant. Like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the popular
image of boyhood was of someone who was independent, fun-loving, and
noble-hearted. In the late nineteenth century, a rash of books portrayed
pre-Civil War American boyhood as a period of unmatched freedom and
independence. An early nineteenth-century British visitor, Frederick
Marryat, recounted an incident that summed up the antebellum attitude
toward boyhood. After a young boy disobeyed his father's command, the
man called the boy "a sturdy republican," while "smiling at the boy's res-
olute disobedience. " 16
Boyhood was defined in opposition to the confinement, dependence,
and restraint of the domestic realm. Boys were freer to roam than girls,
and their chores, such as tending animals or running errands, took place
free from adult oversight. Boys' games-such as races, fistfights, sledding
and skating, swimming, or ball games-invariably took place outside the
home and emphasized physical play, self-assertion, physical prowess, sto-
icism, and competition. Boys' culture simultaneously challenged the dic-
tates of respectable adulthood and prepared boys for it. It was a world of
physicality, dirt, and violence, but also a world in which boys learned to
channel aggression and to function in groups. Boyhood stressed aggres-
siveness, which was expressed through the playing of pranks, the torture
of small animals, and competition with friends and rivals. Pranks played
on adult authority figures, girls, and each other were an essential element
in boys' culture; they provided a way for boys to assert their independence
and avenge insults. Loyalty and group activities were important values for
boys. Boys, much more than girls or their colonial male counterparts,
formed clubs and teams. Various hazing rituals and forms of ridicule, such
as name-calling and teasing, helped maintain these groups' boundaries. 17
Compared with their rural counterparts, urban boys enjoyed more free
time, more contact with peers, and greater freedom from adult supervi-
sion. Freed from farm chores, boys played in streets or fields. By
midcentury, boys were also spending much more time with peers in
schools. In contrast to the colonial era, when entry into apprenticeship or
work experiences away from home marked the end of childhood and en-
try into youth, boyhood ended more gradually in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, and the lines of separation between boyhood and youth were defined
in psychological rather than social terms. As one youth put it, "Suddenly
84 Huck~s Raft
marbles became a childish game which made knuckles grtmy and

chapped." 18
In the early nineteenth century the word girlhood acquired a new mean-
ing. It came to refer to a period of relative freedom before entrance into
the responsibilities of mature womanhood and motherhood. One of the
first figures to use the word in this sense was the French traveler Alexis de
Tocqueville, whose classic Democracy in America drew a sharp contrast
between the American girl and her French counterpart. Whereas French
girls were subordinated within their homes and achieved a degree of inde-
pendence only after marriage, in America a carefree girlhood was fol-
lowed by a staid motherhood. A young Philadelphia woman's diary cap-
tured the abruptness of this transition. It ends with the words: "And now
these pages must come to a close, for the romance ends when the heroine
marries. " 19
Girlhood in the early nineteenth-century North was filled with para-
doxes. On the one hand, young women received unprecedented opportu-
nities for education, work outside the home, and participation in reli-
gious, charitable, and reform activities. In the late eighteenth century,
sewing, weaving, and clothmaking had occupied enormous amounts of
time for teenage women, but the mechanization of textile production
abruptly altered young women's work patterns. By the early 1830s mak-
ing cloth by hand was replaced by factory production. Instead of perform-
ing handiwork at home, young women in their teens sought paid employ-
ment outside the home, as seamstresses, factory operatives, or school
teachers. At the same time, the removal of clothmaking outside of house-
holds freed many middle-class girls to continue their education into their
teens. 20
On the other hand, a much more rigid ideology of gender roles also
emerged, which drew a sharp distinction between girls and boys in tem-
perament, aptitudes, and abilities. For middle-class girls, lessons in femi-
ninity began early. From the age of six or seven, farm girls were initiated
into certain gender-specific tasks. They worked alongside their mothers
and older sisters, sewing, cooking, washing, and tending the dairy. In
towns, too, where middle-class girls were relieved from onerous farm
chores, there was a clear-cut sexual division of labor, with girls responsi-
ble for making beds and caring for younger brothers and sisters. Even in
wealthier families, parents sought to foster proper feminine behavior by
encouraging their daughters to knit, sew, and perform fancy needlework.
Girls' responsibilities for childcare, sewing, and housework left them
much less likely than boys to have time to themselves. Although many
young girls engaged in active games, such as jumping rope, previously a
boy's game, girls' play, much more than boys', involved assuming adult
roles. The toys that girls received from their parents, such as needlebooks
and dolls fashioned out of wax and decorated with human hair, were in-
tended to foster femininity and nurturing skills as well as to encourage
quiet, solitary play. Whereas portraits show boys with swords, guns, bu-
gles, drums, cannons, tin soldiers, hobbyhorses, and wheelbarrows, girls
are pictured with miniature china sets, wax dolls, music boxes, or
books. 21
Adults exhibited an ambiguous attitude toward tomboyish (or what
was called "hoyden") behavior. While antebellum literature contained
memorable images of silent, sickly girls with limited energy, there were
also many images of active, playful, and high-spirited girls who preferred
boyish games to domestic chores. Long before Henry James's Daisy
Miller, a popular literary image of American girlhood was fearless, inno-
cent, bold, and without guile. Many popular advice writers spoke about
girls' need to develop a spirit of independence and self-sufficiency. In 1839
Catharine Maria Sedgwick advised girls to "be sure to be so educated that
you can have an independent pursuit, something to occupy your time and
interest your affections; then marriage will not be essential to your useful-
ness, respectability, or happiness." Sentiments like Sedgwic~'s were ech-
oed by girls themselves. In 1838 thirteen-year-old Ednah Dow Littlehale
wrote a friend: "What do I mean by the rights of women! I mean, I mean
what I say-we have as good a right to rule men as they have to rule us. " 22
Yet as they grew older, girls were supposed to curb their passionate
spirits and channel their energies into more genteel pursuits, such as piano
playing. A girl was to divest herself "of the light and airy habiliments of
girlhood" and assume "the more staid and dignified mantle of woman-
hood." Catharine Sedgwick advised girls to refrain from "rowdyism,"
and William Alcott declared that a girl should not run after she achieved
physical maturity. "She must not," he wrote, "after she is old enough to
need a brassiere, indulge in 'any form of motion more rapid than walk-
ing,' for fear of betraying somewhere below the neck some 'portion of the
general system which gives to women her ... distinctive character.'" In
contrast to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, who remain eternal boys, girls
were expected to grow up and reject childish ways. A teenage girl was to
put up her hair and lower her skirt-two key symbols of proper deport-
ment. Frances Willard, the future leader of the Women's Christian Tem-
perance Union, the largest late nineteenth-century women's organization,
vividly recorded the day in 1856 that she grew up: "Mother insists that at
last I must have my hair 'done up woman-fashion.' She says she can
hardly forgive herself for letting me 'run wild' so long. We've had a great
86 Huck's Raft
time over it all ... My 'back' hair is twisted up like a corkscrew: I carry
eighteen hair-pins; my head aches miserably; my feet are entangled in the
skirt of my hateful new gown. I can never jump over a fence again, so
long as I live. " 23
Since the essence of femininity was perceived to be purity, it is not sur-
prising that many young women were kept in appalling sexual ignorance.
Lydia Maria Child regretted the "want of confidence between mothers
and daughters on delicate subjects" and suggested that mothers explain
the facts of life to daughters around the age of twelve to "set her mind at
rest." The mid-nineteenth-century ideal of a sheltered girlhood stifled
many girls' abilities and restricted their opportunities. In 185 6 a Boston
physician named Harriot K. Hunt linked the roots of hysteria to the
restrictions that girls lived under. As she diagnosed one patient's prob-
lems: "Mind had been uncultivated-intelligence smothered-aspirations
quenched. The result was physical suffering. " 24
Throughout American history the experience of each successive genera-
tion of girls has been less continuous than the experience of boys. Rarely
was the mother-daughter gap greater than during the early nineteenth cen-
tury, when young women between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five re-
ceived wholly new opportunities to attend school and work temporarily
outside a home as school teachers or mill workers. For the first time in
American history, large numbers of young women experienced a period
before marriage when they were not subordinated to a father or husband.
The significance of this period of life can be seen vividly in the diary of
seventeen-year-old Rachel Van Dyke, the daughter of a prosperous New
Brunswick, New Jersey, storekeeper and farmer, who railed against young
women who talked of nothing "but dress, amusements, the beaux, and
such like nonsense." This period of relative freedom from male authority
carried profound psychological implications. Many young women came
to view marriage in a new light, as a closing off of freedoms and options
enjoyed in girlhood. This led many young women to experience a trau-
matic "marriage crisis" as they decided whether or not to marry. 25
Nineteenth-century middle-class culture idealized the bond between sis-
ters and brothers as purer and more innocent than any other social rela-
tionships, untouched by sexuality and selfishness. To a society deeply
troubled by industrialization and urbanization, the sibling bond, based on
a common heritage, signified loyalty, connection, intimacy, selflessness,
and continuity over time. As birthrates declined and children remained
home longer and more continuously, sibling relationships grew far more
emotionally intense than they had been or than they are today. In the early
twenty-first century, half of all children do not have a sibling; but in the
nineteenth century, same-sex siblings often slept in the same room, fre-
quently in the same bed, and younger children often visited or helped out
older children for prolonged periods. Many parents consciously fostered
intense sibling bonds, reminding siblings that they had an obligation to
look out for one another. Further contributing to the intensity of sibling
ties was the relative weakness of institutions that might intrude on such
relationships. Middle-class families encouraged children to play with each
other or with cousins, and mid-nineteenth-century schools made few ef-
forts to foster peer group identities. The emotional and psychological in-
tensity of sibling ties, however, often produced conflicted relationships.
One of Freud's greatest insights was his discovery that Victorian sentimen-
tality about the purity and innocence of the sibling bond masked intense
rivalries and inequalities. 26
The invention of modern childhood represented an effort to contain the
precocity and uncertainties that had characterized the process of growing
up in the early nineteenth century. In the century's early years, childhood
dependence had been brief and ended abruptly. In 1834 Alexis de
Tocqueville announced that "in America there is, in truth, no adolescence.
At the close of boyhood [the young American] is a man and begins to
trace out his own path." At the beginning of the century childhood de-
pendence had been followed by a lengthy, nebulous period of youth, in
which young men and women moved back and forth between domestic
responsibilities, schooling, and work responsibilities outside the home.
Behavior that we would consider precocious was commonplace. When
Abraham Lincoln was seven and his family moved across the Ohio River
from Kentucky to frontier Indiana, the future president helped build a
primitive log cabin and cut down trees so that a crop could be planted.
Before he reached the age of sixteen and enrolled at Yale College, Eli
Whitney had already opened a nail factory. Francis Lieber, a German-
born scholar who taught at a South Carolina college in 1835 and 1836,
recorded the details of one young man's life. By the age of twenty-two he
had been expelled from college for participating in a duel, shot his adver-
sary in the streets of Charleston, studied law, married and had a child,
practiced law, and been elected to the state legislature. 27
The path to adulthood was far less clearly delineated and much more ir-
regular, haphazard, and episodic than it subsequently became. Many farm
children, male and female, worked on their parents' homestead until their
twenties; others sought employment away from home during the winter
(as clerks or laborers) but returned home during the spring and summer
months. Still others served a series of short-term apprenticeships, shifting
back and forth betwe'en their parents' household and work experiences
88 Huck:Js Raft
outside the home. Meanwhile an increasing number of young girls left

home temporarily to work in early factories or to attend school, and a
growing number of boys and girls left home to seek new opportunities in
rapidly expanding cities. 28
For young women as well as young men, youth was a time of uncertain
transitions, when they had to make important decisions about their
schooling, their career, and where they would live. As their economic role
within the family became more problematic, the teen years became a pe-
riod of profound religious uncertainty. As they entered adolescence, many
young women went through an intensely religious phase, often culminat-
ing in an emotional conversion experience. A religious crisis often oc-
curred around the time of first menstruation or when young women be-
gan to seek work or training outside the home. Joining a church provided
young women with friendship and emotional support at a time when they
were experiencing disruptive changes in employment and place of resi-
dence. Three of every four converts during the early nineteenth century
were young women, usually in their mid or late teens. Intense same-sex
friendships also helped many young women, as well as some young men,
to cope with the uncertainties of youth. At a time when relations between
boys and girls were especially stiff, distant, and formal, such relationships
could be intensely physical, involving passionate kissing and hugging. 29
Middle-class and upwardly aspiring working-class young men also
sought stability by forming and joining voluntary associations, ranging
from literary clubs and debating societies to religious societies, sports
teams, amateur theatrical troupes, and young men's political organiza-
tions. These associations included a broad spectrum of ages, from boys as
young as ten or twelve to young men in their twenties. Rather than being
isolated in a rigidly age-segregated world, as is the case today, youth's
world was defined more expansively. Younger boys printed their own
newspapers and joined reform organizations, like the Cadets of Temper-
ance, which crusaded against hard liquor. Boys as young as fourteen also
joined such political organizations as the Little Giants, to support the
Democrats, or the Wide Awakes, to back the Republicans. In his 1838
novel Homeward Bound, James Fenimore Cooper described one charac-
ter's involvement in organizations in arch terms: "From his tenth year
up to his twenty-fifth, this gentleman had been either a president, vice-
president, manager, or committee man of some philosophical, political or
religious expedient to fortify human wisdom. " 30
First emerging in the late eighteenth century, when apprentices formed
the earliest self-improvement societies and college students founded
the first literary societies, youth organizations were mechanisms for self-
improvement and self-education, which prepared young men for adult-

hood. These organizations allowed young men to participate in the public
sphere, trained them in leadership skills, and taught them how to function
in organizations. Many societies were inspired by a conviction that the
young had a historic responsibility to fulfill the founders' ideals. Indeed,
these young men expressed an impulse to match and even surpass the
founding generation. "To us belong ... far higher responsibilities than
rested upon our fathers," announced one young man. During the 1830s
and 1840s middle-class youths constituted much of the rank and file in Bi-
ble associations and temperance and antislavery societies, while their
working-class counterparts joined volunteer fire companies, military com-
panies, and the nation's first urban youth gangs (which first appeared in
the 1770s). 31
African-American young men formed their own organizations. George
T. Downing founded a literary society in New York when he was fourteen
years old. This society refused to celebrate the Fourth of July because "the
declaration of Independence was to the colored in America, 'a perfect
mockery."' An editorial in the New York Colored American in 1837
declared that "history is replete with evidence" that young men "are
important and efficient agents" for "moral reformations or political revo-
lutions. " 32
In stark contrast to young black and white men, young women did not
form separate organizations based on age. Although there were a few
"Young Ladies"' societies, in general young women participated in orga-
nizations that encompassed women irrespective of age, including church
societies, reform societies, and a wide range of philanthropic endeavors.
For the most part, age-based antebellum organizations were male-only.
After the Civil War, the broadly inclusive young men's associations
faded away. Somewhat older men continued to join lodges, fraternal or-
ders, and secret societies, and college students established fraternities. But
youth groups formed and run by the young themselves were replaced by
adult-organized institutions that adopted the name "Young Men's Associ-
ations" or "Mechanics' Institutes." The earliest adult-managed organiza-
tion for youth, the Young Men's Christian Association, modeled on an
identically named English organization, appeared in Boston in 1849. It
served as the precursor for other adult-organized institutions, such as the
Boy Scouts, which were intended to ease the transition to adulthood but
which actually intensified the dependence of teenage boys by encouraging
them to defer to the leadership and direction of adults.
Early nineteenth-century foreign travelers and home-grown moralists
roundly condemned the precocity of American children, whom they con-
90 Huck"'s Raft
sidered filthy, ill-mannered, and disrespectful. European visitors univer-

sally agreed that American children were less disciplined than Old World
children and had a greater voice in family affairs. The explanation for
early nineteenth-century parents' permissiveness was at once cultural and
economic. American culture not only had a weaker sense of hierarchy, but
in labor-short America, parents were highly dependent on their children's
labor, a circumstance that encouraged mild discipline and even parental
indulgence. After 1830, however, there were growing efforts to impose
order on children, especially urban middle-class children between the ages
of seven and thirteen. Tolerance of precocious behavior declined, and
there was a growing concern with ensuring children's proper chronologi-
cal development. Perhaps the most dramatic development was greater sys-
tematization of a haphazard system of education. 33
The emergence of Sunday schools represented one of the first attempts
to rein in young people's lives. The first Sunday schools, founded in the
1790s, were targeted at the children of the poor, but by the 1820s these
institutions had shifted their attention to middle-class children as antebel-
lum churches increasingly envisioned young people's conversion as a grad-
ual development rather than a sudden emotional experience. Convinced
that during childhood a person's "character usually becomes fixed for life,
and for the most part for eternity," their founders assigned Sunday
schools the weighty responsibility of ensuring that young people devel-
oped the strength of character to resist the "flattering allurements" of a
world bent on "seduc[ing] them to ruin," as the American Sunday School
Magazine phrased it in 1825. 34
Far more important than Sunday schools in structuring young people's
lives were public schools, which had the effect of extending childhood de-
pendency into early adolescence. Before the advent of public education in
the early 1830s, formal schooling was sporadic and unsystematic. Ap-
prenticeship was a major form of education, supplemented by charity
schools for the poor, church schools, informal dame schools in which
women took children into their own homes, district schools in smaller
towns and villages, Latin schools in larger cities, and private academies
for the affluent. A typical classroom could contain as many as eighty stu-
dents, from "infants but just out of their cradles" to "men who had been
enrolled . . . in the militia." Opportunity to attend school was circum-
scribed, and attendance was erratic. Even free schools required payment
of tuition, and many required entering students to be literate, barring
youngsters whose parents had not taught them to read. 35
Few textbooks were available, and learning amounted to monotonous
repetition of facts. Students memorized and recited the alphabet, the
definition and spelling of words, the rules of grammar, the facts of arith-
metic, and lengthy prose passages, often long before they understood
them. School buildings were often unpainted and overcrowded and lacked
blackboards, maps, desks, playgrounds, and even outhouses. Teachers
maintained order primarily through "the liberal application of birch and
ferule," in Horace Greeley's words, supplemented by such forms of sham-
ing as requiring unruly pupils to wear a dunce's cap or sit on a fool's stool,
which had only one leg. As might be expected, students responded to dis-
plays of arbitrary authority and humiliation with frequent mutinies.
The campaign for public schools began in earnest in the 1820s, when
religiously motivated reformers, inspired by the school systems in Prussia
and the Netherlands, advocated public education as a way to promote op-
portunity, prevent a hardening of class lines, shape children's character,
create a unified civic culture, and instill the values and skills necessary in a
rapidly changing society: basic literacy, punctuality, obedience, and self-
discipline. Convinced that education would take place most effectively in
a homogeneous environment, educators concentrated on children be-
tween the ages of six and fourteen, which was considered the optimal time
to form young people's character and help them to internalize moral re-
straints. Meanwhile, fearful that premature intellectual stress damaged
young children's minds and bodies, reformers argued that three-, four-,
and five-year-olds would be better educated at home than in formal class-
rooms.36
To trim costs, a number of cities, including New York and Philadelphia,
experimented with a system devised by Joseph Lancaster, an English
Quaker, in which a teacher trained student monitors who conducted
classes on their own. The Lancaster system allowed a single teacher to
teach a thousand students. But localities quickly discovered that they
could expand schooling without a proportionate increase in spending by
relying on female teachers, who received half or a third the wages of male
schoolteachers. At first many local school boards worried that female
teachers could not discipline rowdy schoolchildren, but they came to be-
lieve that women, relying on the techniques of moral suasion emphasized
in childrearing manuals, were actually more effective in disciplining chil-
dren. As a woman who taught during the 1840s observed, a male student
"who would be constantly plotting mischief against a schoolmaster . . .
becomes mild and gentle, considerate and well behaved towards a little
woman, simply because she is a little woman, whose gentle voice and
lady-like manners have fascinated him." In fact, however, many older
boys expressed their disdain for the femininization of education by drop-
ping out of school. 37
92 Huck's Raft
Mid-nineteenth-century public schools followed highly regimented

schedules. Individual classrooms contained as many as fifty or sixty stu-
dents, and despite calls for improved teaching methods that would tap
students' imaginations and draw out their potentialities, teachers relied on
rote memorization, recitation, and strict discipline. A New York City
mayor described a typical school day: "During several daily recitation pe-
riods, each of which is from twenty to twenty-five minutes in duration,
the children are obliged to stand on the line, perfectly motionless, their
bodies erect, their knees and feet together, the tips of their shoes touching
the edge of the board in the floor." Innovations in pedagogy were left to
private schools. 38
By the eve of the Civil War, educational reformers in New England, the
Middle Atlantic states, and the older parts of the Midwest had succeeded
in systematizing the system of education. They persuaded legislatures in
Massachusetts and New York to pass the first mandatory school atten-
dance laws. Attendance was expected to be a full-time activity, in which
the student adjusted to the school's schedule, not vice versa. As a result,
schools tended to prolong middle-class children's dependency by forestall-
ing youths' entry into the world of work. 39
In the early nineteenth century a fundamental tension emerged between
idealizing children and regulating their lives. It is a striking irony that the
very period that most intensely celebrated children's innocence and play-
fulness also witnessed unprecedented efforts to systematize and rational-
ize children's upbringing. Those who waxed most eloquently about child-
hood purity, such as the educational reformer Horace Mann and the
childrearing expert Lydia Maria Child, were also the strongest proponents
of improved methods of childrearing and expanded education. Among the
goals of the inventors of modern middle-class childhood were to shape
children's character and implant habits of self-control through self-
conscious maternal nurture; to shelter children from corruption by keep-
ing them home for longer periods; and to enroll them in age-graded
schools with a curriculum emphasizing lessons in industry, regularity,
and restraint. Precocity was attacked, and order was imposed on young
people's lives. 40
But there was an even more troubling historical irony at work. The very
period that freed middle-class children from work and allowed them to
devote their childhood years to education also made the labor of poorer
children more essential to their families' well-being than in the past, and
greatly increased the exploitation that these children suffered. As we shall
see, the growth of industry, the commercialization of agriculture, and the
expansion of a market economy widened the gulf between middle-class
and laboring children and generated new kinds of child labor that differed
radically from the household-based activities that young people had per-
formed in the past. Ultimately, however, it was the Romantic ideal of a
sheltered childhood that would inspire reformers to embark on efforts to
save dependent, destitute, and working children. The sentimentalization
of childhood-the assertion of childhood's importance and its vulnerabil-
ity to mistreatment-would provide a crucial vantage point for criticizing
the abuse of children.
chapter five
Growing Up in Bondage
H E R NAME WAS Celia, and she was just fourteen when Rob-
ert Newsom, an aging widower and one of central Missouri's most pros-
perous slave owners, purchased her. Already the owner of five male slaves,
Newsom acquired Celia to serve as a domestic servant, a cook, and a sex-
ual partner. Before he had even returned her to his farm, he raped her. He
built her a small cabin near his house and visited her frequently. Over the
next five years she bore him two children. When she was about nineteen,
Celia became involved with a slave named George and demanded that
Newsom end their relationship. When he refused, Celia fatally struck her
master with a club and burned his body in her fireplace. In 1855 she was
executed for murder. Celia's childhood was brief, her womanhood even
briefer. 1
On the eve of the Civil War, four million southerners were enslaved.
Fully half were children under the age of sixteen. Slave owners often as-
cribed childlike characteristics to slaves; in fact most slaves were children,
and they experienced the most extreme version of an unprotected child-
hood. At a time when the urban middle class was freeing its children from
work responsibilities, prolonging and intensifying their family ties, and
devoting an increasing number of their years to formal schooling, a slave
childhood was a world apart. It was a world of poverty, privation, pun-
ishment, and early physical labor. Still, thro~gh the strength of their kin-
ship and community ties and the force of their character, enslaved chil-
dren grappled with the harsh day-to-day realities of slavery, made them
more bearable, and ultimately transcended slavery's traumas. 2
Growing Up in Bondage 95
Even worse than slavery's physical severities were its psychological cru-
elties. Children grew up fearful of family separation. They felt an intense
sense of powerlessness and quickly came to recognize that their parents
were unable to protect them. Many, like Frederick Douglass, the fugitive
slave who became one of the country's best-known abolitionists, felt that
slavery's greatest evil was the systematic deprivation of knowledge about
one's ancestry, about reading and writing, and even about one's birth
date. Slavery, he later wrote, "made my brothers and sisters strangers to
me; it converted the mother that bore me into a myth; it shrouded my fa-
ther in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the
world." Slavery, in his view, had robbed him not only of the attributes of
childhood but of certain defining elements of a human identity. 3
Worse yet, slavery instilled in some children a profound sense of inferi-
ority and shame. Thomas Jones, who spent his childhood in slavery in
North Carolina, described his memory of growing up under slavery: "My
recollections of early life are associated with poverty, suffering and shame.
I was made to feel, in my boyhood's first experience, that I was inferior
and degraded, and that I must pass through life in a dependent and suffer-
ing condition." Denied an education, constantly reminded of his subordi-
nate status, Jones felt a sense of dishonor. Yet for all of slave childhood's
horrors, enslaved boys and girls succeeded in "stealing" a childhood.
They devised games that prepared them psychologically for the traumas
of whippings and family separation. A surprisingly large number learned
how to read and write. Above all, they contributed to their family's well-
being by supplementing their families' meager diets and assisting in their
parents' work. For all its deprivations, childhood in bondage promoted an
early sense of personal responsibility and strong communalloyalties. 4
Enslaved parents looked forward to their children's births with bitter-
sweet emotions. A fugitive slave named Lunsford Lane reprinted a slave
mother's address to her infant child, which read:
And much I grieve and mourn
That to so dark a destiny
My lovely babe I've borne.
Harriet Jacobs, who was sexually exploited under slavery, wrote: "My
heart was heavier than it had ever been before when they told me my new-
born babe was a girl." Slave fathers, too, voiced this ambivalence.
Thomas Jones felt "unspeakable anguish as I looked upon my precious
babes, and have thought of the ignorance, degradation, and woe which
they must endure as slaves. " 5
One reason for parents' ambivalent feelings was an infant death rate
96 Huck"'s Raft
that was twice the rate of that for white infants. Half of all slave new-
borns weighed less than five and a half pounds, and severely underweight
births are associated with respiratory problems, ear infections, develop-
mental problems, and high rates of infant mortality. Fanny Kemble,
whose husband owned a large South Carolina plantation, questioned a
number of enslaved women about their experience losing children. A slave
named Nancy reported that she had lost two of three children. Another
named Leah said that three of her six children were dead. Sukey told her
that five of her eleven children had died. Sarah had lost five of seven chil-
dren. Altogether, the nine women Fanny Kemble interviewed suffered
twelve miscarriages and lost twenty-nine of fifty-five children in infancy or
early childhood. In fact half of all slave children died in infancy or early
childhood. 6
Slaveholders attributed infant deaths to "overlaying" in bed or "suffo-
cation." Sudden Infant Death Syndrome-the still-unexplained sudden
death of infants, which remains higher among African Americans than
among whites-also contributed to the high death rate. But the main con-
tributors to the high mortality were the heavy physical labor that mothers
performed during the late stages of pregnancy, the inadequate nutrition
provided to pregnant women and their children, and an unsanitary envi-
ronment. Even though slave owners recognized that newborns were a po-
tential source of labor and wealth, they failed to take practical steps tore-
duce infant deaths. Thomas Jefferson observed that "a child raised every
2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man," but slave
masters distrusted slave women's claims of pregnancy and proved unwill-
ing to sacrifice their labor to protect the unborn. Although advice manu-
als recommended that no pregnant woman engage in "lifting, pulling fod-
der, or hard work," suspicious masters adopted the view that hard labor
made for an easier birth. Some masters actually reduced rations to women
nearing full term, convinced that smaller babies were delivered more
easily. 7
Under slavery, infants received a grossly inadequate diet. On a few
plantations, "sucklings were allowed to come to [their mothers in the
fields] three times a day, for the purpose of nursing." But it was more
common for mothers to suckle their babies just once during the day, usu-
ally around ten in the morning. The infants were fed cow's milk, thin por-
ridge, "potlicker" (the broth left in a pot after the greens were cooked),
a mixture of mush and skimmed milk, or bread mashed into gravy.
Not only were these foods unsanitary and unhygienic, but because many
African-American infants were lactose intolerant, they were unable to di-
gest them. 8
The physical conditions in which enslaved children lived also contrib-

uted to the high death rate. Many childhood deaths were due to tetanus
and lockjaw-which were four times more common among slave children
than among their white counterparts-resulting from unsanitary living
conditions. Lacking privies, slaves had to urinate and defecate in the cover
of nearby bushes. Lacking sanitary disposal of garbage, they were sur-
rounded by decaying food. Chickens, dogs, and pigs lived next to the
slave quarters, and in consequence animal feces contaminated the area.
Such squalor contributed to high rates of dysentery, typhus, diarrhea, hep-
atitis, typhoid fever, and intestinal worms. 9
The fragility of family ties was a hallmark of a slave childhood. Charles
Ball, who lived for forty years as a slave in Maryland, South Carolina,
and Georgia, was just five years old when he was separated from his
mother. Frederick Douglass saw his mother only four or five times during
his childhood. Separation from fathers was especially common. At least
half of all enslaved children grew up apart from their father, either be-
cause he lived on another plantation, had died, or was white and refused
to acknowledge his offspring. In interviews conducted by the federal gov-
ernment, 10 percent of former slaves reported that their father was white,
and many reported that their master's wives took out their anger by pun-
ishing the mulatto children. The Kentucky-born Lewis Clarke, the son of
a Scottish weaver and a slave mother, reported that "there are no slaves
that are so badly abused as those that are related to some of the [white]
women, or the children of their own husband; it seems as though they
never could hate these quite bad enough." Moses Roper, who was en-
slaved in North Carolina, was told that after his birth his mistress used a
large stick to beat him. 10
Even in instances in which marriages were not broken by sale, slave
children often grew up apart from their father, seeing him only on week-
ends or once during the week. On large plantations, one slave father in
three had a different owner from his wife and could visit his family only at
his master's discretion. On smaller holdings, two fathers in three lived on
a separate farm. In addition, many large slaveholders had numerous plan-
tations and frequently shifted slaves, splitting families in the process.
Renting out slave fathers was also common. 11
Slaves were much less likely to grow up in a two-parent household than
any other children. About a quarter of enslaved children grew up in a sin-
gle-parent household (nearly always with their mother). Another tenth
grew up apart from both parents; 5 percent of young slaves lived in their
owners' homes. Even in two-parent families, children frequently reported
that they spent little time with their parents. In the South Carolina
98 Huck's Raft
lowcountry, wealthy slaveholders took young slaves for weeks or even

months at a time into the upcountry during malaria epidemics in order to
protect their health and future labor. On these occasions, parents were
able to visit their children only on Sundays, if then. A former Alabama
slave named Maugan Sheppard said she rarely saw her mother or father
'' 'cept upon a Sunday," since they left for the cotton field before sunup
and returned to their cabin after she had already eaten her supper and had
fallen asleep. The Reverend James W. C. Pennington, who escaped slavery
in Maryland and went on to earn a degree from the University of Heidel-
berg, called "the want of parental care and attention" slavery's very worst
evil. Because his parents had been forced to spend their time in the fields,
they "were not able to give any attention to their children during the day.
I often suffered much from hunger and other similar causes." 12
Temporary or permanent family separation was an almost universal ex-
perience for slave children by the time they reached their late teens. A
study of slave hires in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, between 1782 and
1810 indicates that most children spent at least a year working as a ser-
vant in another household. During the mid-1930s, when the federal
Works Projects Administration interviewed more than 2,300 former
slaves (2 percent of all who were alive at the time), a third of these ex-
slaves reported that they had been separated from their parents by sale or
transfer of ownership by the age of sixteen. Family separation was one of
enslaved children's most vivid memories. James Green, a Texas slave, re-
called the "unlucky star" day when he was separated from his mother.
One Friday his mother had turned to him and said, "Jim, you be a good
boy." His master then led James away. "Dat was de last time I ever heard
my mother speak, or ever see her," he recalled. By the age of ten or
twelve, many slave children were forced to live in quarters separate from
their families, and in their teens most were sold away from their mothers,
fathers, or siblings. As a result of sale or parental death, over half of all
slave children had lost a parent by sixteen. Children's songs resonated
with the anguish of family separation. As if to prepare themselves for a
life filled with insecurity, children would sing:
Mammy, is Ole' Massa gwin'er sell us tomorrow?

Yes, my chile.
Whar he gwin'er sell us?
Way down South in Georgia. 13
Nevertheless, through distinctive patterns of coparenting, godparent-

ing, and naming patterns that reinforced kin connections throughout an
extended community, parents provided their children with a network of
support. Names were an essential vehicle for transmitting a sense of fam-

ily identity, maintaining links to the African past, and forming links to the
wider kinship group. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
some masters had imposed classical names, such as Hercules, or place-
names, such as London, on slaves, a naming pattern rarely found among
white colonists. But most slaves were named by their parents, who often
followed the West or Central African practice of "day-naming"-assigning
names based on the day of their birth. Common day names included
Cudjo, Mingo, and Cuffee. Over time, African day names were Anglicized
through blending with similar-sounding English names. Thus Fiba, which
meant Friday, became Phoebe. 14
By the early nineteenth century biblical names became common as
growing numbers of slaves converted to Christianity. Yet whether the
names had African or Christian roots, enslaved African Americans did not
passively accept names assigned by slave owners. Rather, they chose

REQUESTOFTHEPUBL~HER
This photograph depicts an African-American slave family in 1861 or 1862, either in

Washington, D.C., or in Hampton, Virginia. The absence of adolescent children is not
accidental; more than half of all enslaved African Americans were separated from their
families during their teens. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
100 Huck~s Raft
names that were deeply meaningful to themselves. Namesaking-naming

children after grandparents or other kin-was a common practice. Name
exchanges-in which brothers named sons for one another-were also
common, underscoring the significance attached to kinship ties. To sus-
tain a sense of family identity, slaves often named their children after par-
ents, grandparents, recently deceased relatives, and other kin. Slaves also
passed down family names to their children, usually the name of an ances-
tor's owner rather than their current owner's. At a time when the propor-
tion of whites naming first-born sons for fathers was sharply declining-
from over half in the early eighteenth century to less than a third in
1790-slave families used names to recognize kinship ties. 15
Slave children had multiple caregivers. Children as young as two or
three rocked babies and made sure that they didn't crawl too near the fire-
place. In one nursery on a rice plantation, "near each baby sat or played a
small boy or girl who had been detailed to care for that especial baby, and
at the door of the house sat Maum Judy, or later Kate, the nurse." On
larger plantations, one or two adults cared for as many as forty or even
seventy young children. One white observer reported that on her planta-
tion a caregiver named Aunt Dinah "told stories, demonstrated how to
make animals from potatoes, orange thorns, a few feathers." She also of-
fered lessons in "practical living," teaching slave children how to '"set ta-
ble' with mats made of the green leaves of the jonquils, cups and saucers
of acorns, dishes of hickory hulls and any gay bit of china they could find;
and had them bake mud pies in a broken stove." Recognizing the likeli-
hood of family separation, slave parents taught their children to call adult
slaves "aunt" or "uncle" and younger slaves "sister" or "brother." In this
way, slave culture taught the young that they were members of a broader
community in which all slaves had mutual obligations and responsi-
bilities.16
Apologists for slavery insisted that slave children were well clothed,
well fed, and well cared for. In actuality, deprivation was a basic reality of
a slave childhood. Children's clothing was minimal, and it was common
to see boys "of about Fourteen and Fifteen years Old" with "their whole
nakedness exposed." Few owners distributed shoes to children who did
not work in the field, and slave children usually wore shoes only during
the coldest months. Most youngsters had to make do with moccasins their
fathers fashioned from animal hides or rags wrapped around their feet.
Slave owners typically issued children two sets of clothing a year, one for
the winter and one for the summer. No underclothes were provided, al-
though leggings might be worn in winter. Young children usually wore a
shapeless garment of rough cloth that was called a shirt when worn by
boys and a shift, a shimmy, or a dress when worn by girls. Made of

plainly woven coarse cotton cloth, these one-piece garments, seamed at
the shoulders, fell from the shoulders to below the knees. Booker T.
Washington wrote that his shirt felt like "a dozen or more chestnut burrs"
rubbing on his skin. But however inexpensive their clothing might be, en-
slaved African Americans sought to individualize their clothing. Girls'
clothing, in particular, was often patterned and colorful. 17
Slave children were severely underfed, and later recalled that they fre-
quently went hungry. On one large plantation, a planter allotted just
thirty pounds of meat a week for 130 children. On most plantations,
young children were fed out of a wooden trough, "the same as we see
pigs, horses, and cattle gather around troughs today." Annie Burton, who
was born into slavery in Clayton, Alabama, in 1858, later recalled: "We
children had no supper, and only a little piece of bread or something of
the kind in the morning. Our dishes consisted of one wooden bowl, and
oyster shells were our spoon. This bowl served for about fifteen children,
and often the dogs and the ducks and the peafowl had a dip in it. Some-
times we had buttermilk and bread in our bowl, sometimes greens or
bones." Children's meals often consisted of cornmeal mush served with
molasses or crumbled bread or peas or buttermilk poured into the tub,
which they ate with their hands or seashells. 18
Even though slave children in the American South were larger than
their counterparts in the Caribbean, their growth rates were very slow by
modern standards, reflecting an inadequate diet. On average slave chil-
dren did not reach three feet in height until their fourth birthdays. At that
age, they were five inches shorter than a typical child today and about the
same height as a child in present-day Bangladesh. At seventeen, slave men
were shorter than 96 percent of present-day American men, and slave
women were smaller than 80 percent of American women. Children's diet
under slavery was monotonous and unvaried, consisting largely of corn-
meal, salt pork, and bacon. Only rarely did enslaved children drink milk
or eat fresh meat or vegetables. As a result, slave children were small for
their age, suffered from vitamin and protein deficiencies, and were victims
of such ailments as beriberi, kwashiorkor, and pellagra. Poor nutrition
and high rates of infant and child mortality contributed to a very short
average life expectancy-just twenty-one or twenty-two years-compared
with forty to forty-three years for whites. 19
To compensate for their meager diets, children ate whatever was avail-
able. Jake Maddox, who spent his childhood in slavery in Georgia, re-
moved chicken feet from the garbage and gnawed the bones. Alex
McCinney beat some dogs to a biscuit that his master's family had thrown
102 Huck~s Raft
out. But the main way that children supplemented their family's diet was
by picking nuts and edible weeds, fishing and hunting, and trapping small
game and birds. In this way they greatly enhanced their family's well-
being.20
Early induction into the labor force was one of slavery's cruelest fea-
tures. Booker T. Washington recalled that "from the time that I can re-
member anything, almost every day of my life has been occupied in some
kind of labor." Only the very youngest children were exempt from work.
Elizabeth Keckley, who was born into slavery in Virginia in 1818 and
later served as a seamstress for Mary Todd Lincoln, was put to work at
the age of four as caretaker for her owner's baby. Plantation inventories
indicate that even extremely young children had a positive valuation. At a
time when an adult male slave was valued at $1,000, a slave infant was
listed in a plantation inventory at as little as $25, reflecting the high infant
death rate, but a three-year-old was valued at $150. When an adult male
was priced at $1,500, a twelve-year-old male was valued at $800. The
value of even young children reflected the fact that slave owners regarded
them as productive assets. 21
Young children worked in the owner's house until they were old enough
to toil in the fields, caring for infants, serving food, polishing furniture,
and swatting flies and fanning their master or mistress. Many houseboys
and housegirls, as young as three, slept in their master's house, in their
owner's room, or in attics or stairwells. Far from making life easier or
more comfortable, living in the big house led to increased oversight and
discipline. Frederick Douglass described a teenage housegirl, a member of
his wife's family, who had her nose and breastbone broken during a beat-
ing after she fell asleep and failed to respond to a crying infant in her
care. 22
At five or six, enslaved children served as human scarecrows, frighten-
ing crows away from corn stalks, or toiled on trash gangs, hauling water
and wood, pulling weeds, sweeping yards, driving cows to pasture, and
cutting tree limbs for firewood. They also fed chickens, gathered eggs,
milked cows, churned butter, and shelled, peeled, and washed vegetables.
They plucked grubs off tobacco plants, and sometimes were forced to
swallow those that they missed. On sugar plantations, children tossed cut
cane into a cart and unloaded the stalks at the mill. In addition, young
children picked burrs out of wool, carded, spun and wove cloth, and
raked wheat or corn from the ground, tied it into bundles, and stacked the
bundles. At the age of eight Henry Johnson of Virginia carried water for
twenty-five or even thirty field hands. Between ten and twelve, youngsters
began to wield the hoe themselves, with girls entering fieldwork earlier
than boys. Thomas Jefferson had "children till 10. years old to serve as
nurses. from 10. to 16. the boys make nails, the girls spin. at age 16. go
into the grounds or learn trades." 23
Many enslaved youngsters looked forward to entry into the workforce
as a symbol of their growing maturation. It was only when slave children
began to work in the fields full-time around age twelve that they received
a full ration of food and adult clothing. The recommended portion of
food more than doubled, from just a pound of bacon and half a peck of
cornmeal a week to two and a half pounds of bacon and one and a half
pecks of meal. Meanwhile young men donned the work shirts, pants, and
hats that symbolized a working hand. A small number of boys served ap-
prenticeships as blacksmiths, carpenters, ironworkers, masons, mill-
wrights, and shoemakers, while a similarly small number of girls were
trained to spin, weave, make dresses, and cut and dress their mistress's
hair. These were often the children of slaves who held skilled positions on
a plantation. 24
As grave as the physical dangers posed by slavery were the psychologi-
cal: that children would internalize a sense of dependence, inferiority, and
subordinate status. Much more than a system of labor exploitation, slav-
ery was a complex set of social relationships in which masters strove to
make their property obedient, tractable, and dependent. Slavery placed
sharp limits on parental authority and parents' ability to shield children
from a master's punishment. For many, the harshest memory from their
childhood was seeing their parents being whipped and discovering that
they were impotent to do anything about it. Allen Wilson never forgot
seeing his mother stripped naked, tied to a tree, and whipped. Josiah
Henson, who served as Harriet Beecher Stowe's model for Uncle Tom,
never forgot watching his father's punishment: "His right ear had been cut
off close to his head, and he had received a hundred lashes on his back.
He had beaten the overseer for a brutal assault on my mother, and this
was his punishment." When William Wells Brown saw his mother being
whipped for failing to be in the fields on time, "the cold chills ran over
me, and I wept aloud. " 25
Among the most severe traumas experienced by slave children was
learning that their parents were helpless to protect them from abuse.
When Jacob Strayer, who was being trained as a jockey, was regularly
beaten, he turned to his father for help. His father told him: "Go back to
your work and be a good boy, for I cannot do anything for you." When
his mother intervened on Jacob's behalf, she was beaten for her efforts.
Caroline Hunter, who lived with her mother and three brothers on a small
Virginia farm, experienced a similar sense of powerlessness: "Many a day
104 Huck's Raft
my ole mamma has stood by an' watched massa beat her chillun 'till dey
bled an' she couldn't open her mouf. Dey didn' only beat us, dey useta
strap my mamma to a bench or box an' beat her wid a wooden paddle
when she was naked. " 26
As they recalled their childhood in bondage, former slaves invariably
recollected a moment around puberty when they first confronted the real-
ity of lifelong servitude. A whipping, an abusive epithet, a sudden change
in how one was treated by white playmates revealed the full meaning of
enslavement. For one former Louisiana slave that defining moment came
when her mistress whipped her for saying "to missis, 'My mother sent
me.'" She explained that on her plantation "We were not allowed to call
our mammies 'mother.' It was too near the way of the white folks." For a
Virginia slave known as Charles, the crucial moment came when his white
playmates began to treat him as a slave. His master's son vividly recalled
that moment. "It is customary in nearly all households in the South for
the white and black children connected with each other to play together,"
he wrote. "The trial ... comes when the young Negroes who have hith-
erto been on this democratic footing with the young whites are presently
deserted by their ... companions, who enter upon school-life ... ceasing
to associate with their swarthy comrades any longer, meet them in the fu-
ture with the air of the master." Charles responded with bitterness and
defiance. He set fire to the family's house and was subsequently sold to the
Deep South. Francis Black underwent a similar experience. He was play-
ing with his master's son, who called him a "nigger." He quickly replied to
his playmate: "I say, I ain't no nigger. He say 'Yes you is, my pa pay $200
for you. He bought you to play with me."' 27
For slave children, there \lvere daily reminders of their subordinate
'status and dependence on their master's will. They were expected to dis-
play deference and undergo verbal and physical harassment without re-
sponding. One South Carolina slave explained how slave children were
taught to greet their owner properly. "The boys were required to bend the
body forward with the head down and rest the body on the left foot, and
scrape the right foot backwards on the ground while uttering the words,
'howdy Massa and Missie.' The girls were required to use the same
words, accompanied with a curtsy." Many children were assigned menial
tasks, such as holding their mistress's skirt off the dirt, brushing flies away
from her, or picking up her daughter's bonnet, reinforcing a sense of so-
cial inferiority. 28
Play, too, could buttress a sense of subordination. Thomas Jefferson
believed that "the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpet-
ual exercise of the most boisterous passions ... Our children see this, and
learn to imitate it." In fact many interracial games reenacted the relation-
ship between masters and slaves, reinforcing the plantation hierarchy and
accentuating the divide between white and black children. When the game
was wagon, slave children served as mules. "Mounted on his pony," Solo-
mon Northrup wrote, "a master's son often rides into the field with his
whip, playing the overseer, greatly to his father's delight." Slave children
remembered masters' children speaking with the voice of command: "I've
got an account to settle with you; I've let you go about long enough; I'll
teach you who's your master; go now God damn you, but I haven't got
through with you yet. " 29
A defining element of slave childhood was a tug-of-war between the
child's parents and the master and his family for the child's affection and
obedience. Slave owners frequently intruded on parental prerogatives in
an attempt to produce a loyal, diligent, obedient, and even grateful labor
force. Showing kindness to slave children played a critical role in sustain-
ing the masters' conception of themselves as benevolent, paternalistic,
truly Christian beings. Slave owners thought of themselves as kind and
even munificent, citing such examples as giving slave children candy, extra
rations, and presents at Christmas time. Many plantation mistresses took
special pride in nursing slave children during illnesses. Masters tried to
win children's affection with food and privileges that parents could not
give. It was difficult for slave children to resist these attentions and not re-
spond by being grateful. 30
Many enslaved children found themselves torn between the demands of
their owners and the interests of the slave community. Mattie Gilmore, an
Alabama slave, was required to report any thefts from the plantation
house, which meant betraying the community. Childhood represented a
battlefield in which parents and masters competed over who would exer-
cise primary authority over children. Harriet Jacobs described an incident
in which her father and her mistress called for her brother at the same
time. Willie "finally concluded to go to his mistress. When my father re-
proved him for it, he said, 'You both called me, and I didn't know which I
ought to go to first.' 'You are my child,' replied our father, 'and when I
call you, you should come immediately, if you have to pass through fire
and water."' Slave parents strove against all odds to instill a sense of pride
in their offspring and to educate them to maneuver through the complexi-
ties of slavery. Adeline, who grew up in Arkansas, said that from the time
she was a small child, she was told "that it was no disgrace to be a Negro
and had it not been for the white folks who brought us over here from Af-
rica as slaves, we would never have been here and would have been much
better off. " 31
From a very early age, slave parents taught their children the etiquette
of interacting with whites. They were told not to repeat things they heard
106 Huck's Raft
in the slave quarters. As Elijah P. Marrs, who was born in Shelby County,
Kentucky, in 1840, explained: "Mothers were necessarily compelled to be
severe on their children to keep them from talking too much. Many a
poor mother had been whipped nearly to death on account of their chil-
dren telling white children things." Children were also reminded that they
could never appear "uppity" or impudent or disrespectful. Above all, they
had to learn to flatter the egos of whites, by behaving in an obsequious
manner or feigning stupidity or gratitude without internalizing a sense of
inferiority or losing a sense of self-worth. 32
Learning how to obey racial etiquette without giving in to it was not
easy. A slave had to call even a young child "Young Massa" or "Young
Misses." Joseph Sanford's father advised him "to be tractable, and get
along with the white people in the best manner I could and not be saucy."
One slave mother ordered her son to "git dat hat off dat head and bow
your head fo' he git hear!" Amos Gadsden learned to "step aside at all
times for white people." Children were told not to stare as whites engaged
in conversation, lest they be accused of listening. Learning how to deceive
and how to separate one's outward demeanor from one's inner feelings
was crucial if a child was to preserve a sense of self-worth. Henry Bibb ex-
plained: "The only weapon of self defence that I could use successfully
was that of deception." Another ex-slave emphasized the importance of
deception, trickery, and role-playing even more bluntly: "Got one mind
for the boss to see; got another for what I know is me." Parents advised
mulatto children not to inquire about their parentage. Candis Goodwin
knew her master to be her father, but learned to respond to questions
about his identity by explaining that "tuckey buzzard lay me an de sun
hatch me." Renty, a Georgia slave, never asked his mother to name his fa-
ther because he felt "ashamed to ask her. " 33
Under slavery, stories, song, and folklore were an important source not
only of amusement but of edification. Many enslaved parents played on
children's fears to keep them out of trouble. One mother recited a chant
about the patrollers who roamed the countryside looking for fugitive
slaves. Slave children throughout the South learned to fear the characters
"Raw Head" and "Bloody Bones." Other tales helped sustain a sense of
distinctive identity and collective history. One story that was especially
common in the slave quarters told of white slave traders enticing Africans
with trinkets and holding them in pens before taking them across the
Atlantic. Among the most popular slave folktales were animal trickster
stories, like the Brer Rabbit tales, derived from similar African stories,
which told of powerless creatures who achieved their will through wit and
guile rather than power and authority. Much more than amusing stories,
these trickster tales were used to comment on the people around them and
convey lessons for everyday living. These stories taught slave children
how to function in a white-dominated world and held out the promise
that the powerless would eventually triumph over the strong. 34
Children were not simply slavery's victims; they were also active agents,
who managed to resist slavery's dehumanizing pressures. Like children of
the Holocaust, enslaved African-American children did not simply play
games to escape their misery; instead their games mirrored their surround-
ings. Games like "Hide the Switch," which concluded with the loser being
flogged, and "auction," in which children staged slave auctions, allowed
black children to reenact what they saw around them in order to under-
stand and cope with slavery's stresses. Other forms of play instilled a
sense of self-worth that was vital in resisting slavery's humiliations. Play
taught enslaved children that they were equal or even superior to their
white counterparts. "We was stronger and knowed how to play, and the
white children's didn't," recalled Felix Heywood of Texas. 35
To be sure, slave children played with homemade marbles, dolls, jump
ropes, and hobbyhorses. They roamed the woods and fields, hunting and
trapping small game, fishing, and gathering nuts and berries. Ring games,
hopscotch, and ball games were especially popular. In the winter many
slave children slid across the ice. But play was also a way to learn adult
skills and deal with the insecurities of life in bondage. Many games pre-
pared children for adult roles, such as cooking or caring for babies, or
taught values that would be useful in the adult world. Role-playing games
were especially popular, as children acted out baptisms, funerals, and
weddings, and dressed up like adults. The children on one plantation
liked to play conjure man in a game called hoodoo doctor, which gave
them a sense of power and agency. Play helped forge a sense of solidarity
among enslaved children and allowed them to create a semiautonomous
realm, beyond the direct control of their masters. 36
Children for whom education was forbidden learned to count while
playing hide and seek. Other games required children to recite the alpha-
bet. Verbal sparring known as "playing the dozens" sharpened young
people's wits. Ring games accompanied by songs and riddles allowed
slave children to give expression to feelings that often had to be repressed:
My old mistress promised me,

Before she dies she would set me free.
Now she's dead and gone to hell.
I hope the devil will burn her well. 37
Play required a great deal of ingenuity, helping to instill resourcefulness

and a sense of independence. In order to play ball, slave children had to
make balls out of yarn with a sock as covering. Some play involved petty
108 Huck's Raft
pilfering, such as taking fruit from orchards or eggs from a henhouse.

Games that allowed children to accumulate modest material possessions
were common. Slave children used corn kernels as a substitute for playing
cards. They also competed for marbles, made of bits of clay. Like free
children, slave children enjoyed competition that tested their physical
prowess, such as shooting, riding, and fishing. Sometimes children used
playtime to help older slaves. Richard Carruthers in Texas was posted
by fellow slaves as a lookout. "If I see the overseer comin' from the
Big House," he recalled, "I sing a song to warn 'em so they no get
whipped. " 38
Masters at times required slaves to participate in brutal sports for their
own entertainment. Henry Bibb described masters forcing slaves to take
part in bloody wrestling and boxing matches. But it is notable that slave
children rarely chose such games on their own; nor did they generally play
games that required the elimination of players. Even when they played
games similar to dodgeball, slave children did not require the "losers" to
leave the game. This may have been a reaction to the possibility that any
member of the slave community might be sold and their resistance to los-
ing any member of the community. 39
Denial of an education was among slavery's most painful traumas.
"There is one sin that slavery committed against me, which I will never
forgive," James W. C. Pennington declared. "It robbed me of my educa-
tion." Frederick Douglass agreed. When his mistress learned that he could
perform mathematics, she slapped him across his face and said, "If I ever
catch you making another figure anywhere I'll cut off your right arm."
From this incident, he learned an important lesson: that "Knowledge
unfits a child to be a slave." From that moment on, he viewed literacy as
"the direct pathway from slavery to freedom. " 40
On the eve of the Civil War the overwhelming majority of the slave
population was illiterate, a situation that most southern whites favored. A
delegate to the Virginia House of Delegates boasted, "We have as far as
possible closed every avenue by which light may enter their minds. If we
could extinguish the capacity to see the light our work would be com-
pleted." Although a few southern religious leaders believed that it was es-
sential for all Christians, including slaves, to be able to read the Bible,
others forcefully disagreed. The editors of the Presbyterian Herald asked
rhetorically: "Is there any great moral reason why we should incur the tre-
mendous risk of having our wives slaughtered in consequence of our
slaves being taught to read incendiary publications?" 41
Only four states-Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Virginia-
had laws on the books from 1830 to 1860 making it illegal to teach slaves
to read and write, and even these laws could be circumvented. But
throughout the region, a slave who knew how to read or taught others to
read risked a flogging or even the amputation of a finger. Titus Byrnes's
mistress told him "that if he was caught writing again his right arm would
be cut off." When Leonard Black's master caught him with a book, he
said, "if I ever knew you to have a book again, I will whip you half to
death." He then took the book and burned it. Daniel Dowdy recalled:
"The first time you was caught trying to read or write you was whipped
with a cow-hide the next time with a cat-o-nine tails and the third time
they cut the first jin offen your forefinger. " 42
Nevertheless, on the eve of the Civil War perhaps 5 or even 10 percent
of slaves were literate. A few masters and mistresses, such as the southern
abolitionists John Fee and Moncure Conway, the diarist Mary Boykin
Chesnut, and the pioneering feminist Sarah Grimke, subverted law and
custom and taught some slaves to read and write. In some instances such
efforts were motivated by a Protestant religiosity that stressed the impor-
tance of reading the Bible. But practical considerations more frequently
prevailed. A slave who could read or write was a valuable asset who could
maintain records, order supplies, and conduct correspondence.
A surprising number of enslaved children taught themselves to read.
Frederick Douglass yearned to learn the mysterious skill that he and other
African Americans were denied. "The frequent hearing of my mistress
reading the Bible aloud," he wrote, "awakened my curiosity in respect to
this mystery of reading, and roused in me the desire to learn." Steeling his
courage, he asked his mistress to teach him, and "in an incredible short
time, by her kind assistance, I had mastered the alphabet and could spell
words of three or four letters." But many whites feared that literate slaves
would question their status, and his master was one of them. He forbade
his wife to give young Douglass any further instruction. But "the determi-
nation which he expressed to keep me in ignorance only rendered me the
more resolute to seek intelligence." By stealth and trickery, Douglass
learned to write. He made friends with white boys he met and got them to
teach him how to write individual letters and words. Lacking paper and a
pen and ink, he practiced writing on a fence or a brick wall or pavement
with a lump of chalk. 43
Learning to read and write under slavery was an arduous process that
took tenacity and determination and often extended over several years.
Thomas Johnson of Richmond encouraged his young master to spell
words and read passages from his spelling book out loud. Richard Parker,
who was enslaved in Virginia, scavenged old nails until he had collected
enough money to buy a speller. He later gave white children marbles if
110 Huck's Raft
they taught him a letter or two. John Sella Martin learned to read while
working as an errand boy in a Columbus, Georgia, hotel where he lis-
tened to white workers wager on the correct spelling of words, while
Benjamin Holmes, an apprentice tailor in Charleston, studied signs and
the names on doors. After he was told that a slave should not learn to
read, Thomas Jones, as a child in North Carolina, went to a shopkeeper
and claimed that he had been sent to buy a book for a white child. To pre-
vent their masters from discovering their ability to read, children often
had to practice in the woods by the light of a fire. 44
Learning to write proved even more difficult than learning to read. Es-
pecially in rural areas, enslaved children encountered few examples of
cursive writing. Noah Davis, who was bound out to a shoemaker, learned
to write by copying the letters that he saw his master write in the lining of
boots and shoes. Henry Bibb explained that whenever he "got hold of an
old letter that had been thrown away, or a piece of white paper, I would
save it to write on. I have often gone off in the woods and spent the
greater part of the day alone, trying to write myself a pass, by writing on
the back of old letters." Frederick Douglass learned by watching ships'
carpenters fill out manifests for shipping lumber. For many children, liter-
acy was an act of resistance, which instilled a sense of self-worth and of-
fered psychological freedom. It allowed them to read the Bible for them-
selves and not depend on the interpretations of white southerners. Also, a
slave who could write could forge a pass. 45
Youth, for African Americans, was a much more uncertain and prob-
lematic period than it was for whites. Harriet Jacobs said that mothers of
slaves lived "in daily expectation of trouble" once their children became
teenagers. It was during the teen years that slave sales peaked. Most girls
were sold between the ages of thirteen and twenty, while most boys were
sold in their late teens and early twenties. 46
One reason why slave mothers looked to their children's adolescence
with dread was the fear of the sexual exploitation of enslaved teenage
girls by whites. Within the slave community there were strong norms
around sexuality in the teen years. Although some young slave women
gave birth outside wedlock in their teens, the overwhelming majority did
not. There was a substantial gap between the time slave women became
sexually fertile and when they gave birth to their first child. Even though
first menstruation for slave women occurred around the age of fifteen, the
average age at which slave women had their first child was nearly twenty-
one years. But sexual maturation also increased the likelihood of sexual
abuse. Virtually every female slave narrative includes a reference to the
threat or reality of sexual exploitation. James H. Hammond, a congress-
man, governor, and U.S. senator from South Carolina, whose wife bore
him eight children, purchased an eighteen-year-old slave named Sally and
her infant daughter, Louisa, in 1839. He made Sally his mistress, fathered
several children by her, and when the daughter reached the age of twelve
fathered several children by her. 47
Religion helped enslaved youth cope with the insecurities and fears gen-
erated by slavery. In early childhood many slave children were introduced
to religious teachings. One observer noted that "the Negroes on planta-
tions sometimes appoint one of their number, commonly the old woman
who minds the children during the day to teach them to say their prayers,
repeat a little catechism, and a few hymns, every evening." One former
slave explained how religion helped him deal with family separation:
"God started on me when I was a little boy. I used to grieve a lot over my
mother. She had been sold away from me and taken a long way off. One
evening ... I was walking along thinking about Mama and crying. Then a
voice spoke to me and said 'Blessed art thou."' Religion taught slave chil-
dren endurance. In the words of one spiritual: "They crucified my Lord,
and He never said a mumbling word." 48
During their teens many slave youth underwent a protracted period of
spiritual anxiety, during which they experienced intense feelings of sinful-
ness and fears of damnation. Then, without warning, many experienced a
vision in which they saw themselves as dead, destined for eternal damna-
tion, before undergoing the liberating experience of acceptance by God
and a sense that they had been born again. Josiah Henson was eighteen
when he underwent conversion, an experience triggered by the words of a
sermon he heard. The preacher had said that "Jesus Christ, the Son of
God, tasted death for every man; for the high, for the low, for the rich, for
the poor, the bond, the free, the Negro in his chains, the man in gold and
diamonds." Henson recalled: "I stood and heard it. It touched my heart
and I cried out: 'I wonder if Jesus Christ died for me."' In addition to reli-
gion, conjure, herbalism, ghost lore, witchcraft, and fortune telling
flourished in the slave quarters. Many young people, like Frederick
Douglass, turned to conjurers for charms or herbs that might help them
win another slave's love or protect them from punishment. Through the
spirit world, enslaved youth found the determination and resources to
withstand the destructive impact of slavery. 49
The outbreak of the Civil War precipitated new uncertainties in the
lives of enslaved children. When the Civil War began in 1861, nine-year-
old Booker T. Washington was awakened by his mother, who was "fer-
vently praying that Lincoln and his armies might be successful, and that
one day she and her children might be free." Slaves, parents and children
112 Huck~s Raft
alike, followed the progress of the war closely, he observed: "Every suc-
cess of the Federal armies and every defeat of the Confederate forces was
watched with the keenest and most intense interest." In an effort to gather
information, a Tennessee child "would go round to the windows and lis-
ten to what the white folks would say when they were reading their pa-
pers and talking after supper." The war penetrated into every aspect of en-
slaved children's lives, including their play. Candis Goodwin, a Virginia
slave, recalled that black and white children on her plantation would
"play Yankee and 'Federates, 'course de whites was always the 'Federates.
They'd make us black boys prisoners an' make b'lieve dey was gonna cut
our necks off. " 50
As the war dragged on and began to disrupt the plantation system,
many slave owners attempted to relocate their slaves into more secure ar-
eas, often in Texas. At least 30,000, and perhaps as many as 100,000,
slaves-mainly adult males-were moved out of the South Carolina and
Georgia lowcountry and Mississippi Valley, with many women and chil-
dren left behind to shift for themselves. In desperation, a growing number
of slave women and children fled to northern lines. A seventy-year-old
slave woman took twenty-two children and grandchildren on a flatboat
down the Savannah River, finding safety at last on a Union vessel. In an
attempt to maintain discipline, many slave owners spread horror stories
about advancing Union armies, telling children that "a Yankee was
somepin what had one great big horn on the haid and just one eye and dat
right in de middle of the breast." 51
After the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1,
1863, authorizing the enlistment of black soldiers, thousands of slave men
escaped from plantations to serve in the military. Altogether, ex-slaves ac-
counted for about two-thirds of the 180,000 black men who fought in the
Union army and the 30,000 who served in the navy. Many slaveholders
punished the families of men who enlisted by denying them food and
compelling wives and children to do the heavy outdoor labor previously
performed by the men. Private William Brooks's wife and children were
"required to the same work that he formerly had to do, such as chopping
wood, splitting rails &c." Elizabeth Scantling, who was fifteen years old
in 1865, said that she was required to plow with "a mule an' a wild un at
dat. Sometimes my hands get so cold I jes' cry." Some slave owners
evicted wives and children from their homes. Early in 1864 the wife of a
recent recruit, who was struggling to care for a two-year-old child, re-
called that she had "been severely beaten and driven from home by her
master and owner." Her master "told her never to return to him . . . and
that he would not support the women." In a poignant letter to her hus-
band, Martha Glover, a Missouri slave, wrote: "Remember all I told you
about how they would do me after you left-for they do worse than
they ever did & I do not know what will become of me & my poor little
children." 52
In November 1863 aid workers estimated that at least 50,000 slaves,
mainly women and children, had fled to refugee camps. They had no shel-
ter except crude tents fashioned out of leaves and branches, "fit for noth-
ing but to protect them from night dews." Lacking bedding, thousands
slept on the bare ground; many were "half naked." Delays in distributing
rations and a lack of cooking facilities left some starving. "No language,"
aid workers reported to President Lincoln, "can describe the suffering,
destitution and neglect which prevail in some of their 'camps.' The sick
and dying are left uncared for, in many instances, and the dead unburied.
It would seem, now, that one-half are doomed to die." One Union officer
described the suffering in particularly gripping terms: "the suffering from
hungar & cold is so great that these wretched people are dying by
scores-that sometimes thirty per day die & are carried off by wagon
loads, without coffins, & thrown promiscuously, like brutes, into a
trench." The plight of fugitive slaves was particularly bleak in the border
states, where slavery remained legal. Most Union officials took the posi-
tion that slave owners were responsible for caring for slaves, and refused
to provide food or shelter to fugitives. Not until March 1865 did Con-
gress adopt a joint resolution freeing the wives and children of black sol-
diers and future recruits. 53
Slavery's abolition as a legal institution was followed by a protracted
struggle to define the meaning of freedom. Childhood quickly became a
central battleground in this struggle. Former slave owners viewed black
children as a potential source of labor and used apprenticeship laws to
force them to work without wages. Any fatherless children or any whose
fathers "do not habitually employ their time in some honest industrious
occupation" could be bound out as orphans to their former master. In ad-
dition, children whose mothers were not legally married might be classi-
fied as bastards who could be legally indentured. Children of parents
deemed "unfit" could also be indentured without their parents' consent. 54
Many former slaveholders went to Orphan's Courts and invoked ap-
prenticeship laws to claim the labor of those under the age of twenty-one.
Within a month of the end of the Civil War, more than 2,500 African-
American children were apprenticed to former slave owners. At the same
time, landowners invoked the threat of indenturing children to force adult
males to sign labor contracts. A federal official in Maryland's Eastern
Shore described the situation there: "In many instances, boys of 12 and 14
114 Huck's Raft
years are taken from their parents, under the pretence that they (the par-
ents) are incapable of supporting them, while the younger children are left
to be maintained by the parents." He explained that "this is done without
obtaining the parent's consent" and that the Maryland courts did not take
"any testimony relative to the capability of the parents to support their
children." An Army chaplain in Mississippi described a subterfuge that
many former slave owners used to circumvent laws that required "ap-
prentices" to be freed at the age of twenty-one: they openly lied about the
young person's age. He explained: "Children are almost invariably bound
out from two to 12 years younger than they are." He described one case
where a former slave named Sam, who was eighteen years old, was de-
scribed as "6 years & six months old! " 55
Lacking land, draft animals, and tools, the families of former slaves
only had one resource to draw upon, their family's labor. Without their
children's labor, these families were invariably forced into economic de-
pendency on their former masters, but federal authorities were reluctant
to tamper with apprenticeship. Eager to reduce the number of African
Americans eligible for relief, fearful that the unemployed would starve or
turn to crime, the Freedman's Bureau sought to restore plantation produc-
tion as rapidly as possible. The bureau took the official position that
"children may be bound to service with the consent of their parents only."
But in practice the bureau acquiesced in the apprenticeship of thousands
of black children. One apprenticeship agreement required a thirteen-year-
old to labor ten hours a day on his master's farm and be "respectful in his
deportment." He received no salary for his efforts; his compensation took
the form of "Board, Clothing, and Medical Attendance." One Freedmen's
Bureau agent in 1867 recognized that "the binding out of children seems
to the freedmen like putting them back into Slavery." But he was con-
vinced that former masters were better able to care for the "apprentices"
and, without appreciating the depths of family ties, claimed that the freed-
men, too, simply wanted the children's labor. As he wrote sarcastically:
"In every case where I have bound out children, thus far Some Grand
Mother or fortieth cousin has come to have them released. " 56
Although many white southerners defended apprenticeship as a way to
care for orphans, it was essentially a system of labor exploitation. Most
apprentices were of working age, mainly between the ages of ten and thir-
teen. Most-were bound without their parents' consent, received no train-
ing, and were held beyond the legal age. One North Carolina woman to
whom the bureau indentured six children was a pauper and was in fact
hiring the children out. In order to obtain land, some African-American
families were forced to apprentice their children. Thomson Baker com-
plained in 1867 that his former owner came to his house and took "my

This 1868 photograph depicts an

African-American girl who was re-
sponsible for caring for a white in-
fant. Courtesy of the Florida Pho-
tographic Collection, Florida State
Archives, Tallahassee.
children by force and threten to kill my wife and drew his knife and cut at
hir and cut a handerkerf around her neck, and carried one of them home
and had it bound out without consent. " 57
The struggle over childhood involved more than labor. There was a
deep fear among many southern whites that young African Americans,
not socialized under slavery, would refuse to accept a subordinate place in
society. This led to widespread efforts to enforce subservience in all as-
pects of their lives, particularly their education. The state of Alabama
spent $22.96 each year on the education of a white child and 98 cents on
a black child. Inequities like this led Booker T. Washington to quip that it
was too great a compliment to expect black children to learn seven times
more easily than a white child. Black schooling typically took place in un-
painted one-room structures or in churches or private homes. One Missis-
sippi classroom had between 75 and 100 students. When Mary McLeod
Bethune taught in Daytona Beach, Florida, she was forced to use splinters
from burnt logs for pencils, and elderberries for ink. In 1899 one white
summarized the lessons that the schools were to teach: "Face the music;
avoid social questions; leave politics alone; continue to be patient; live
moral lives; live simply; learn to work and to work intelligently; learn to
work faithfully; learn to work hard ... know that it is a crime for any
teacher, white or black, to educate the Negro for positions which are not
open to him. " 58
Much of an African-American child's essential education took place
116 Huck-'s Raft
outside the classroom, where children experienced repeated indignities

and humiliations designed to teach them to accept a subordinate status.
When James Robinson boarded a bus in Knoxville early in the twentieth
century, he was told: "You damn little darkey, didn't anybody learn you
to stay in your place? You get the hell back there and wait till the white
people get on the bus." Years later the memory of this incident remained
fixed in his memory. "Inwardly, I boiled. It hurt inside, all the way down
... I wanted to cry but hate wouldn't let me ... What hurt me most of all
was that grown-up Negro men had not dared to speak in behalf of a help-
less child." 59
Scenes of racial violence left an indelible impression in many young Af-
rican Americans' memories. The theologian Benjamin Mays's earliest
memory was witnessing a group of white men, guns drawn, curse his fa-
ther and force him to bow down before them. "I was not yet five years
old," he later wrote, "but I have never forgotten them." The poet Pauli
Murray was six when she saw the body of an African-American man who
had been murdered because he had walked across a white man's water-
melon patch. The novelist Chester Himes remembered seeing his father
"crying like a baby" when a white hospital refused to admit his critically
injured brother. Even those who didn't witness violence firsthand heard
stories of racial slights, verbal and physical abuse, and outright violence.
The novelist Richard Wright recalled that he "would stand for hours on
the doorsteps of neighbors' houses listening to their talk, learning how a
white woman had slapped a black woman, how a white man had killed a
black man. It filled me with awe, wonder, and fear. " 60
One essential lesson that Benjamin Mays learned as a child was that "in
this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life
and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along
with white folks." This was a lesson repeated again and again by adults.
Zora Neale Hurston's father told her: "Lemme tell you something right
now, my young lady; you ain't white." As they watched a catfish thrash-
ing on a creek bank, Charles Holcombe's grandfather told him: "Son, a
catfish is a lot like a nigger. As long as he stays in his mudhole he is all
right, but when he gits out he is in for a passel of trouble. You 'member
dat, and you won't have no trouble wid folks when you grows up."
Young African Americans were repeatedly told to bite their tongues and
repress their feelings of anger. Richard Wright, who was once beaten be-
cause he failed to say "sir" to a white man, wrote: "The safety of my life
in the South depended upon how well I concealed from all whites what I
felt." When the future jazz musician Louis Armstrong was five years old,
he asked his mother about the sign "For Colored Passengers Only."
"Don't ask so many questions!" she replied. "Shut you mouth you little
fool. " 61
Many young African Americans underwent rituals of humiliation dra-
matizing their second-class status. Margaret Walker knew before she was
ten "what it was to step off the sidewalk to let a white man pass; other-
wise he might knock me off." Ed Brown, who grew up in Georgia before
World War I, said, "My motto was, when I was a boy, Don't Meet No-
body. When I seen someboy comin or heard a horse, I'd set outside the
road and they'd pass on by ... Because nine times out of ten you'd be
made to dance or to drink some whiskey." Margaret Walker, who grew
up in Mississippi, had to climb a fire escape to enter a theater, because
there was no entrance for blacks. 62
For some young African Americans, the only way to cope with humilia-
tion was to hate whites. Martin Luther King Sr. wrote: "my way to pro-
tect myself, I thought, was to build around myself an armor made of my
hatred of whites ... To hate those responsible made it bearable, and so I
indulged myself and began to despise every white face I saw." Many chil-
dren grew up with intense feelings of helplessness. William Henry
Holtzclaw remembered that he and his siblings "would often cry for food
until falling here and there on the floor we would sob ourselves to sleep."
Yet if parents emphasized the importance of self-restraint and self-control,
they also showed children how to maintain a sense of self-respect and self-
worth. "When I was a boy your age," Ely Green's grandfather told him,
"I was ... put on the block and sold with five other brothers and sisters."
Pauline Fitzgerald's father told her never to call a white person "marse,"
because she should not suggest that any white man was her master. "If I
ever catch you saying 'Marse' again," he said, "I'll whale the daylights out
of you. " 63
If African-American childhood was harsher than whites ever under-
stood, and if it sometimes inflicted scars that lasted a lifetime, it also left
black children with a sense of pride, family and communal loyalty, and re-
sistance to injustice. The strengths it transmitted were all the greater be-
cause of the obstacles that young African Americans had endured and
overcome.
chapter six
Childhood Battles of the Civil War
BORN INTO SLAVERY on the Georgia Sea Islands in 1848, Susie

Baker was six when she and a brother began to live with her maternal
grandmother in Savannah. At a secret school run by a free black woman,
she learned to read and write. For two years, she wrote, "We went every
day about nine o'clock, with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the
police or white persons from seeing them. We went in, one at a time."
Later she received additional instruction from another free black woman,
a white playmate, and her grandmother's landlord's son. 1
In April 1862 an uncle led Susie and his own family to a Sea Island un-
der Union control. Although she was only fourteen, she became a laun-
dress for the 33d U.S. Colored troops, one of the Union Army's first black
regiments, and led a day school for forty African-American children and a
night school for adults. She also nursed wounded soldiers. At first the
wounded and bloody soldiers shocked her, but soon she grew accustomed
to the sight. "It seems strange," she later wrote, "how our aversion to suf-
fering is overcome in war. How we are able to see the most sickening
sights and instead of turning away, how we hurry to assist in alleviating
their pain." 2
In times of war, age lines blur, new demands are made of the young,
and children cannot be insulated from adult realities. The Civil War was
no exception. The war brought excitement, but also anxiety and priva-
tion. It disrupted families, separated children from their fathers and
brothers, and thrust the young into the heated political debates of the
times. Unlike later wars in American history, young people were involved
Childhood Battles of the Civil War 119

This youth, known only as Taylor, served as a drummer with the 78th
Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry. The 78th Regiment played a crucial role
in helping the North maintain control over the Mississippi River and
dividing the Confederacy in two. Courtesy of the National Archives,
Washington, D.C.
120 Huck,s Raft
in all aspects of the Civil War, including fighting on the battlefield. Wil-
liam Black, the youngest wounded soldier, was twelve when his left hand
and arm were shattered by an exploding shell. An unknown number of
soldiers-probably around 5 percent-were under eighteen, and some
were as young as ten. Others served as scouts or nurses for the wounded.
Yet even those who did not participate in the war itself saw their lives al-
tered by the conflict. During wartime young people had to grow up
quickly, assuming the responsibilities of absent relatives. At Atlanta, Get-
tysburg, and Vicksburg, the young experienced war's harshest realities;
yet far from the battlefront, the conflict intruded into children's games,
magazines, and schools. 3
Even after the war ended, its repercussions continued to be felt. Parents
grew more protective of their children, and "child protection" became a
watchword for reform societies seeking to address such social problems as
child abuse and neglect. Children's experience during the Civil War per-
manently altered a generation of Americans, who in turn transformed
American society in the years that followed. For the children of former
Confederates, the war's legacy was apparent in the formation of organiza-
tions such as the Sons and the Daughters of the Confederacy, which
sought to ensure that their parents' sacrifices had not been in vain. Mean-
while the children of former Union soldiers took the lead in promoting
hiking, camping, and competitive sports to provide their offspring with a
"moral equivalent of war." The experience of children during the Civil
War forces us to rethink popular assumptions about children's fragility. It
demonstrates young people's resilience, but also the indelible impression
that war leaves on children's lives.
"What storeyes I shall have to tell when I get home," sixteen-year-old
William Wilbur Edgerton wrote his mother shortly after he joined the
107th New York Volunteer Infantry in 1862. Since the age of twelve,
Wilbur had taken on a series of odd jobs: fiddle playing, barrelmaking,
blacksmithing, and laboring as a farm hand and a factory worker. When
the war broke out, he enlisted, and two months later he fought in the bat-
tle of Antietam on the bloodiest day of the Civil War. In a letter to a youn-
ger brother he described the experience. "The balls flew around my head
like hail stones," he wrote, "and sounded like a swarm of bees." His
brother would "have no idea what it is to souldier off in a strange country
whare your comrades are a dieing off fast and no noing how soon before
your time will come." Unlike a friend who deserted, he declared, "I am no
coward and I never will disgrace the name of Edgerton by desertion or
Sneeking out of danger like some have." 4
The stories of boys and girls in blue and gray read like fiction. Indeed,
their exploits provided the basis for dozens of Civil War novels. Ken-
tucky-born William Horsfall was thirteen when he ran away from home
in December 1861 to serve as a drummer in the Union Army's First Ken-
tucky Infantry, and just fourteen when he earned the Congressional
Medal of Honor for saving the life of a wounded officer caught between
Union and Confederate lines at the battle of Corinth in Mississippi.
Pinkus Aylee, who served in a black regiment, was sixteen years old when
he rescued a young white soldier who had been wounded and left for
dead. Soon afterward both young men were captured and taken to
Andersonville, the dreaded Confederate prison camp in Georgia where at
least 12,000 of 30,000 Union prisoners died. Aylee was hanged immedi-
ately, but the white soldier survived to tell their story. Not all child sol-
diers were boys. Perhaps 400 women, including seventeen-year-old Mary
Seaberry of the 52d Ohio Infantry and nineteen-year-old Rosetta Lyons
Wakeman, took on male aliases in order to serve in the Civil War. As a
soldier, Wakeman explained, she was able to live as "independent as a
hog on the ice. " 5
In 1861 President Lincoln announced that boys under eighteen could
enlist only with their parents' consent. The next year he prohibited any
enlistment of those under eighteen. But heavy casualties led recruiting
officers to look the other way when underaged boys tried to enlist, and
thousands participated in the conflict as drummers, messengers, hospital
orderlies, and often as full-fledged soldiers. They carried canteens, ban-
dages, and stretchers and assisted surgeons and nurses. Many young sol-
diers signed up as drummers, who relayed officers' commands, signaling
reveille, roll call, company drill, and taps. In the heat of battle, many car-
ried orders or assisted with the wounded; at least a few picked up rifles
and participated in the fighting. Their motives for enlisting varied, includ-
ing patriotism and a desire to escape the boring routine of farm life or an
abusive family. A few were jealous of older brothers, and some young
northerners were eager to rid the country of slavery. For some young Con-
federates, there was a desire to repel northern invaders from their soil.
One southern boy made his feelings clear with words colored by irony: "I
reather die then be com a Slave to the North." Many letters convey a con-
viction that the hand of providence was at work in this terrible conflict,
and that blood needed to be shed if the nation was to fulfill its destiny. 6
Children employed a variety of ruses to enlist. Ned Hunter assured a re-
cruitment officer in Mississippi that although he was fifteen years old, he
"can shoot as straight as any who has signed today." Charles E. Goddard,
who was sixteen when he enlisted in the First Minnesota Regiment in late
April1861, simply lied about his age. Fifteen-year-old Elisha Stockwell Jr.
122 Huck~s Raft

A young "powder monkey" stands next to a 100-pound gun on the U.S.S. New Hamp-
shire. Powder monkeys carried explosives on board warships. Courtesy of the Library of
Congress.
persuaded a friend's father, a captain in the Union army, to accompany

him to the recruiting station. "The Captain got me in by my lying a little,
as I told the recruiting officer that I didn't know how old I was but I
thought I was eighteen. " 7
Like Henry Fleming, Stephen Crane's farmboy protagonist in The Red
Badge of Courage, the young soldiers' romantic illusions about military
glory evaporated under the harsh realities of combat. They suffered hun-
ger, fatigue, and discomfort, and gradually lost their innocence in combat.
Every aspect of soldiering comes alive in their letters and diaries: the
stench of spoiled meat, the deafening sound of cannons, the sight of

maimed bodies, and the randomness and anonymity of death. Excitement
over enlistment swiftly gave way to the boring routines of camp life and
marches. Because of a lack of equipment, fifteen-year-old Thomas Galwey
and other members of the Eighth Ohio Regiment paraded in civilian
clothes and drilled with "wooden guns, wooden swords, and cornstalks."
"Day after day and night after night did we tramp along the rough and
dusty roads," sixteen-year-old John Delhaney, a Confederate soldier,
wrote, "neath the most broiling sun with which the month of August ever
afflicted a soldier ... scarcely stopping to gather the green corn from the
fields to serve us for rations. " 8
Homesickness afflicted many young soldiers. John Delhaney described
his feelings on his first night in camp: "The strange faces and forms ...
were not calculated to allay my uneasiness of mind or lighten my hearts or
its cares." Teased by older soldiers, young soldiers suffered from inade-
quate food, clothing, and shelter. Charles Nott, a sixteen-year-old New
Yorker, said that during the winter months coffee was the only warm food
he had. "The pork was frozen and the water in the canteens solid ice, so
we had to hold them over the fire when we wanted a drink." On a snowy
night he and three other soldiers only had four blankets, "two of them
wet and froz~n," to cover them. 9
William Bircher was fifteen when he enlisted as a drummer boy in the
Second Veteran Volunteer Infantry in 1861. At first his diary entries re-
corded his excitement in training with his regiment, but soon his tone
grew somber. His regiment fought at the battle of Chickamauga after
marching for days without shoes; William had to wrap his bleeding feet in
rags torn from his own uniform. The young drummer boy described eat-
ing rotten food and drinking putrid water from puddles. He recalled:
After we had been in the field a year or two the call, "Fall in for your hard-
tack!" was leisurely responded to by only about a dozen men ... Hard-tack
was very hard. This I attributed to its great age, for there was a common be-
lief among the boys that our hard-tack had been baked long before the begin-
ning of the Christian era. This opinion was based upon the fact that the let-
ters "B.C." were stamped on many, if not, indeed, all the cracker-boxes. 10
Complaints about provisions appeared in many letters. "Rats are found to

be very good for food," a Union boy wrote in his diary, "and every night
many are captured and slain." "They are so tame," he observed, "that
they hardly think it worth while to get out of our way when we meet
them." 11
The young soldiers' most lasting impressions were of the dead and
124 Huck's Raft
wounded. Sixteen-year-old John Cockerill, a musician in a Confederate

unit at the battle of Shiloh, "passed the corpse of a beautiful boy in gray
who lay with his blond curls scattered about his face and his hands folded
peacefully across his breast." Cockerill admitted: "At the sight of the poor
boy's corpse, I burst into a regular boo-hoo." General Ulysses S. Grant's
son never forgot the sights after the siege of Vicksburg in 1863. "Here the
scenes were so terrible that I became faint," he wrote, "and making my
way to a tree, sat down, the most woebegone twelve-year-old in Amer-
ica." Fifteen-year-old Thomas Galwey of the Eighth Ohio Volunteer In-
fantry offered a particularly vivid picture of the face of battle: "Lieutenant
Delaney is shot . . . Lieutenant Lantry, poor fellow, is annihilated in-
stantly, near me. The top of his head is taken off by a shell. Our company
is narrowing more and more ... Fairchild is bleeding; Campion falls,
mortally wounded; Jim Gallagher's head is badly grazed, and he rolls,
coiled in a lump, down into a ditch." When the war was over, only 97 of
the unit's 990 men mustered out. 12
War, they quickly discovered, was hell. The boy soldiers described
drinking water from creeks stained red with blood, and piling up corpses
to make a windbreak for a field surgeon's operating theater. Edward
Spangler, a sixteen-year-old Pennsylvania private who suffered a leg
wound at Antietam, saw "hundreds of prostrate men with serious wounds
of every description." "Many to relieve their suffering were impatient for
their turn upon the amputation tables," he noted glumly, "around which
were pyramids of severed legs and arms. Many prayed aloud, while others
shrieked in the agony and throes of death." Some young soldiers, like
Henry Graves, gradually grew desensitized to violence. He wrote that he
was able to "look on the carcass of a man with pretty much the feeling as
I would do were it a horse or hog." But many others suffered from "sol-
dier's heart," or what later generations would call battle fatigue, shell
shock, or post-traumatic stress disorder. 13
The accounts of young Union prisoners at Confederate prison camps
are especially harrowing. Sixteen-year-old Michael Dougherty was
shocked by the sight of "different instruments of torture: stocks, thumb
screws, barbed iron collars, shackles, ball and chain. Our prison keepers
seemed to handle them with familiarity." William Smith, a fifteen-year-old
soldier in the 14th Illinois Infantry, was shaken by the physical appear-
ance of prisoners at Andersonville in Georgia, a "great mass of gaunt, un-
natural-looking beings, soot-begrimed, and clad in filthy trousers."
Ranson J. Powell, who was just thirteen years old and barely four feet tall
when he left his home in western Maryland to serve as a drummer with
the Union Army's 10th Virginia Regiment, was captured and confined at
Andersonville, where his daily rations consisted of a teaspoon of salt,

three tablespoons of beans, and half a pint of unsifted cornmeal, and wa-
ter came from a nearby creek that also served as the camp's sewer. When
fifteen-year-old Billy Bates managed to escape from Andersonville, he
weighed just sixty pounds. 14
The war's impact was not confined to the front lines. Far from the bat-
tlefields, the war also intruded upon children's lives. In August 1864 an
Atlanta girl wrote in her journal: "I was ten years old today. I did not
have a cake. Times are too hard. I hope that by next birthday, we will
have peace in our land." Carrie Berry was one of many children whose
lives were turned upside down by the war. Despite her youth, she had to
care for her pregnant mother and a sickly younger sister. She cooked,
cleaned, sewed, and scavenged for nails and lead that she could trade for
food. Each night she lived in dread of cannon shells. "One has busted un-
der the dining room which frightened us very much," she wrote. "One
passed through the smokehouse and a piece hit the top of the house and
fell through." After the Union Army under William Tecumseh Sherman
captured the city, new fears arose: "Some mean soldiers set several houses
on fire in different parts of town." In her journal she confessed that she
"could not go to sleep for fear that they would set our house on fire." 15
Near the battlefront, children, black and white, witnessed the destruc-
tion of farms and villages. Their letters and diaries describe foraging sol-
diers, exploding shells, burning cities, mangled corpses, and stacks of hu-
man limbs. A few gave directions to scouts or nursed the wounded, while
others sold gingerbread or buttermilk to soldiers or foraged battlefields
for souvenirs. Some were wounded or killed by stray shots or shells.
Children near the battle lines grew up rapidly during wartime. "In these
few months, my childhood has slipped away from me," wrote Celine
Fremaux, a twelve-year-old from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who was re-
sponsible for six younger siblings, including a newborn brother. "Neces-
sity, human obligations, family pride and patriotism had taken entire pos-
session of my little emaciated body." At an early age, children learned to
improvise. Evelyn Ward of Blandensfield, Virginia, explained what she
did when stores ran out of candy. "We used to cut down the sorghum
cane," she recalled, "peel off a joint, and chew the pith." Eight-year-old
Annie Marmion, whose father was a physician in Harpers Ferry, West Vir-
ginia, remembered that "the great objects in life were to procure some-
thing to eat and to keep yourself out of sight by day, and keep your candle
light hidden by night; lights of every kind, being regarded as signals to the
Rebels, were usually greeted by a volley of guns." 16
Children near the battle lines were vitally affected by the events sur-
126 Huck's Raft
rounding them. Before the battle of Gettysburg, fifteen-year-old Tillie

Pierce saw free blacks fleeing the town, fearing reenslavement by the ap-
proaching Confederate forces. She described "men and women with bun-
dles as large as old-fashioned feather ticks slung across their backs, almost
bearing them to the ground. Children also, carrying their bundles, and
striving in vain to keep up." During the battle, many children huddled in
cellars while cannons shook their homes' foundation. Fifteen-year-old
Albertus McCreary carried buckets of water to the soldiers. Army sur-
geons transformed Sue Chancellor's house into a makeshift hospital.
"They had taken our sitting room as an operating room," she recalled,
"and our piano served as an amputating table." Young Jeanie McCreary
assisted the nurses and surgeons. "I never thought I could do anything
about a wounded man," she wrote following the battle, "but find that I
had a bit more nerve than I thought I had." Two weeks after the momen-
tous battle was over, Annie Young wrote a cousin. "I have lived a lifetime
in the past few weeks," she said, "and yet, to look back, it seems like
some fearful dream. God grant that . . . none I love, may ever pass
through such scenes or witness such bloody, fearful sights! Words can give
you no conceptions. It was perfect agony." 17
As the war dragged on, hardship on the southern home front grew in-
tense. In the besieged city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, families sought ref-
uge in cliffside caves. A stray shell left one child, Lucy McCrae, buried un-
der a mass of earth. "The blood was gushing from my nose, eyes, ears,
and mouth," she later wrote, "but no bones were broken." Youngsters
participated in bread riots in Richmond, Virginia; Montgomery, Alabama;
Raleigh, North Carolina; and Columbia, South Carolina. A Richmond
girl defended the looting: "We are starving. As soon as enough of us get
together we are going to take the bakeries and each of us will take a loaf
of bread. That is little enough for the government to give us after it has
taken all our men." 18
For some children far from combat, war was an enthralling adventure.
Seven-year old Theodore Roosevelt, a New Yorker who had two uncles in
the Confederacy, enjoyed playing "Running the Blockade." When
Jeanette Gilder was nine, she ran away to join the Union army. A colonel
sent her back home, but she was unrepentant. "I was marched off to
bed," the recalled, "but I made a tent of my sheets, and with a broom for
a musket, drilled myself till I was so tired that I fell asleep." But for many
other boys and girls, the war meant taking on adult responsibilities.
Twelve-year-old Marion Drury had "to assume the work and responsibili-
ties of a man because most of the farmhands had gone into the army."
Anna Shaw, who was fourteen in 1861, grew up in the wilds of Michigan,
and later became an important suffrage leader, took on her father and
brothers' jobs. In addition to sewing, cleaning, and caring for boarders,
she taught school and cleared fields. 19
Perhaps the most striking development was the politicization of child-
hood. Even young children got caught up in the heated political debates of
the time. In a school composition that he wrote in 1861, eleven-year-old
Edward Bellamy, the author of the utopian novel Looking Backward,
marveled at how "this great nation gathered determination with God's
help to forever crush treason from this continent." Katie Darling Wallace
of Glencoe, Virginia, who was also eleven, expressed the opposing view-
point in her journal in July 1863. "I think our people did right to invade
the enemy's country," she wrote. "It is the only way to bring them to their
right senses." The ideas and emotions articulated by adults infected chil-
dren as well. 20
During wartime the games young people played, the entertainments
they enjoyed, and the books and magazines they read were saturated with
war imagery. Schoolbooks, which had avoided controversy before the
war, became politicized to an astonishing extent. The Union ABC began:
"A is for America, land of the free." A Confederate textbook asked its
readers: "If one Confederate soldier can whip seven Yankees, how many
soldiers can whip 49 Yankees?" The Geographical Reader for the Dixie
Children provided a Confederate perspective on the causes of the war:
In the year 1860, the Abolitionists became strong enough to elect one of their
men for President. Abraham Lincoln was a weak man, and the South be-
lieved he would allow laws to be made, which would deprive them of their
rights. So the Southern States seceded, and elected Jefferson Davis for their
President. This so enraged President Lincoln that he declared war, and has
exhausted nearly all the strength of the nation, in a vain attempt to whip the
South back into the Union.
In occupied parts of the South, schools became contested terrain, where

students, administrators, and parents battled over course content, school
activities, and songs. In New Orleans schools, Confederate sympathizers
wore mourning ribbons and refused to participate in pro-Union cere-
monies.21
Children's magazines, which had studiously avoided the slavery issue
before the war, incorporated war themes into their stories and poems.
Some, such as "The Soldier's Little Boy," a tale about a dying boy whose
father was killed at Antietam, prepared the young for the realities of
death. A few children actually published their own wartime newspapers.
In the fall of 1862 an editorial in one of these papers, the Concord, Mas-
128 Huck,s Raft
sachusetts Observer, declared: "War must become the daily vocation of

us all. " 22
The martial spirit also infected play. Boys held mock parades, skir-
mishes, and drills. Boys in Shenagno, Pennsylvania, formed their own mil-
itary company, elected a thirteen-year-old captain and held weekly drills
in a nearby schoolyard. A Virginia mother, Margaret Junkin Preston,
wrote that her children's "entire set of plays have reference to a state of
war." Her five-year-old son George "gets sticks and hobbles about, saying
that he lost a leg at the second battle of Manassass; tells wonderful stories
of how he cutt off yankees' heads, bayoneted them, &c." Politics became
an integral part of young people's experience. Seventeen-year-old Lizzie
H. Corning, who lived in Concord, New Hampshire, listened to political

War Spirit at Home, by Lilly Martin Spencer, 1866. As a mother reads a newspaper while
holding an infant on her lap, her children celebrate Ulysses S. Grant's victory at the battle
of Vicksburg in 1863 by marching and banging pots. Courtesy of the Newark (New
Jersey) Museum.
Childhood Battles of the Civ~l War 129
speeches, went to view battlefield panoramas, and raised money for the
troops. Many children collected books for soldiers and participated in
fundraising events (know as "sanitary fairs") during the war's last two
years to support soldiers' aid societies, soldiers' homes, and hospitals.
Northern girls raised money and collected supplies for Union troops by
selling handicrafts, foods, and even kisses. Some knitted mittens and
rolled bandages for soldiers. Clara Lenroot remembered scraping "away
at the linen, making fluffy piles of the soft lint" used to pack soldier's
wounds. 23
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott's tale of four girls growing up in Civil
War New England, remains the classic depiction of how middle-class girls
were transformed by the war into responsible adults. Its portrait of the
headstrong Jo, beautiful Meg, shy Beth, and temperamental Amy, and
their struggle to cope with genteel wartime poverty, provided generations
with insight into what it was like to grow up during the Civil War, sepa-
rated from one's father. In real life, too, girls' lives were shaken by war
and forced into early maturity. Emma Le Conte, the daughter of a Colum-
bia, South Carolina, chemistry professor, declared that the war left her
feeling dreadfully depressed. "It commenced when I was thirteen," she
wrote, "and I am now seventeen and no prospect yet of its ending. No
pleasure, no enjoyment-nothing . . . but the stern realities of life."
Compared with other South Carolina families, hers was doing well when
they ate two meals a day, including a dinner consisting of a small piece of
beef, some cornbread, potatoes, and hominy. But as the war dragged on,
her family's situation deteriorated. Their diet consisted of rancid salt pork
and stringy beef. She had to knit her own stockings and wear homespun
undergarments. The situation became so stressful that she found herself
unable to read. Nevertheless, she remained convinced of the righteousness
of the Confederate cause, and rejoiced in President Lincoln's assassina-
tion. "Hurrah!" she wrote. "Old Abe has been assassinated! It may be ab-
stractly wrong to be so jubilant, but I just can't help it ... We have suf-
fered till we feel savage. " 24
Far from weakening family bonds, wartime separation intensified many
fathers' commitment to their children. James Garfield, the future presi-
dent, worried that his daughter would forget him, asked his wife to ensure
that her memory of "papa, papa" not fade away. "Have her say it, so that
when I come she may know to call me." Joshua Chamberlain, a hero at
Gettysburg who later received Robert E. Lee's formal surrender at Appo-
mattox, was much more cautious. "If I return," he wrote, "they will soon
relearn to love me. If not, so much is spared them." Soldiers' letters to
their wives and children abounded with paternal advice about children's
130 Huck's Raft
diet, medical care, dress, and education. In an 1862 letter to his son, Con-
federate Major General Mansfield Lovell expressed pleasure that his son's
arithmetical skills were improving: "You do not take to it easily or natu-
rally and for that reason will have to apply yourself more studiously, than
you would to anything that you learned without trouble." "Write me as
often as you wish," he continued. "It will help to improve you in writing
in expressing your thoughts. " 25
Especially striking are the number of soldiers' letters that discuss poli-
tics with their children. During the Civil War, soldiers were driven to fight
not simply by loyalty to fellow members of their unit or fear of disgracing
themselves in the eyes of their community, but by deeply held political and
moral beliefs, which they communicated to their children. In an 1864 let-
ter to his daughter Loula, Tobias Gibson, an ardent Confederate, com-
plained that "American ideas of liberty have totally changed" since the
Union army of occupation had arrived in Louisiana. "As far as I know the
white children are to grow up in ignorance or mix in the same cabin with
the Negro with the same Yankee Marm for the teacher!" But many letters
were much more personal. Twenty-two-year-old Henry Abbott wrote his
five-year-old brother that "when you get mad & begin to cry, it makes the
rebel bullets come a good deal nearer to me." Henry was killed in battle in
1864. In a letter to her father, sixteen-year-old Maria Lewis of Ebensburg,
Pennsylvania, wrote: "0 papy should eny thing happen I know it would
kill mammy and when I was sick I was so afraid I would die and not get
to see you but I am spared and hope to see you again." Her father, Cap-
tain Andrew Lewis of the 40th Pennsylvania Regiment, died on July 2,
1862, near Richmond, Virginia. 26
In an 1884 address, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was twenty when
the Civil War began, and twice seriously wounded in battle, believed that
his generation had "been set apart by its experience. Through our great
good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire." The Civil
War had a profound and lasting impact on American culture and society,
and the children who grew up during the war learned lessons that they
carried into the postwar years. Among many future intellectuals and re-
formers, the war bred a contempt for softness and sentimentality and a
deep distrust of political ideologies. Wartime experience encouraged an
emphasis on organization and professionalism that was evident in post-
war efforts to care for orphans and the children of the poor. The experi-
ence of the Civil War also fueled a search for moral equivalents to war, in-
cluding an emphasis on competitive sports and the strenuous life, which
had a powerful impact on postwar middle-class boyhood. One group, the
children of abolitionists, perpetuated prewar idealism by continuing to
work for racial justice. These descendants of the original abolitionists

took a leading role in postwar efforts to establish schools and colleges for
African Americans, the struggle against lynching, and the founding of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. 27
In the South, defeat nurtured nostalgia for the "Lost Cause" and the so-
cial order that children's fathers and older brothers had fought to defend.
At the war's end, Emma Le Conte lamented: "For four years there has
been throughout this broad land little else than the anguish of anxiety-
the misery of dear ones sacrificed-for nothing!" But later the view that
the war had been a waste gave way to a far different outlook. Edwin H.
McCaleb, who became a Confederate officer when he was only seventeen,
embodied the attitudes that shaped the white southern response to Recon-
struction. He deplored the assassination of President Lincoln but also
deeply resented any attempts by the North to promote racial equality.
"We would gladly substitute white for slave labor," he wrote in 1865,
"but we can never regard the Negro our equal either intellectually or
socially. " 28
After northern Republicans seized control of Reconstruction from Pres-
ident Andrew Johnson, denied representatives from the former Confeder-
ate states their congressional seats, and wrote the Fourteenth and Fif-
teenth Amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing African Americans
equal protection of the laws and giving black men the vote, many young
southern whites responded with violence. Having endured wartime hard-
ship a~d a postwar sense of powerlessness, they sought to reassert their
white supremacist racial ideology. Organizations such as the Sons of the
Confederacy and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which arose
after the war, expressed reverence for the sacrifices of the Civil War gener-
ation and took the position that sectional reunion required the North to
allow the South's "natural" leaders to solve the region's racial problems
without outside interference. Efforts to segregate, disenfranchise, and con-
trol the South's black population through legislation and violence were
part of the war's legacy to the younger generation, which venerated its
Confederate fathers and sought to reassert control over African Ameri-
cans who had not been raised under slavery. 29
Perhaps the Civil War's greatest impact on children was on family life.
Like the American Revolution, the Civil War produced huge numbers of
orphans and impoverished fatherless families. In Boston in 1865 an esti-
mated 6,000 vagrant children lived on the streets; in New York the figure
reached 30,000. More than 100 bodies of newborn children were found
in empty barrels or in the rivers in New York each month. By the late
1860s charitable societies were caring for more than 12,000 dependent
132 Huck~s Raft
children in New York City alone. To cope with the worsening problem of
dependent children, eight states opened institutions to care for dead sol-
diers' orphans in 1865 and 1866, and a decade after the war, Pennsylva-
nia subsidized the care of more than 8,000 soldiers' orphans. Conditions
in these institutions were horrendous. In Illinois's Soldiers' Orphans'
Home, which had only two bathrooms and no playground or infirmary, a
three-year-old was scalded to death when older children were placed in
charge of the baths. 30
Many fathers returned home to discover that their children did not rec-
ognize them. To five-year-old Hamlin Garland, his father seemed like
"only a strange man with big eyes and [a] care-worn face." Some men, so-
cialized to a soldier's life, found it difficult to readjust to domesticity. One
boy later recalled: "My father brought back from two years' campaigning
... the temper and habit of a soldier." Noting that "the moments of ten-
derness were few," he said that he and his siblings soon learned "that the
soldier's promise of punishment was swift and precise in its fulfillment. " 31
In a reaction to wartime disruptions, postwar parents strengthened and
intensified family bonds. Middle-class parents responded to the war's
traumas through an intensified commitment to a protected, prolonged
childhood. Parents who had been rushed to adulthood sought to provide
their offspring with a sheltered childhood. They not only kept their chil-
dren home longer than in the past, but also emphasized the idea of insu-
lating children from the harsher realities of adult life. But the war also
altered-and diminished-the father's role in the family. While they re-
mained authority figures of last resort, postwar fathers were more disen-
gaged from family life than their antebellum counterparts and more likely
to participate in activities outside the home, such as fraternal orders and
men's clubs. The war itself may have contributed to this reorientation by
intensifying the mother-child dyad even as it drew many men outside the
home. For many men, the military had promoted male bonding, while for
many women, the experience of managing homes on their home encour-
aged them to assert new authority over the family in the postwar years. 32
chapter seven
Laboring Children
LucY LARCOM, the ninth child in a family of ten, was eleven

when she went to work in a Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mill in 1836.
Her father, a sea captain, had died a year earlier, and Lucy's mother, a
boardinghouse proprietor, was barely able to support the family. Lucy felt
"it would be a pleasure to feel that I was not a trouble or burden or ex-
pense to anyone," so she and an older sister applied to be mill girls. The
mill had one job available; because Lucy was taller than her sister, she re-
ceived the job. 1
Initially Lucy enjoyed the sense of independence and peer-group com-
panionship she experienced in the mill. She and half a dozen girls changed
the bobbins on the machines every three-quarters of an hour, and spent
the rest of the time frolicking amid the machinery, "teasing and talking to
the older girls, or entertaining ourselves with games and stories in a cor-
ner, or exploring" the mill's mysteries. Soon, however, she felt frustrated
by the low pay (two dollars for a week's work), the long hours (from five
o'clock in the morning till seven at night, with a half-hour for breakfast
and dinner, six days a week), and the abysmal working conditions (the
windows nailed shut, the dim light, the dust and fabric fibers that filled
the air). Above all, she complained about the lack of educational opportu-
nities, the noise, and routine. "The buzzing and hissing whizzing of the
pulleys and rollers and spindles and flyers," she later recalled, "often grew
tiresome ... When you do the same things twenty times-a hundred times
a day-it is so dull!" She remained in the mill for ten years, then left for
Illinois with a married sister. 2
134 Huck,s Raft
Capitalist expansion and growth carried far-reaching consequences for

children's lives. For the urban middle class, increasing economic affluence
allowed parents to provide an extended, protected childhood; but for the
laboring classes, a sheltered childhood was impossible. The demands of a
market economy made their children indispensable economic resources,
whose labor could be exploited in new ways. Unlike their middle-class
counterparts, children in laboring families were expected to repay their
parents' sacrifices by contributing to the family economy. These children
worked not because their parents were heartless, but because their labor
was essential to their family's survival.
The wrenching social and economic changes of the nineteenth cen-
tury-the explosive growth of cities and industry, the rapid movement
into the trans-Mississippi West, the sharp increase in foreign immigration,
and the expansion of commercial agriculture and tenant farming-pro-
duced patterns of schooling, play, and work that differed dramatically by
class, ethnicity, gender, race, and region. Indeed, at no point in American
history was childhood as diverse as it was in the mid and late nineteenth
century. The experiences of Lucy Larcom and two other girls-Lai Chow
and Ann McNabb-offer useful examples. Lai Chow was only twelve
years old when she was sold by her family in China and smuggled along
with two dozen other young girls in crates marked "dishware" on a vessel
bound for San Francisco, where she was forced into prostitution. Ann
McNabb, who migrated from Ireland to Philadelphia in the 1860s,
worked as a live-in cook. Yet these girls' diverse experiences were the
product of interconnected economic developments. The early stages of in-
dustrialization generated a voracious demand for child labor at the same
time that it disrupted rural household industries, stimulating a massive
migration from farms and rural villages in Europe and the eastern United
States to rapidly growing cities and factory towns. Growing middle-class
affluence created intense demand for domestic servants, most of whom
were teenaged or even younger. Meanwhile the growth of an integrated
national market propelled hundreds of thousands of migrants-including
400,000 pioneers and more than a quarter-million Chinese immigrants-
to the Far West. 3
Several shared realities cut across the boundaries of class, ethnicity, gen-
der, or region, especially a high incidence of child mortality. As late as
1895, 18 percent of children-one in six-died before their fifth birthday.
While mortality was greatest among the poor, most affluent families with
five or six children experienced the death of at least one child. Another
commonality was heavily gendered expectations for sons and daughters.
Girls were much more likely to be sheltered in the house, to take part in
Laboring Children 135
housework, and to hand over all their earnings to their parents, while
boys were more likely to be encouraged to move into the outside world
and explore its possibilities. But regional and especially class differences
remained the defining feature of family life, work, schooling, and play
in the United States throughout the century. It was not until the mid-
twentieth century that educators and self-described "child savers" suc-
ceeded in universalizing the middle-class norm of an extended, protected
childhood. 4
During the nineteenth century, only a small minority of children experi-
enced the middle-class ideal of maturation taking place gradually, in care-
fully calibrated steps, within institutions segregated from adult society.
The vast majority of families living in urban working-class neighbor-
hoods, in mill and mining towns, and in the rural Northeast, South, Mid-
west, and Far West continued to rely heavily on children's labor and earn-
ings. On farms, children as young as five or six pulled weeds and chased
birds and cattle away from crops. By the time they reached eight, many
tended livestock, milked cows, churned butter, fed chickens, collected
eggs, hauled water, scrubbed laundry, and harvested crops. In urban ar-
eas, working-class children ran errands, scavenged, participated in street
trades, or took part in outwork, forms of manufacturing that took place
in the home.
As for schooling, its amount varied starkly by ethnicity, social class, and
geographic location. While the amount of grammar school education in-
creased sharply for all groups-with enrollment reaching half of all young
people five to nineteen in 1850 and almost 60 percent in 1870-enroll-
ment was much higher in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West than in
the South, where fewer than half of all children attended school as late as
1890. In rural areas the school year was much shorter than elsewhere be-
cause of seasonal labor needs. While urban students typically began their
education around the age of seven, attended school nine months a year,
and completed a year of high school, rural children went to school six
months a year for less than five years. Schooling differed not only in
length but in content and form. Urban students attended schools with
age-graded classrooms, a standardized curriculum, and trained educators,
while rural students attended one-room schools containing a wide range
of ages with teachers lacking formal preparation. Class and region also
heavily influenced the age of school leaving. In increasing numbers, the
urban middle class enrolled in high school and remained there until the
age of sixteen or seventeen. In contrast, around puberty, farm children
went off temporarily to work as hired laborers, while the urban working-
class entered regular employment at "apprentice" or "youth" wages. 5
136 Huck~s Raft
The settings in which children played varied widely, as did the games
they played and the toys they had. By the 1870s middle-class children had
a growing number of store-bought, manufactured toys and board games,
designed to inculcate moral values and gender norms and prepare boys
for future careers. In one popular board game, The Mansion of Happi-
ness, players passed by "Honesty" and "Idleness" before reaching "Hap-
piness." Working-class and farm children, in contrast, played with home-
made toys-dolls made from corncobs, balls made from socks, or jacks
from corn kernels-and amused themselves not in nurseries or playrooms
but in rural fields or city streets. Compared with their urban middle-class
counterparts, working-class and farm children enjoyed much less privacy
inside the home, but greater freedom from parental oversight outside
the home. After 1870 urban middle-class children participated in adult-
organized youth groups and team sports, while urban working-class chil-
dren enjoyed commercial amusements, notably penny arcades, dance
halls, and amusement parks. 6
The expansion of a market economy and the growth of industry had
paradoxical effects on children's lives. Middle-class children were ex-
cluded from the world of work while the economic value of working-class
and farm children expanded and their labor potential became more essen-
tial to their family's economic well-being. The earnings of children be-
tween the ages of ten and fifteen often amounted to 20 percent of a fam-
ily's income and spelled the difference between economic well-being and
destitution. A teenage son's income frequently exceeded his father's. Accu-
mulating a savings account or purchasing a house required sons and
daughters to subordinate their personal wishes to larger family consider-
ations. Key decisions-about the length of schooling or the age of entry
into the workforce-were based on family needs rather than individual
choice. Among many ethnic groups it was common for daughters to leave
school at an early age and enter work so that their brothers could con-
tinue their education. It was also customary for a daughter to remain un-
married and to care for younger siblings or aging parents. The coopera-
tive family economy made decisionmaking a by-product of collective
needs rather than of individual preferences.
While the Industrial Revolution did not invent child labor, it did make
child labor more visible by removing child and teenage workers from do-
mestic settings. The first textile mill in the United States, Samuel Slater's
mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, which opened in 1790, had a workforce
consisting of seven boys and two girls, ages seven to twelve, who operated
the factory's seventy-two spindles. Slater soon discovered that children,
"constantly employed under the immediate inspection" of a supervisor,
could produce three times as much as whole families working without su-
pervision in their own homes. To keep the children alert and awake, Slater
whipped them with a leather strap and sprinkled them with water. On
Sundays the children attended a special school established by Slater. 7
During the early phases of industrialization, textile mills and agricul-
tural tool, metal goods, nail, and rubber factories had a ravenous appetite
for cheap, tractable teenage laborers. In many mechanized industries,
from a quarter to half the workforce was under the age of twenty. Gen-
erally child and teenage laborers were hired not by the mill or factory
owner, but by a skilled adult worker, who was responsible for their disci-
pline. Child workers were disciplined by ridicule and taunting as well as
by physical punishments, including slaps, ear boxing, and whippings. 8
Even before the rise of the factory system, the significance of child labor
had grown. During the late eighteenth century the growth of household
industries greatly increased young children's economic value. Merchant
capitalists distributed raw materials to individual households, which then
manufactured finished goods. Dexter Whittemore, the owner of a country
store in rural Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, distributed palm leaves to lo-
cal farm families. Family members braided the leaves into hats in ex-
change for credits on the store's ledgers. For cash-strapped farm families,
the opportunity to earn cash was a godsend. The money was used to pay
off debts, finance farm improvements, purchase household goods, or send
children to school. Domestic industries provided work for thousands of
rural children, and the quantity of goods they produced was staggering. In
1809 farm families near Philadelphia produced more than 230,000 yards
of cloth for sale, four times the amount produced by the area's textile
mills. Massachusetts farm households produced more than 100,000 pairs
of shoes-more than all the nation's professional shoemakers combined.
After 1820, however, household industries declined and were replaced by
manufacturing in city shops and factories. 9
Apprenticeship, like domestic manufacturing, also diminished. Until the
early nineteenth century, apprenticeship was how boys were trained in
skilled trades. More than a system of labor, apprenticeship was also a way
to deal with potentially disruptive adolescents. Like the system of inden-
tured servitude it resembled, the apprenticeship system provided a foster
home for youths in their teens. Compared with its rigidly regulated Euro-
pean counterpart, the American system of apprenticeship was an "anemic
institution," providing a much briefer experience. Nevertheless, appren-
ticeship was a major part of the process of growing up in early America,
with apprentices usually living in the master's house under his watchful
eye. 10
138 Huck~s Raft
Following the American Revolution, however, the apprenticeship sys-

tem disintegrated as teenagers obtained new opportunities to enter trades.
The Revolution itself was partly responsible for the system's demise, as
many youths were no longer willing to display the deference that the mas-
ter-apprentice relationship required. Economic uncertainties contributed
as well. Faced by sharp fluctuations in demand for the goods they pro-
duced, masters shortened the terms of apprenticeships, preferring simply
to hire workers when demand was high. The introduction of labor-saving
machinery and an influx of immigrants from Europe accelerated the insti-
tution's demise. In trades such as printing, mechanization produced a glut
of skilled artisans, and "slop shops" offered employment to young men
with a minimum of skills. By the 1850s most apprentices were no more
than semiskilled workers or machine tenders. Meanwhile, manuals,
printed guides, and lectures and demonstrations at mechanics' institutes
allowed young men to learn craft skills on their own without going
through a formal apprenticeship. 11
By the mid-nineteenth century, apprenticeship resembled most other
employment relationships. Instead of living in a master's home, appren-
tices received cash wages and resided in boardinghouses in distinct work-
ing-class neighborhoods. The paternalistic view of a master who super-
vised behavior and provided for an apprentice's welfare was replaced by a
new conception of labor as a commodity that could be acquired or dis-
posed of according to the laws of supply and demand. No longer did mas-
ters advertise in newspapers for the return of runaway apprentices; in-
stead they simply hired new employees. As the apprenticeship system
declined, male teenagers were pushed out of the skilled trades and into
unskilled labor. In Newark, New Jersey, the proportion of white males be-
tween the ages of fifteen and twenty in the skilled trades fell by over a
third, while the proportion who were jobless or in school rose from 7 to
2 7 percent. In the future, teenage workers would be used primarily as
helpers, messengers, or unskilled laborers. 12
As the close, highly ritualized master-apprenticeship bonds disap-
peared, advice books, self-help manuals, mechanics' institutes, apprentice
libraries, and lyceums proliferated to help young men navigate the
difficult transition away from home during the teen years and the increas-
ing choices, opportunities, and possible roadblocks they faced. Appren-
ticeship's decline also encouraged educational reformers to devise the
modern high school as an instrument to fill the void left by the end of this
system of labor. 13
The demise of apprenticeship coincided with a shift in authority rela-
tions within the working-class family. In certain respects the apprentice-
ship system had reinforced paternal power, by giving a father a formal say
in a son's career choice. Under common law, a son remained under his fa-
ther's control until the age of twenty-one. Fathers had a legal right to their
sons' earnings and had the power of consent over their sons' decision to
leave an apprenticeship and assume a new one. By the mid-nineteenth
century, increasing numbers of sons were contesting their father's author-
ity to dictate their choice of a career. At the same time a growing number
of the sons of skilled laborers and prosperous commercial farmers, con-
vinced that apprenticeships were no longer a secure route to a promising
career, were staying at home longer and attending school beyond the mid-
dle elementary grades in order to pick up the skills necessary to become a
clerk or a broker. For these young men, ties between parents and children
were intensified and prolonged, yet paternal authority was giving way to
maternal counseling and peer companionship. 14
The breakdown of the apprenticeship system produced a class division
tied to decisions made at puberty. Especially after the economic panic of
1837, young men either entered a factory between the ages of twelve and
fourteen, a choice that doomed them to a life of unskilled or semiskilled
labor, or remained in school into their mid-teens before entering a clerk-
ship or another salaried position in their late teens or early twenties.
Those who pursued school had the care and shelter of the middle-class
home. Those who went to work in factories developed a very different
and distinctive urban working-class youth culture. Cash incomes made
possible the advent of young "dandies," who patronized theaters and mu-
sic halls, paraded through city streets in ostentatious dress, and prome-
naded with young women. Barber shops, boardinghouses, firehouses, sa-
loons, and theaters provided settings where young working-class men
could socialize. Prizefights, horse races, and politics played an important
role in the new peer culture. In the early 1850s the bitterly nativist Know
Nothing political party overwhelming drew its most ardent supporters
from these same youths in their teens and twenties. 15
Many young unskilled laborers and factory operatives spent their free
time congregating· on street corners, committing petty theft, or seeking en-
tertainment in bowling alleys, tippling shops, gaming houses, and the-
aters. Seeking a sense of belonging, identity, and excitement, they were
particularly likely to join volunteer fire companies that allowed them to
don hats, badges, and uniforms, and fight fires at close range, sports
teams, or youth gangs, which engaged in the ethnic, racial, and religious
rioting that plagued mid-nineteenth-century cities. In the deadliest riot of
the nineteenth century, the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, most of
those arrested were under twenty-one. 16
140 Huck's Raft
Whatever the gains in personal freedom and flexibility that came with
apprenticeship's demise, there were also losses. Apprenticeship had al-
lowed young men to gain self-respect, independence, competence, and
maturity while remaining connected to adults who had an obligation to
them. It provided a balance between youthful independence and adult
mentoring that has since been lost. The initiation rites, parades, and other
rituals that signaled a young person's entrance into a particular trade and
the world of adulthood were swept away. Instead urban adolescents either
attended high school and remained in the parental home or else were cast
adrift to make their way as best they could. Some-like the young Samuel
Clemens, who arranged informal apprenticeships as a printer and later as
a riverboat pilot-gradually found their way to a successful adulthood.
But many others did not; caught in the tide of a modern market economy,
they became delinquents, joined gangs, or drifted into a life of poverty
and unskilled labor, joining America's growing underclass of the chroni-
cally unemployed or underemployed. 17
The same economic developments that transformed the experience of
teenage males also drastically altered the lives of young working-class
women. For young women, the early stages of the Industrial Revolution
increased employment opportunities beyond the traditional options of do-
mestic service and clothesmaking. Young unmarried women made up a
majority of the workforce in cotton textile mills and a substantial minor-
ity of workers in factories manufacturing ready-made clothing, furs, hats,
shoes, and umbrellas. Some, like Lucy Larcom, found the new opportuni-
ties exhilarating. Unlike farm work or domestic service, employment in a
mill offered female companionship and an independent income. Wages
(which could be as little as $1.45 a week) were twice what a young
woman could make as a seamstress, tailor, or schoolteacher, and mill girls
were able to spend their free time attending lectures, participating in sew-
ing groups and literary improvement circles, and producing their own
publications such as the Lowell Offering. What made mill work tolerable
was the fact that employment was a temporary expedient before mar-
riage. Most worked in the mills fewer than four years and frequently in-
terrupted their stints in the mill for several months at a time with trips
back home. 18
By the 1830s, however, increasing competition- caused deteriorating
working conditions that drove native-born girls out of the mills. Em-
ployers cut wages, lengthened the workday, and required mill workers to
tend four looms instead of two. Hannah Borden, a young Fall River, Mas-
sachusetts, textile worker, was required to have her looms running at five
in the morning. She was given an hour for breakfast and half an hour for
lunch. Her workday ended at half past seven, fourteen and a half hours
after it had begun. For a six-day work week she received between $2.50
and $3.50. Such labor was destructive of health and well-being. The mill
girls militantly protested the wage cuts and worsening work environment.
In 1834 and again in 1836, they went on strike. Eleven-year-old Harriet
Hanson described her role in the 1836 walkout: "When the day came on
which the girls were to turn out ... the girls in my room stood irresolute,
uncertain what to do ... I, who began to think they would not go out, af-
ter all their talk, became impatient, and started on ahead, saying . . . 'I
don't care what you do, I am going to turn out whether anyone else does
or not."' As a result of her participation in the strike, Harriet's mother, a
widow who ran a boardinghouse in Lowell, was fired. She was told: "You
could not prevent the older girls from turning out, but your daughter is a
child and her you could control." During the 1840s fewer young native-
born women were willing to work in the mills. "Slavers"-long, black
wagons that crisscrossed the Vermont and New Hampshire countryside in
search of mill hands-arrived empty in Rhode Island and Massachusetts
mill towns. Increasingly they were replaced with a new class of permanent
factory operatives, immigrant women from Ireland. 19
More common than factory employment for teenage girls was domestic
service. Servants, who had previously been regarded as quasi-family mem-
bers and been referred to as "help," were now considered paid employees.
A servant's life was onerous and burdensome. Live-in servants were on
call six and a half or even seven days a week. Their day began at half past
four or five in the morning, and their responsibilities included cooking
and serving meals, washing up, trimming and filling lamps, cleaning, plac-
ing coal and wood in fireplaces and stoves, cleaning, doing laundry, and
caring for children. Even though domestic service paid better than factory
work and the physical conditions were far superior, young women consid-
ered household service the most demeaning form of labor because of the
psychological abuse and often the sexual abuse. 20
In rapidly growing urban areas, many young working-class women
took on outwork, manufacturing shoes, clothing, or other household
items inside their own home or a boardinghouse. By the 1830s a highly
visible group of young women used their earnings to participate in the ex-
panding urban working-class youth culture. The "Bowery gal" challenged
Victorian notions of propriety by promenading down city streets wearing
flashy clothes. But most urban working-class young women, especially the
daughters of skilled workers, eschewed fancy clothes and gave their wages
to their parents. They worked at home or stayed in school in a working-
class version of domesticity.
142 Huck's Raft
In the poorest families, especially those headed by widows or single

mothers, children's ability to earn their keep provided the indispensable
margin of subsistence. They toted water up stairs, helped out with cook-
ing, cleaning, and laundry, and ran errands. Poor families living in cellars
or garrets also depended on children to perform various kinds of out-
work. Young children cut and glued boxes, dipped matchsticks, or sewed
seams and buttons. They also carried goods back and forth to a shop.
Poor children too young for wage work scavenged for wood or coal and
scoured the docks for tea, coffee, sugar, flour, and other goods that could
be used at home. They hawked newspapers, held horses, blackened boots,
and even caught butterflies for canary growers. Poor children participated
in the informal economy, selling fruit or matches on street corners and
scrub brushes and other household goods door-to-door, or peddling loose
cotton, old rope, shreds of canvas and rags, bits of hardware, and bottles
and broken glass to junk dealers and to papermakers, foundries, and
glassmakers. 21
Scavenging produced considerable dismay among public authorities,
who regarded it as a form of petty theft. Most of the child scavengers
came from single-parent homes that depended on their labor and expected
children to earn their keep. "Of the children brought before me for pilfer-
ing," wrote a police magistrate in 1830, "nine out of ten are those whose
fathers are dead, and who live with their mothers, and are employed in
this way." When children refused to contribute to the family economy,
poorer parents turned to public authorities for help. William Cadman's
mother placed her son in a New York asylum in 1853 "because he would
not work, and she could not support him." Working-class families held a
very different view of childhood from the middle class. Far less sentimen-
tal in their conception of childhood, they did not believe that parents
should make economic sacrifices for their children without reciprocal la-
bor from their offspring. 22
During the nineteenth century an increasing proportion of working-
class children were the daughters and sons of immigrants. Many came
from Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia, pushed from their homelands
by famine, political unrest, and the destruction of traditional handicrafts
by factory enterprise. In addition, 288,000 Chinese immigrants arrived in
the United States between 1854 and 1883. Although most immigrants
were adult males, one group-Irish Catholics-included significant num-
bers of children and teens, many of whom arrived in the United States
alone.
Fifteen-year-old Diarmuid O'Donovan Rossa of County Cork was one
of the many Irish children to suffer grievously from the potato famine. In
1846 he and a brother dug "over two hundred yards of a piece of a ridge,
and all the potatoes I could pick ... would not fill a skillet. They were no
larger than marbles." The Illustrated London News described conditions
in Diarmuid's county. Whole families subsisted on wild weeds, and
"15,000 persons ... are destitute; of this 5000 are entirely dependent on
casual charity ... The deaths ... now average 25 daily!!" Altogether
around 150,000 people in County Cork died during the famine years
1845-1847, including Diarmuid's father. Evicted from their small farm,
Diarmuid's mother, sister, and two brothers emigrated to Philadelphia.
Only Diarmuid, now seventeen, remained. "I supposed they thought I was
old enough to take care of myself," he later said. His family's departure
remained etched in his memory. "The cry of the weeping and wailing of
that day rings in my ears still," he recalled. 23
During the summer of 1845 a "blight of unusual character" devastated
Ireland's potato crop, the basic staple in the Irish diet. A few days after
potatoes were dug from the ground, they turned into a slimy, decaying,
blackish "mass of rottenness." Expert panels, convened to investigate the
blight's cause, suggested that it was a result of "static electricity" or the
smoke that billowed from railroad locomotives or "mortiferous vapours"
rising from underground volcanoes. In fact the cause was a fungus that
had traveled from America to Ireland. In 1846 the potato crop was just
one-fifth as large as it had been two years earlier. Half a million Irish were
evicted from their cottages, and "famine fever"-dysentery, typhus, and
infestations of lice-soon spread through the Irish countryside. Observers
reported seeing children crying with pain and looking "like skeletons,
their features sharpened with hunger and their limbs wasted, so that there
was little left but bones, their hands and arms." Masses of bodies were
buried without coffins, a few inches below the soil. 24
Over the next five years, 750,000 Irish died, and approximately a mil-
lion Irish migrated to the United States. Freighters offered fares as low as
$17 to $20 between Liverpool and Boston-fares subsidized by English
landlords eager to be rid of the starving peasants. The journey to the
United States took five to ten weeks, and conditions aboard the "famine
ships" were abominable. Steerage compartments were only about five feet
high and contained two tiers of buqks, with each berth holding at least
four people. On one vessel, only a pound of meal or bread was allotted as
a daily ration for each adult, half a pound for each child under the age of
fourteen, and a third of a pound for those under seven years, along with a
pint of water. As many as 10 percent of the emigrants perished while still
at sea. In 1847, 40,000 (or 20 percent) of those who set out from Ireland
died along the way. "If crosses and tombs could be erected on water,"
144 Huck's Raft
wrote the U.S. commissioner for emigration, "the whole route of the emi-
grant vessels from Europe to America would long since have assumed the
appearance of a crowded cemetery. " 25
Lacking the money to move elsewhere, most Irish immigrants remained
near the port cities where they landed. Often whole families crowded into
a single room. Nativist Protestant reformers stigmatized immigrant family
life as disorganized, denouncing the prevalence of drinking, youth gangs,
domestic violence, and the number of children institutionalized in alms-
houses, houses of refuge, and reformatories. In fact the biggest contribu-
tor to family instability among Irish immigrants was the high death rate
among unskilled Irish Catholic workers. "It is well established," one Irish
American noted, "that the average length of life of the emigrant after
landing here is six years; and many insist it is much less." Harsh outdoor
labor, reported another observer, meant that "a man who labours steadily
for 10 to 12 years in America is of very little use afterwards." 26
Many young people arrived in America by themselves and took what-
ever jobs were available. Some girls, like Ann McNabb, who migrated to
Philadelphia, became live-in household servants, an occupation that na-
tive-born girls shunned. As late as 1900, three-fifths of all Irish-born
women in the United States were domestic servants. Other young Irish
women did piecework in factories or their own apartments, making nine
shirts a week for a total of about ninety cents. In the second generation,
many became schoolteachers or nurses, while many boys worked as la-
borers, constructing streets or canals or sewers, or toiling on the docks. Al
Smith, the grandson of an Irish immigrant, was born in 1873 in Hell's
Kitchen on New York's Lower East Side. He took his first job selling
newspapers when he was eleven. After his father's death when he was
thirteen, he left school and took a series of jobs, including unloading bar-
rels of fish at New York's Fulton Fish Market, where his days began at
three in the morning. 27
Migration to America profoundly altered Irish families. For the first
and second generations of immigrants, the stresses of emigration, poverty,
and unskilled labor sometimes resulted in severe family tension and dis-
ruption, weakening the role of the father and husband and widening the
division between male and female spheres. Widowhood and single-parent
female-headed households were much more common in the United States
than in Ireland as a result of the high male mortality rate, frequent on-the-
job accidents, and desertion. One son whose father deserted his family
was the dramatist Eugene O'Neill, and as a result his "family always was
ill-fed and poorly-clad." Single-parent families were more common
among the Irish than any nineteenth-century ethnic group except African
Americans. Migration enhanced sons' economic significance and gave
daughters greater responsibilities and independence. 28
The childhood of Anne Sullivan, the "miracle worker" who gained in-
ternational renown as Helen Keller's teacher, illustrates the problems of
poverty and family instability in extreme form. Born to desperately poor
and troubled immigrant parents in 1866, she had a father with a drinking
problem and a mother suffering from tuberculosis. At the age of five Anne
contracted trachoma, an eye disease associated with filthy living condi-
tions. When she was eight, Anne's mother died. A sister and brother were
sent to live with relatives, while Anne remained home to care for her fa-
ther. When she was ten, her father deserted Anne, and she and her brother
were placed in the Massachusetts almshouse at Tewksbury, where her
brother died of tuberculosis. Anne's experience underscored the stresses
and family tensions that migration imposed on many children of immi-
grants.29
During the nineteenth century, as many families made their livelihoods
from mining coal or minerals from the earth as worked in the nation's
iron and steel mills. In eastern Pennsylvania alone, mining engaged more
than 100,000 families. After his family emigrated from Lithuania to the
coalfields near Scranton, Pennsylvania, nine-year-old Joseph Miliauska
earned seventy cents for a ten-hour day as a breaker boy, separating coal
from the slate and rocks. If his boss caught a boy slipping up and letting
slate pass by, Joseph recalled, "you'd get it in the back with a broom. " 30
Coalmining families endured a particularly harsh existence. Employ-
ment was grueling, dangerous, and erratic, and annual earnings were ex-
tremely low. At the end of the nineteenth century, when one state survey
estimated that it took a yearly income of $754 to provide food, clothing,
and shelter for a family of five, 60 percent of the adult miners in eastern
Pennsylvania anthracite fields earned less than $450. To supplement the
father's income, sons entered the mines as soon as they were physically
able. Boys as young as nine or ten started out as door boys, driver boys,
or breaker boys. Door boys sat for hours in the darkness of the mine to
open and shut the doors that permitted the mule-drawn mine cars to pass.
Driver boys dumped coal from the cars, after which it descended through
processing machines to the breaker boys, who cleaned and inspected it
and separated rocks and slate from the coal. Breaker boys covered their
mouths with handkerchiefs to keep out the coal dust, but they were for-
bidden to wear gloves, even in the coldest weather, because doing so im-
paired their finger movement and sense of touch. "If we were discovered
146 Huck"'s Raft
BLOCKED IMAGE AT T_HE

"Breaker boys," who separated slate and impurities from coal, stand outside a
Pennsylvania coal mine in 1911. Courtesy of the National Archives.
wearing gloves," remembered one breaker boy, "the boss would strike
our knuckles with a long stick he carried." As a result, for the first few
weeks the sulfur on the coal irritated the boys' skin and caused their
fingers to swell, crack open, and bleed, causing a condition called "red
tips." Until their fingers hardened, mothers applied goose grease to their
sons' fingers every night. 31
The heavy reliance on child labor and wages meant that few boys could
stay in school very long. Most boys had no more than five years of formal
education, and half were out of school by their twelfth birthday. Coalmin-
ers' daughters typically assisted their mothers in such tasks as manufac-
turing handicrafts or taking in laundry or boarders or gardening. As late
as 1924, over half of West Virginia's mining families planted gardens and
kept cows, pigs, and poultry. "Miners couldn't always depend upon the
mine," one later recalled; "therefore we would have to raise a garden to
make sure we always ate." 32
Much as industrialization generated enormous demand for unskilled
child labor in mills and mines, and growing middle-class affluence created
a growing hunger for household servants, the commercialization of agri-
culture made children's farm labor more valuable than ever before. The
lure of commercial agric.ulture led some 400,000 pioneering families to

venture westward to settle in California, Oregon, and the Great Plains.
Nancy Kelsey was eighteen years old and already a mother when she mi-
grated westward on the first wagon train to California in 1841. "We were
then out of provisions, having killed and eaten all our cattle," she re-
called. "I walked barefeeted until my feet were blistered and lived on
roasted acorns for two days." This first party of sixty-nine pioneers en-
dured almost inconceivable hardships. They were forced to abandon their
wagons and eat their pack animals, "half roasted, dripping with blood." 33
It took Americans a century and a half to expand as far west as the Ap-
palachian Mountains, a few hundred miles from the Atlantic coast. It
took another fifty years to push the frontier to the Mississippi River. By
1830, fewer than 100,000 pioneers had crossed the Mississippi. But dur-
ing the 1840s, tens of thousands of Americans ventured beyond the Mis-
sissippi, and by 1850 they had pushed the edge of settlement to California
and the Oregon country of the Pacific Northwest. The journey west was a
tremendous test of human endurance. Thirteen-year-old Mary Murphy
lost her mother and five other relatives to starvation. "I hope I shall not

On the overland trail, sex and age roles blurred as girls and boys cared for younger children, tended
animals, and gathered buffalo chips for fuel. Courtesy of the Denver Public Library.
148 Huck~s Raft
live long, for I am tired of this troublesome world and want to go to my

mother," she wrote. That was in 1847. Murphy was a survivor of the in-
famous Donner party, which became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada
and resorted to cannibalism to survive. 34
Mary Goble lost her mother, two sisters, and a brother along the over-
land trail to Utah. Born in Brighton, England, she was twelve years old in
1855 when her parents joined the Church of Latter-Day Saints and de-
cided to sell everything they owned and move to the Great Salt Lake.
From Liverpool they made a six-week voyage to Boston with 900 other
new Mormons, then traveled by train to Iowa City, where they began the
thousand-mile trek to Utah. Along the way, they went days without fresh
water and subsisted on gruel made out of a quarter-pound of flour a day.
The pioneers covered between fifteen and twenty-five miles each day, but
they had departed too late in the summer and were overtaken by severe
snowstorms. Once, Mary got lost in the snow, and when she was finally
found (at eleven at night) she had suffered such severe frostbite that a doc-
tor had to amputate her toes. 35
Some 40,000 children faced blizzards, desert heat, massacres and epi-
demics on the way west between 1841 and 1865. On the overland trail,
pioneer children bore responsibilities that were crucial to their families'
survival. They cared for livestock, hunted and fished, cooked, stood
guard, scouted for camping spots, nursed the sick and injured, and buried
the dead. Girls got up before dawn and collected wood and buffalo chips
(animal dung used for fuel), hauled water, kindled campfires, kneaded
dough, and milked cows. They also tended younger children. On the
westward trail, it proved impossible to maintain a rigid age or sexual divi-
sion of labor. Boys and girls drove or maintained wagons and livestock,
stood guard duty, and hunted buffalo and antelope for extra meat. Child-
hood accidents and diseases were an ever-present danger. Young children
fell out of wagons and under wagon wheels. 36
On the far western frontier, a distinctive form of childhood emerged. A
severe shortage of labor blurred age and gender distinctions and invested
the young with a great deal of responsibility and autonomy. Today the
popular image of a frontier childhood derives, first and foremost, from
the eight-volume "Little House on the Prairie" series of books written by
Laura Ingalls Wilder in the 1930s and 1940s. Born in 1867 in a log cabin
outside Pepin, Wisconsin, sixty miles southeast of Minneapolis, she
chronicled a pioneer girlhood in the upper Midwest during the 1870s and
1880s, based on her family's experiences as they moved from Pepin to
Burr Oak in northeastern Iowa; Spring Valley and Walnut Grove,
Minnesota; and De Smet in Dakota Territory. Altogether her family
moved seven times in ten years, with each move creating new problems
for the family. 37
Wilder's tales describe the joys and hardships of a frontier childhood on
the midwestern plains-a sister who contracted scarlet fever and was left
blind, a grasshopper plague that devoured the family's crops, her father
fiddling his daughters to sleep, and receiving Christmas stockings filled
' with peppermint candy and shiny new pennies. The books helped imprint
a number of lasting images of a frontier life in the American imagination:
of a sod house, scraped out of the prairie, with a stovepipe running
through the hay and reed roof; of prairie fires; of town socials and spelling
bees and one-room schoolhouses. Even as a young child Laura, like other·
frontier children, was expected to help with cleaning, childcare, tending
animals, and tending the crop. As she grew older, she served as a maid
and waitress in a failing hotel, and sewed shirts in town in order to con-
tribute cash to the family economy. Although she hadn't finished high
school, she took her first teaching job at the age of fifteen. Her school-
house was a crude shanty, and many of the students were bigger and older
than she was.

This one-room schoolhouse on the Great Plains was constructed of strips of sod. Courtesy of the
National Archives.
150 Huck~s Raft
The frontier could not have been settled without children's labor. They
provided game and wild plants for their families' tables as well as the fuel
to cook their food. They cut hay, herded cattle and sheep, burned brush,
gathered eggs, and churned butter. They also broke sod, planted, weeded,
and harvested. Farmers on the plains could not afford to delay their off-
spring's entry into the family workforce. A Kansas father bragged that his
two-year-old son could "fetch up cows out of the stock fields, or oxen,
carry in stove wood and climb in the corn crib and feed the hogs and go
on errands." Improved plows and other farm machinery allowed young
sons and daughters to assist with plowing, planting, and harvesting. An
Oklahoma father gave each of his children a knife to hack the soil and
"make a seed bed for a garden and the first crop of kaffir corn." Fannie
Eisele was only ten years old when she began to plow her family's
Oklahoma fields, and Helen Brock at fifteen was branding calves and
erecting fences. 38
For children who lived near western mining towns, there were many
opportunities to earn spare change. Mary Ronan sold edible weeds in Vir-
ginia City for a dollar and a half a bucketful, while Martha Collins and
her brother made $800 in a year from the sale of butter, bacon, and wild
game. Others earned money by cooking, cleaning, or doing odd jobs.
Boys of twelve or thirteen also found regular employment outside the
home. William Hedges, the son of a Helena, Montana, attorney, was just
thirteen years old when he became head of the town's public library; at
the same age Walter Smith of Tellurium, Colorado, was swinging a
sledgehammer in mine tunnels. 39
Touring the Rockies in 1873, an English traveler, Isabella Bird, re-
marked: "One of the most painful things in the Western States and Terri-
tories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children, only
debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness,
and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten
years old." It was easy to find evidence to substantiate the claim that a
sheltered childhood was extinguished on the frontier. A child in Creede,
Colorado, began smoking cigarettes at the age of five and took up a pipe
at six. A twelve-year-old plowed his family farm. A girl was nine when she
broke her first horse; another was ten when she broke the sod on her fam-
ily's west Texas homestead. William Cody, later Buffalo Bill, was fourteen
when he rode for the Pony Express. On the western frontier, precocious
behavior was not at all unusual. 40
In contrast to their urban middle-class counterparts, frontier children
were not subjected to close supervision in the vast outdoors. Instead they
were encouraged to act independently and to assume essential family re-
sponsibilities at an early age. An entry in the diary of a twelve-year-old

Helena, Montana, girl underscores the degree to which a frontier child-
hood could be exposed to adult realities: "At two o'clock in the morning
a highway Robber was hung on a large pine tree. After breakfast we went
to see him. At ten o'clock preaching, at one o'clock a large auction sale of
horses and cattle. At two o'clock Sunday school. At three o'clock a foot
race. At seven o'clock preaching. The remainder of the time spent by hun-
dreds of miners in gambling and drinking. " 41 Meanwhile, schooling on
the plains was sporadic and intermittent. As late as 1910, a fourth of the
schools in Montana held classes for no more than four months a year; in
rural Arizona the school term averaged just 105 days. 42
Yet if frontier conditions promoted early independence and adultlike re-
sponsibilities, adults nonetheless strove to create the institutions consid-
ered essential for a proper childhood. One of the first institutions estab-
lished was a Sunday school, soon followed by an elementary school.
Social life in many frontier communities revolved around spelling matches
and school programs. Even gamblers sometimes set up play equipment.
Yet however romantic a western childhood may seem in retrospect, to
many of the children who grew up on the plains, it was a bleak world
characterized by loneliness and privation. As an adult, Hamlin Garland
would become one of the country's foremost advocates of local color, an
indigenous American literature that provided realistic accounts of specific
places. His greatest works of fiction, such as A Son of the Middle Border,
were unflinching looks at the rigors of pioneer life, based on his childhood
memories of hardships, frustration, and toil. He described "main-traveled
roads" with "a dull little town at one end and a home of toil at the other."
Born in a log cabin near La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1860, Garland grew up
in Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakota Territory as his parents participated
in the nation's westward expansion. In his books he expressed resentment
at his father's decision to move the family to remoter and harsher environ-
ments in search of a prosperity that never came. He recalled that at the
age of eleven he spent seventy days behind a plow all by himself. "It was
lonely work ... There is a certain pathos in the sight of that small boy
tugging and kicking at the stubborn turf in the effort to free his plow.
Such misfortunes loom large in a lad's horizon." The life he describes was
desolate, lonely, and laborious. 43
Although a frontier childhood encouraged a youth of self-reliance, in-
ner-directedness, and early independence, many western children experi-
enced youths of withering poverty, dispiriting routine, and personal en-
trapment. Edna Matthews Clifton hated picking cotton on her family's
Texas farm. "Sometimes I would lie down on my sack and want to die,"
152 Huck's Raft
she wrote. "Sometimes they would have to pour water over my head to /
relieve me." A fifteen-year-old girl on a west Texas ranch wrote: "It is so

misirably lonely here. I feel buried alive in this slow vally. " 44
The pioneer families that ventured onto the Great Plains went with a
strong spirit of optimism. Unfortunately, high hopes were quickly dashed.
Of the 400,000 families that took advantage of the Homestead Act to
start a farm, fewer than a third managed to "prove up" the land to which
they laid claim. During the late nineteenth century drought, grasshoppers,
fire, hail, blizzards, and floods devastated farms from Texas to the Dako-
tas, leaving many families destitute. A Minnesota girl described her fam-
ily's plight to the state governor: "We have no money now[,] nothing to
sell to get any more clothes with as the grasshoppers destroyed all of our
crops what few we had for we have not much land broke yet ... We ...
almost perish here sometimes with the cold. " 45 For many children, the
western adventure was a nightmare from which they longed to awaken.
The Industrial Revolution had radical effects on children's experiences.
For the middle class, growing affluence allowed parents to provide their
children a sheltered childhood, free from work responsibilities and de-
voted to education and play. For working-class, immigrant, and farm chil-
dren, the growth of industry and the expansion of commercial agriculture
increased parents' dependence on child labor. As a result, two divergent
conceptions of childhood emerged. One conception, the useful childhood,
was based on the premise that all family members, including children,
should contribute to a family's support. Rooted in the experience of farm,
artisanal, and frontier families, this idea took on heightened significance
in an urban and industrial context, where low wages and frequent bouts
of unemployment made children's earnings essential for a family's well-
being. As a result, many working-class and immigrant parents expected
that their economic sacrifices should be matched by sacrifices and labors
from their offspring. The other conception was a protected childhood,
sheltered from the stresses and demands of the adult world. First adopted
by the rapidly expanding urban middle class, this ideal proved highly at-
tractive to working-class and farm families as well. In the late nineteenth
century, a central demand of labor unions was the "family wage," which
would allow a male breadwinner to support his family without the eco-
nomic contributions of his wife and children. Meanwhile, in rural areas,
the more prosperous farmers began to substitute hired labor for children's
labor whenever possible, and in the urban North, African-American par-
ents struggled to keep their children in school and prolonged their chil-
dren's education despite economic pressures. 46
It took a concerted struggle lasting more than half a century to ensure
that every child had a right to a childhood free from labor and devoted to
education. The drive to universalize a sheltered childhood was the result
of a determined political struggle by a broad-based coalition that included
educators, physicians, psychologists, union leaders, and pioneering femi-
nists, and it required government action in the form of compulsory educa-
tion laws and restrictions on child labor. Aided by broader technological
developments, these reformers, who adopted the name "child-savers,"
were responsible for one of the most striking social transformations in
American history. They succeeded in creating a pattern of childhood-
emphasizing prolonged schooling and residence in the parental home-
that transcended class, ethnicity, and region.
chapter eight
Save the Child
MERICANS first discovered the grim realities of child poverty,

juvenile delinquency, and child abuse in the nation's cities. As early as the
1790s, philanthropists and reformers were shocked by the sight of a
"multitude of half-naked, dirty and leering children" roaming city streets,
sleeping in alleyways, picking pockets, and robbing shops. Young girls
stood barefoot on street corners, begging for pennies, while small boys
picked through garbage scattered in the streets. "Cunning and adroit,"
they bore no resemblance to the middle-class ideal of children as icons of
innocence. Especially appalling was "the female portion of the youngest
class, those who have only seen some eight or twelve summers, [who] are
addicted to immoralities of the most loathsome descriptions." 1
As a result of their parents' death or remarriage, poor children fre-
quently shifted from one household to another and sometimes were left
with no home at all. In 1827, shortly after her family migrated from Ire-
land, the parents of twelve-year-old "M. K." died. She was placed as a
servant with a distiller's family, where a hired men "made free" with her
twice. John Mulligan was ten when his father died. He, too, was placed
out, first with a boatman, then with a tailor and an ironmonger; in 1825,
when he was fourteen, he was living on New York City's streets. Twice he
was arrested for stealing shoes and once for picking pockets. Expected to
earn their keep, poor children scavenged on the street and engaged in
petty theft. In 1826 a twelve-year-old girl, known by the initials
"S. H. L.," assisted her mother by selling stolen soap, needles, pencils, and
almanacs. She also had "learnt the trick of getting money from men, with
Save the Child 155
the promise that she would go with them, and afterwards run away." In
1814 an illiterate fourteen-year-old boy, known by the initials "A. B.,"
helped support his family by picking pockets and stealing fruit, meat,
handkerchiefs, shoes, and hats. 2
In the eighteenth century, destitute and delinquent children had been
absorbed into rural and urban households as servants, farm laborers, or
apprentices. But with the decline of household industries, the demise of
the apprenticeship system, and the growth of factory enterprise, these
households were no longer able to absorb sufficient numbers. Juvenile de-
linquency seemed out of hand and infanticide rampant. In the middle of
the century, as many as 150 infants' bodies were found in New York City
each month. Something needed to be done. "Save, oh save from impend-
ing ruin the miserable neglected little objects that now infest your streets,"
an anonymous Baltimore writer pleaded in 1820; "take them under your
paternal care, and direct their steps in the path of virtue and honesty." Be-
ginning in the 1790s, philanthropists, who came to be known as child-
savers, experimented with new strategies to care for indigent and delin-
quent children, including the establishment of charity schools, Sunday
schools, orphan asylums, houses of refuge, and reformatories. 3
An underlying ambiguity marked these child-saving efforts ..They at-
tempted both to protect children from the dangers of urban society and to
protect society from dangerous children. Many child-savers were guilty of
paternalism, class and racial bias, xenophobia, and double standards re-
garding gender. They often confused delinquency and neglect with the re-
alities of life under poverty. Reformers proved far too eager to break up
the families of the poor, supposedly for the children's own good, but in re-
ality separating the young from their kin and isolating them in a harsh
and repressive environment. Fixated on urban problems, the child-savers
neglected rural children, who were frequently confined with adults in
county poorhouses. Yet for all their limitations and biases, the child-sav-
ers were not merely moralistic "social controllers," propounding punitive
solutions to the problems of child welfare. A highly disparate group, they
included elite philanthropists, evangelical Protestants, benevolent middle-
class women, urban missionaries, penologists, amateur and professional
charity and youth workers, attorneys, physicians, educators, and social
workers with diverse motives and agendas. Furthermore, there was al-
ways a dialectic between the child-savers and the people they wanted to
help, with poor children and their parents using child-saving institutions
for their own purposes. One must balance the myopia of the reformers
with their major achievement: a sustained public commitment to chil-
dren's welfare. The child-savers pioneered innovative and creative ap-
156 Huck's Raft
proaches to the problems of childhood that should stand as an inspiration

and a rebuke to Americans today. 4
Child-saving evolved in three overlapping phases, each with its own
constituency and distinctive approach. In the first phase, stretching from
the 1790s through the 1840s, child-savers created congregate institutions
to separate children from the corruptions of the public world and provide
them with the order and discipline that their families lacked. The use of
congregate institutions remained the dominant approach to child-saving
throughout the nineteenth century. Only after a profound demographic
shift had taken place, sharply reducing the proportion of the population
under the age of fifteen, did alternative approaches supplant institution-
alization. Yet even before the Civil War, the limitations of institutionali-
zation were already evident. Urban missionaries and charity workers re-
garded the Christian home as a superior alternative to institutions and
experimented with placing-out systems, foster care, adoption, and "cot-
tage" systems to provide a more homelike environment. 5
The Civil War sparked a second phase in child-saving as a new genera-
tion of reformers invoked the state's police powers to protect children
from abuse, exploitation, and neglect. In the name of child protection,
child-savers founded quasi-public societies to prevent cruelty to children.
They also drew a sharper line between childhood and adulthood by re-
moving children from almshouses, enacting laws to suppress obscene ma-
terials that might be viewed by the young, attacking child prostitution,
raising the age of consent to sexual intercourse, and prosecuting a new
crime, statutory rape. The Progressive era, the period stretching from the
1890s to World War I, marked a third phase in the history of child-saving.
Progressive child-savers greatly expanded public responsibility and pro-
fessional administration of child welfare programs. While their reforms
had less impact than their creators anticipated, they set precedents for the
programs inaugurated by the New Deal. 6
Rapid urban growth, immigration, and the breakdown of the appren-
ticeship system greatly increased the number of dependent children, and
institutionalization appeared to be the most cost-effective response. But
institutionalization also reflected shifting ideas about childhood. The
binding out or public auctioning of poor or orphaned children clashed
with the sentimental view of the child as an innocent creature who needed
care and nurture. Meanwhile, a heightened emphasis on children's plastic-
ity made them much more promising candidates for reform than adults.
Orphan asylums, houses of refuge, and reform schools were to rectify the
failures of impoverished families; insulate children from a contaminating
social environment; and shape their character by instilling habits of sobri-
Save the Child 157
ety, industry, and self-discipline. These institutions reflected a humanitar-

ian impulse to rescue children from deprived and abusive conditions and a
religious impulse to redeem children from sin. Less positively, institu-
tionalization sought to cut the cost of poor relief, remove poor and unruly
children from the streets, and place them out of sight. Child-saving was
driven by a mixture of hope and fear-by a utopian faith that crime, pau-
perism, and class division could be solved by redeeming poor children;
and a mounting concern over growing cities, burgeoning gangs of idle and
unsupervised youths, and swelling immigrant populations.
The earliest and longest-lasting child-saving institution was the orphan
asylum. First established in the early eighteenth century, these institutions
did not become widespread until a century later. Most inmates were not
true "orphans," who had lost both parents, but half-orphans whose single
parents could not earn enough money to care for the child at home. A sur-
prising number came from intact but poor two-parent families, like the
future baseball great George Herman "Babe" Ruth.
Nineteenth-century literature was obsessed with orphans. Huck Finn,
Tom Sawyer, Susan Warner's Elizabeth Montgomery in The Wide, Wide
World, and Willa Cather's Jim Burden, the narrator of My Antonia, were
orphans or half-orphans. So, too, were Horatio Alger's heroes. The liter-
ary appeal of orphanhood was partly rooted in the number of young mi-
grants who left relatives behind in search of new opportunities. But in a
society in which half of all children lost a parent before the age of twenty,
orphanhood was also a fact of life. As late as 1900, 20 to 30 percent of all
children lost a parent by age fifteen. The number of orphaned and de-
pendent children increased sharply in the late eighteenth century as a re-
sult of Revolutionary upheaval, increases in urban poverty, and cholera
and yellow fever epidemics. A father's death almost invariably thrust a
working-class family into poverty, and the children were sent to live with
relatives, indentured to another family, or placed temporarily in alms-
houses, where they lived alongside criminals, paupers, prostitutes, and the
insane. Some children were auctioned off to the lowest bidder through the
public vendue system, sparing local communities the cost of supporting
poor youth. 7
In 1800 there were just six orphan asylums in the United States. But as
childhood came to be seen as a vulnerable period demanding special pro-
tection, it seemed essential to shelter orphaned or homeless children from
an unhealthy environment. By 1850 New York State had nearly 100 or-
phanages. Established mainly by religious denominations or by private
charities, orphan asylums were to provide a carefully controlled environ-
ment where children would learn the values of industry, sobriety, and self-
158 Huck~s Raft
control. The annual report for 1865 of the Baltimore Home of the Friend-
less expressed a widely held philosophy: "Our enterprise is a hopeful one
... The children are brought to us before they are corrupted by their vi-
cious surroundings." Control of children's environment was viewed as the
key to transforming their character. As one authority later boasted, "We
can control the influences that make up the child's life. We can control
what he thinks about, from the time when he gets up in the morning till
he goes to bed at night ... He never will run with the gang. He never will
be out nights. " 8
Many working-class parents used orphanages as temporary and long-
term shelters. This was, however, an emotionally costly arrangement for
parents and children. Surviving letters from parents to orphan officials are
heart-wrenching. "Please don't let him forget that he's got a mother,"
wrote one mother. "Does he ever ask for me?" asked another. It is difficult
to generalize about the orphanage experience. Some parents considered
orphanages a godsend-"! thank god," wrote one, "that there is such a
place . . . what wood become of children if there was [no] place like that
for them to go to." But many orphan asylums were bleak institutions
where corporal punishment was the rule, hugs and affection were rare,
and bullies terrorized younger children. 9
Most orphanages were small, with fewer than 50 children, but most in-
mates lived in large institutions of 500 to 2,000, where children wore uni-
forms, were forced to walk in single file, were identified by numbers, and
slept in barracklike dormitories with little privacy. Many institutions se-
verely restricted visits by parents and relatives. Still, compared with the
slums where many children had previously lived, the orphanages were
safe and healthy. They also offered vocational training, medical care, and
a reliable if monotonous diet. Many of the practices that we regard as es-
pecially harsh were intended to reduce health risks and to prevent im-
moral influences from entering the institutions.
As early as the 1850s, American orphanages had already acquired their
Dickensian image as drab, regimented facilities, characterized by harsh
discipline, rigid routine, and an absence of emotional care. A term arose
to describe the passivity of children in orphanages: institutionalism. Re-
ports of physical and sexual abuse abounded. To address these concerns,
some orphanages adopted a "cottage" style, breaking down larger institu-
tions into smaller homelike units. But as the nineteenth century pro-
gressed, the size of the larger institutions increased sharply. In the early
1900s more than 100,000 children resided in some 1,200 orphanages
throughout the United States. 10
Orphanages remained an important mechanism for caring for depend-
Save the Child 159
ent children well into the twentieth century, and continued to suffer from
problems identified a half century earlier. In 1914 an inspection of twenty-
six orphanages run by private charities in New York City reported chil-
dren "overworked and underfed," beds "alive with vermin," and "anti-
quated modes of punishment," including shackles and chains. "Try to
conceive of a girl being compelled to go to work at a washtub at 5 o'clock
in the morning, there to remain until the dinner bell sounded at noon, and
have such a brutal procedure styled 'vocational training,"' a commis-
sioner of public charities asked rhetorically. 11
The great flu epidemic that killed half a million Americans during
World War I produced a fresh surge of admissions. During the Great De-
pression orphanages received their final influx, overwhelming these insti-
tutions' finances. The establishment of Aid to Dependent Children, as part
of the Social Security Act of 1935, ended an era that had lasted more than
a century. Those institutions that survived abandoned the term orphan-
age~ instead calling themselves group homes or treatment facilities, and
transformed themselves into residential care facilities where children with
behavioral or psychiatric problems received treatment. 12
In the 1990s, however, reports of children mired for years in foster care
and the exploding number of babies born addicted to crack cocaine
sparked talk of creating large group homes. In 1994 Newt Gingrich, soon
to become Speaker of the House of Representatives, suggested that or-
phanages would be better than having children remain with abusive or ne-
glectful parents. Gingrich, who had himself been born to a single teenage
mother who had divorced her abusive husband before her son was born,
regarded growing up in a family receiving welfare as tantamount to child
abuse. Like the harsher nineteenth-century proponents of orphanages, he
regarded these institutions as a way to rescue poor children while punish-
ing their parents. 13
Alongside the orphan asylum, houses of refuge for delinquent and
homeless children arose. In 1823, 450 children were incarcerated in New
York's Bridewell and Newgate prisons; their only offense was living on
the streets. That year the city's Society for the Prevention of Pauperism
called for construction of a house of refuge to serve as an alternative to
the prison and the almshouse for vagrant children. New York's first
House of Refuge, which admitted its first inmates-six boys and three
girls-in 1825, was a semipublic institution managed by private philan-
thropists but receiving financial support from the municipal and state gov-
ernments. Located in a fortresslike structure on the city's outskirts, the
refuge took in 527 children in its first four years of operation. Most had
been arrested for vagrancy or petty theft and would otherwise have been
160 Huck's Raft
incarcerated in a local jail. Destitution, shifting residences, and the death

of caretakers had characterized the lives of children admitted to the ref-
uge. Fifteen-year-old Mary Ann Corbitt lived in at least ten different
homes after her mother died when she was ten. 14
The refuges' regimen emphasized order, discipline, routine, plain food,
and regular work. Although their founders insisted that the refuges were
"an asylum for friendless and unfortunate children, not a prison for
young culprits," their architecture and internal organization resembled a
penitentiary's. Children wore badges, slept in large dormitories, labored in
group workshops, and ate in silence in a common dining hall. A ringing
bell awoke the children at five; after washing and making their bed, the
children paraded in the yard, where officials examined their dress and hy-
giene. The children then attended morning prayers and school until seven,
when they received breakfast and began to labor in the refuge's work-
shops, making nails, finishing shoes, constructing wicker chairs, or wash-
ing laundry. After an hour for lunch, they worked until five in the after-
noon. After dinner their schooling resumed until eight. Well-behaved
youngsters were allowed to take unescorted trips outside the institution.
Administrators punished unruly behavior severely, inflicting whippings,
placing children in solitary confinement, depriving them of meals, and re-
straining them in leg irons and handcuffs. Children who wet their beds
had their names announced in the dining hall. In 1848 a critic named Eli-
jah Devoe reported: "On parade, at table, at their work, and in school,
they are not allowed to converse ... Restriction and constraint are their
most intimate companions." 15
By the 1840s there was a widespread impression that the refuge experi-
ment had failed. The New York refuge suffered from vandalism, run-
aways, and arson. In one incident, a youthful inmate murdered a refuge
official. To maintain discipline, refuge authorities relied on isolation and
corporal punishment, including the cat-o' -nine-tails. Part of the problem
was demographic. The refuge founders were interested in taking in youn-
ger children who had committed only minor offenses. While they sympa-
thized with the plight of older children, the seriously delinquent were ex-
pected to remain in adult jails. But over time, those placed in the refuge
were older, more experienced in crime, and less amenable to refuge disci-
pline. The refuge became a warehouse for troublesome children. Instead
of regarding the inmates as redeemable, refuge officials embraced expla-
nations of delinquency based on heredity. 16
During the 1840s, as the number of delinquent and neglected children
outstripped the capacity of private benevolent societies, the house of ref-
uge was superseded by a new institution, the reform school. Located in
Save the Child 161
rural areas, these schools sought to remove wayward children from the
moral contamination of the city and transform them culturally through a
regimen of moral instruction, prayer, and physical labor. Like the refuge,
the reform school melded the school, the prison, and the workhouse, but
unlike the refuge, the reformatory was a state-run institution, publicly
financed and administered. It quickly became clear that reform schools
faced the same problems of discipline as refuges. Strict regimentation
served to "darken, harden, and embitter" the young people placed in
these institutions. An 1859 fire at the Massachusetts State Reform School
for Boys in Westborough-just eleven years after the institution opened-
underscored the bleak underside of reform-school life. Caused by arson
(the work of a disgruntled fifteen-year-old), the fire revealed that three in-
mates had been in solitary confinement for several months. The three,
who had been accused, respectively, of running away, assaulting an insti-
tution official, and attempted arson, were manacled to the floor in dark,
poorly ventilated cells and fed bread and water. 17
The impulse to rescue vulnerable victims of exploitation and redeem
misguided souls inspired efforts to establish reform schools for young
women. The first was the Massachusetts State Industrial School for Girls
in Lancaster. Originally, most inmates were accused of vagrancy, running
away from home, or staying out all night. Although critics accused the
Massachusetts courts of taking Irish Catholic girls away from their fami-
lies, more than half of the inmates were brought to court by their own
parents, who felt incapable of controlling disobedient daughters, many of
whom refused to contribute to their family's support. The girls were pro-
vided with an education, religious instruction, and training in domestic
skills before they were indentured as domestic servants. In practice, much
of the training was menial; "these arts," the institution's founders ex-
plained, "should include not only the washing of tables and dishes, but
the scouring of floors, stairs, windows and walls, and of clothes, and espe-
cially of bedclothes, and bedsteads." 18
Today the prisonlike orphan asylums and reformatories of the early
nineteenth century stand as relics of a seemingly more repressive, less en-
lightened past. But these institutions were inspired, to varying degrees, by
a utopian faith that it was possible to solve social problems and reshape
human character by removing children from corrupting outside influence
and instilling self-control through moral education, work, rigorous disci-
pline, and an orderly environment. As early as the 1850s, it was apparent
that the early child-saving institutions had failed to live up to their found-
ers' aspirations. Some of the reasons were insufficient funding, over-
crowding, and a shortage of trained caregivers. But their failure also
162 Huck's Raft
reflected contradictions at the heart of the child-saving impulse. In theory,

the institutions were to provide the young with a familial environment
and use the same techniques that childrearing manuals prescribed to pro-
gressive parents to strengthen their children's moral character, substitut-
ing psychological discipline for physical restraint and manipulating guilt,
shame, and sympathy to instill a capacity for self-control. Yet for all the
talk about moral uplift, these institutions mainly served a custodial func-
tion, which became more pronounced over time. Even before the Civil
War, these institutions had become human warehouses, where the inmates
consisted largely of immigrant children subjected to strict surveillance,
regimentation, and corporal punishment. 19
Alongside the development of new child-saving institutions, the early
nineteenth century also witnessed far-reaching revisions of laws affecting
children. The conception of children as weak, vulnerable, and defenseless
creatures gave rise to three legal principles with profound consequences
for the future. One was the "best interests of the child" doctrine, which
held that children's welfare should be the preeminent consideration in any
judicial decision involving custody. A second principle was the "tender
years" doctrine that young children were best left to their mother's care.
The third principle was ccparens patriae,'' that courts had the authority to
override parents' custody rights. Each of these doctrines gave judges
broad discretion to grant custody as they saw fit, allowing them to take
into account their perceptions of the parents' fitness. In the realm of judi-
cial discretion, however, decisions could easily reflect various biases based
on racial, gender, ethnic, and class prejudice. 20
A widely publicized legal case of the 1830s and 1840s illustrated these
legal changes. For six years Ellen Sears, a wealthy woman from Boston,
and her estranged husband, a Swiss count named Paul Daniel Gonzalve
Grand d'Hauteville, battled over the custody of their son, Frederick. Since
Gonzalve had not physically abused his wife or violated his marriage vow,
Ellen had no right to a divorce. In a case that attracted widespread atten-
tion from the penny press, her lawyers argued that she deserved custody
because mothers were better suited to caring for young children than fa-
thers. In awarding her temporary custody, the Pennsylvania Supreme
Court rejected the common law presumption that fathers automatically
retained custody unless proven to be unfit. "The reputation of a father
may be stainless as crystal," the Court stated in its ruling, "and yet the in-
terest of the child may imperatively demand the denial of the father's right
and its continuance with the mother. " 21
In child custody cases, judges used the "best interests of the child" and
"tender years" doctrines to undercut paternal claims to guardianship. As
Save the Child 163
early as 1809, a South Carolina father, in the case of Prather v. Prather,

lost custody of his infant daughter because he had committed adultery.
Changes in custody occurred as an incremental result of legal decisions,
not as a result of statutory enactments. As late as 1900, only nine states
and the District of Columbia had established a mother's statutory right to
equal guardianship of children. Nevertheless, most courts took the posi-
tion that young children belonged with their mothers. For many women,
this presumption proved to be a double-edged sword as new notions of
"parental fitness" supplanted older assumptions about paternal rights. A
woman could receive custody only if she conformed to Victorian notions
of propriety and if the court found her character above reproach. 22
The legal right to institutionalize children without parental consent was
established by a 1838 Philadelphia case known as ex parte Crouse. Mary
Ann Crouse's mother considered her daughter incorrigible and had au-
thorities place her in the Philadelphia House of Refuge. Mary Ann's father
challenged the government's right to incarcerate her without his consent.
Ruling that the government had the authority to remove children "when
[the parents were] unequal to the task of education," the court declared
that removal did not require due process. Concluding that "it would be an
act of extreme cruelty to release" the girl from the facility, the court re-
fused to inquire into the procedures for commitment, the duration of her
incarceration, or the conditions in the school. 23
New ideas about children's welfare also prompted reconsideration of
children born outside marriage. Convinced that it was unfair to visit par-
ents' sins upon their children, legislatures and courts extended limited
rights to children born outside wedlock. Common law had regarded an il-
legitimate child as filius nullius, with no legal claims on a parent or rela-
tive. The only parental obligation was to provide sufficient financial sup-
port to ensure that the child did not become a public charge. But even
before the Civil War, courts and legislatures reduced the stigma of illegiti-
macy by recognizing common law marriages and declaring legitimate the
offspring of annulled marriages and of parents who subsequently married.
State statutes also gave inheritance rights to illegitimate children who
were formally acknowledged by their parents. Meanwhile, to prevent ille-
gitimate children from being separated from their mothers, states allowed
poor children to be a charge in their mother's place of residence rather
than in their place of birth. 24
Adoption-the notion that adults should be able to become the legal
parents of a child who is not their own biological offspring-was another
product of the mid-nineteenth century's commitment to new ideas about
childhood. Unlike English common law, which refused to recognize adop-
164 Huck's Raft
tion out of fear of undercutting blood relatives' inheritance rights, the

American colonies allowed adoption on a limited scale. Many adoptions
took place without a formal legal proceeding, and some were established
through a will. In the mid-nineteenth century the state legislatures of Mis-
sissippi (in 1846) and Texas (in 1850) responded to a growing number of
requests for private a·doption bills by enacting the first general adoption
statutes, which provided for public registration of private adoption agree-
ments. In 1851 Massachusetts adopted the first modern adoption law, re-
quiring judges to determine whether adoptive parents were "of sufficient
ability to bring up the child ... and furnish suitable nurture and educa-
tion" before issuing a decree. The statute also obliged the child's natural
parents or guardian to consent to the adoption in writing. As older no-
tions of parental rights rooted in religion, natural law, and property rights
eroded, legal adoption presaged a new conception of parenthood empha-
sizing affection and stewardship. It also provided an alternative to place-
ment of children in institutions and a way to assist abused and neglected
children. 25
Even before the Civil War, the reaction against institutionalization, ap-
parent in the rise of legal adoption, prompted another influential ap-
proach to the care of dependent children: the orphan train, a precursor to
foster care. The sight of thousands of New York children supporting
themselves as beggars, flower sellers, and prostitutes shocked Charles
Loring Brace, a young Connecticut-born minister. Asked to head the New
York's Children's Aid Society for a single year, he remained on for more
than three decades. To protect destitute children from a pernicious envi-
ronment, he established lodging houses and reading rooms, and set up in-
dustrial missions where children (mainly young girls) received free meals
and learned to make clothes. He also developed a more ambitious solu-
tion, to find slum children homes on western farms, where they would re-
ceive an education and get a chance for a better future. Brace's program
drew on a number of precedents: traditional forms of indentured servi-
tude, a new German residential school system for homeless children, and
the 1849 example of transplanting city children to farm families pio-
neered by the Boston Children's Mission. His scheme also drew on faith in
the power of a fresh start and an idealized image of life in the West. "The
best of all Asylums for the outcast child is the farmer's home," was a
Children's Aid Society slogan. Between 1855 and 1875 the society sent an
average of 3,000 children westward annually. 26
Between 1853 and 1929, 200,000 young people, almost all of them
white, traveled westward not in Conestoga wagons, but in railroad cars,
to be placed with farm families in the Midwest and Far West. Driven by a
Save the Child 165
mixture of charitable and economic motives, the orphan trains were an

idealistic attempt to remove poor children from corrupting urban influ-
ences; an effort to supply workers to labor-short rural areas; and a way to
relieve eastern cities of their "dangerous" classes. Brace embodied these
contradictory impulses. Deeply sentimental, he considered poor children
redeemable and believed they deserved better childhoods than those avail-
able in eastern slums. But his thinking also reflected a deepening heredi-
tarian strain of thought that colored mid-nineteenth-century attitudes
toward poverty. He feared that "gemmules" in destitute adults' blood
made them unsalvageable. In addition, a $10 train ticket cost far less than
the $85 it took to support a child in an orphanage or refuge.
In some instances, children were matched with a specific couple before
being sent west. More often, a newspaper announcement appeared before
a group's arrival, and prospective parents, who had been screened by
county commissioners, applied for them. The selection process, held in a
town hall or a railroad station, resembled a slave auction. Those not cho-
sen were put back on the train and taken to the next town. Brace rejected
written contracts, fearing they would reduce placing-out to a purely legal
and financial arrangement. Because the Children's Aid Society retained

Between 1850 and 1930, at least 200,000 destitute urban children traveled in orphan trains to foster
homes, mainly on farms in the Midwest and Far West. Courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society,
Topeka.
166 Huck's Raft
legal guardianship, it could reclaim children if families were abusive; con-

versely, families were free to return the children. In practice, the lack of a
formal contract meant that there was no formal legal protection for the
child. 27
There were some notable success stories. Two boys who traveled on the
same 1859 train became governors of Alaska and North Dakota respec-
tively. Most boys, however, became farmhands or farmers or mechanics;
and most girls were placed as domestic servants, which helps explain why
few girls applied to go on the orphan trains. There were many stories of
hardship and abuse. Some children were treated more like indentured la-
bor than like sons and daughters. Marguerite Thomson, who was taken
to the small farming town of Bertrand, Nebraska, recalled: "I never had
enough to eat." She reported that she "never had a glass of milk, the first
two years, even though they had cows. They said they had to sell the
milk. " 28
Contrary to Brace's contention, most of the children were not parent-
less waifs: "ragged girls who had nowhere to lay their heads; children
driven from drunkards' homes; orphans who slept where they could find a
box or a stairway; boys cast out by step-mothers or step-fathers." About
one child in five was an orphan or an abandoned child. Another fifth were
brought in by parents or relatives during a family crisis only to be re-
trieved when the crisis had subsided. The single largest group were boys
fourteen and older seeking economic opportunity. 29
Some youths, unhappy with their placement, initiated a move to a new
situation. John Fratenburg left his employer after only twenty-four days
because the latter refused to pay wages. Maggie Riley left an abusive em-
ployer and found employment as a domestic servant with another family.
George Higgenbotham could not "learn farming" and took a job in town
instead. When fourteen-year-old Peter Hilliard was not allowed to attend
Catholic mass, he left his foster family and moved in with an Irish farmer.
Nearly 10 percent of children ran away from their foster homes. Accord-
ing to the Children's Aid Society's records, roughly a third of the children
remained in contact with their biological families during placement. 30
As early as the 1870s, complaints mounted that many children were
forced aboard the trains without their parents' knowledge or consent. At
a Conference of Charities in 1893, an official in one of the receiving
states, North Carolina, charged that the so-called orphans were placed
with people who "treat them as slaves." Midwesterners claimed that the
children's aid societies dumped juvenile delinquents into their states, while
many Catholics and Jews regarded the orphan trains as a Protestant
scheme to convert their children. At the same time, a new generation of
Save the Child 167
social workers argued that society should try to keep struggling families
together. 31
In 1929 the last orphan train, with three boys aboard, left New York
for Sulfur Springs, Texas. Declining demand for farm labor and increasing
efforts to preserve families led to the program's demise. But the orphan
trains had a profound impact on child welfare in the United States. The
children's aid societies were among the first American institutions to use
professional case workers instead of volunteers, to maintain case records,
and to conduct home visits. They also pioneered foster care, suggesting
that it was cheaper and healthier for children than institutionalization.
The orphan train was one expression of a broader revaluation of child-
hood. Increasingly, children were valued not for the labor they provided,
but for emotional reasons. But as children acquired greater sentimental
value, they became, for the first time, prey for kidnappers. The first kid-
napping for ransom took place in 1874. Four-year-old Charley Ross and
his six-year-old brother Walter were abducted outside their affluent Phila-
delphia home after their abductors promised to buy them firecrackers.
Walter was subsequently released, but Charley was not. Twenty-three let-
ters passed between the kidnappers and the boy's frantic father. The police
urged him not to pay ransom, fearing that doing so would encourage
more abductions, but ultimately he decided to meet the kidnappers' de-
mands. Arrangements to deliver the ransom misfired, and communica-
tions from his son's captors ceased. The boy was never found. 32
After the Civil War a new phase in child-saving arose. The Civil War
greatly intensified public concern over children's welfare and convinced
reformers that state action was necessary to protect the young. The
postbellum years witnessed the first organized efforts to prosecute child
abuse, suppress vice targeted at young people, and raise the age at which
girls could consent to sexual relations. Child rescue was the movement's
watchword.
A single case of abuse ignited a movement to end cruelty to children.
Mary Ellen, a foster child, was forced to sleep on an old piece of carpet on
the floor and forbidden to play with other children, She had no shoes or
stockings, and her body was covered with bruises, whip marks, and
burns. In 1874 Etta Angell Wheeler, an urban missionary in New York's
Hell's Kitchen slum, heard about the girl's plight and launched a legal bat-
tle to free Mary Ellen from her abusive home. Unsuccessful in persuading
the police to remove the child from her foster parents, Wheeler turned to
Henry Bergh, president of New York's Society for the Prevention of Cru-
elty to Animals. According to legend, Bergh declared: "The child is an ani-
mal. If there is no justice for it as a human being, it shall at least have the
168 Huck"'s Raft
right of the cur in the street ... It shall not be abused." Forty-eight hours
later, Mary Ellen and her foster mother were brought before a justice
on the New York Supreme Court. Her foster mother was found guilty
of assault and battery and was sentenced to a year of hard labor in a peni-
tentiary. 33
Earlier acts of child abuse had been ignored by the press and public. A
few months earlier a thirteen-year-old boy had been beaten to death by his
father for "refusing to go after beer without the money to pay for it," but
this case aroused no reaction. Several factors made Mary Ellen's case dif-
ferent. Wheeler's husband, a newspaperman, received help from journal-
ists in publicizing the case. Because Mary Ellen had been beaten by some-
one other than her natural mother, the case did not challenge parents'
prerogative to discipline children as they saw fit. Rather, the case involved
dereliction on the part of private charities that placed children in foster
families without oversight. Above all, Mary Ellen was an attractive girl,
and pretty young girls are particularly likely to garner public sympathy. 34
Over the course of American history, concern about child abuse has
been sporadic. Between 1640 and 1680, Puritan Massachusetts adopted
the first laws in the western world forbidding "unnatural severity" in dis-
ciplining children, but these laws were rarely enforced. Before the Civil
War, the temperance movement condemned alcohol on the grounds that it
led fathers and husbands to abuse wives and children. As early as 1852, a
New England periodical published an article on "The Rights of Children"
that spoke of the need to "protect" children from parental "tyranny." But
it was not until the 1870s that the first societies to prevent cruelty to chil-
dren appeared, led by moralistic upper-class reformers, distressed by the
rapid growth of cities and the "depraved" habits of the immigrant poor.
By 1908 there were fifty-five societies devoted exclusively to protecting
children from cruelty. 35
The cruelty societies did not question parents' right to discipline chil-
dren with physical punishment. At the organizing meeting of the New
York society, Henry Bergh said that although he was anxious "to protect
children from undue severity," he himself favored "a good wholesome
flogging, which he often found most efficacious." A commitment to fam-
ily privacy and parental rights led the cruelty societies to focus their atten-
tion almost exclusively on impoverished immigrant families and on fami-
lies headed by single mothers and the unemployed. Relying on threats of
·prosecution for drunkenness or assault, the societies' preferred solution to
abuse was to institutionalize the children by removing them to a city-run
institution or a foster home. Working-class children sometimes took ad-
Save the Child 169
vantage of fears about the societies' agents by threatening to report their

parents "to the Cruelty. " 36
Although the "Cruelty" was accused of breaking up poor families on
flimsy grounds, much of the demand for state intervention came from
family members themselves. The societies' most unfortunate effect was to
convince the public that constructive steps were being taken against child
abuse, when in fact the societies concentrated their energies on child ne-
glect. Although the societies claimed that "the grosser forms of physical
cruelty are not so prevalent as they were a few decades ago," the use of
corporal punishment remained widespread. A study of autobiographies
and letters indicated that three-quarters of the post-Civil War children for
whom information was available had been hit with an instrument by their
parents in the course of discipline. 37
Concern with child abuse led to investigation of other abuses, such as
"baby-farming," the practice of sending unwanted infants to boarding
homes where they were badly neglected or simply allowed to die. "Baby-
farms," Elbridge T. Gerry, the head of the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children charged, "are concerns by means of which persons,
usually of disreputable character, eke out a living by taking two, or three,
or four babies to board ... They feed them on sour milk, and give them
paregoric to keep them quiet, until they die." In fact most baby farms
were primitive nurseries for the infants of working mothers. Another
abuse that aroused child protectors' concern was the claim that poor par-
ents attempted to profit from their children's death by purchasing life in-
surance policies for twenty-five cents a week. In reality the insurance pay-
off, about $17, was only enough to pay for a child's funeral. Although
there were a handful of cases in which insurance was indeed a motive in a
child's death, what disturbed reformers was the idea that any monetary
value should be attached to a child's life, which conflicted with the re-
formers' notion that a child's value was priceless. 38
Reformers became especially distressed by the threat that obscene art
and literature posed to young people's impressionable minds. Convinced
that society's moral health could be enhanced much as sanitary reformers
improved nutrition, sanitation, and personal hygiene, the Young Men's
Christian Association in 1868 persuaded New York's state legislature to
pass a law restricting obscene material. That same year, a British court in
the case of Hicklin v. Queen ruled that the government might suppress
any publication that tended "to deprave and corrupt those whose minds
are open to immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of
this sort may fall." The Hicklin case allowed a work to be judged obscene
170 Huck's Raft
on the basis of isolated passages and its potential impact on the "young
and inexperienced." This decision encouraged antivice reformers like An-
thony Comstock and societies for the suppression of vice to campaign to
rid the mails of "Boys' Papers" and other materials that might corrupt
youngsters; in 1873 Congress passed the Comstock Act, which made it a
crime to distribute obscene materials through the mails. This legislation
not only outlawed publications and works of art deemed obscene, but
also contraceptive devices or medications. 39
Child prostitution was a particular source of alarm. In an article pub-
lished in 1885, William Stead, an English journalist, described how he
had purchased a thirteen-year-old girl for five pounds sterling. Stead was
convicted and imprisoned (for three months) for kidnapping a minor.
Publicity over the case led the British Parliament to raise the age of con-
sent for sexual intercourse from thirteen to sixteen. In 1887 Bessie V.
Cushman, an American physician, documented child prostitution in the
lumber camps of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In New York City in the
middle of the nineteenth century, an estimated 5 to 10 percent of young
women in their teens or early twenties engaged in prostitution for at least
a brief period. In the low-wage urban economy with growing numbers of
unattached, ill-paid, and unemployed young women workers, prostitution
paid twice as much as factory employment. Concern about child prostitu-
tion led New York State to raise the age of consent, which was only ten in
1865, to eighteen by 1895. To enforce this new boundary, states relied on
statutory rape laws, which working-class families frequently invoked to
control their daughters' behavior. 40
A different form of rescue was apparent in the Florence Crittenton mis-
sions. In 1883, after hearing a preacher tell prostitutes, "Go and sin no
more," Charles N. Crittenton, who had made a fortune in pharma-
ceuticals in New York, opened his first home for unwed mothers. By the
time of his death in 1909, he had established eighty missions, providing
educational, vocational, and welfare services to former prostitutes, indi-
gent immigrants, and victims of venereal disease. Many of the homes also
offered infant-care training classes and day nurseries for the children of
working women. Strongly opposed to adoption, Crittenton and his suc-
cessor Dr. Kate Waller Barrett believed that the only way the young
women could atone for their sin was by caring for their children. In con-
trast to the popular image of maternity homes as punitive and coercive,
the Crittenton homes apparently encouraged self-respect, self-reliance,
and dignity among their clients. 41
The most far-reaching effort at child protection involved Native Ameri-
can children, as self-proclaimed "Friends of the Indians" launched an am-
Save the Child 171
bitious campaign to "Americanize" Indian children and obliterate their

tribal identity. Beginning in the late 1870s, the federal government and
private religious organizations established dozens of boarding schools to
indoctrinate Indian children in Anglo ways. It cost between $6,000 and
$10,000 to kill an Indian but only $1,200 to educate a child at a boarding
school. Education seemed the cheaper and more constructive approach to
assimilating young Indians. Richard H. Pratt, a former army officer, em-
braced the idea after working with Apache prisoners in St. Augustine,
Florida. He believed that removing Indian children from their culture and
subjecting them to strict discipline and hard work would lead them to
abandon their tribal traditions and assimilate into mainstream society. His
famous dictum was "Kill the Indian and save the man." "In Indian civili-
zation I am a baptist," Pratt announced, "because I believe in immersing
the Indians in our civilization and, when we get them under, holding them
there until they are thoroughly soaked. " 42
In 1879 Congress gave Pratt eighteen students and a barracks at a de-
serted Army college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to try out his ideas. Luther
Standing Bear, a young Teton Sioux, later recalled his journey to the
school in 1879, just three years after Custer's Last Stand. He remembered
being "surrounded by a jeering, unsympathetic people whose only emo-
tions were those of hate and fear" whenever his train stopped at railroad
stations. After arriving at Carlisle, he was arbitrarily given the name Lu-
ther from a list of names on a blackboard, and his hair was cut short. Stu-
dents were expected to spend three years at Pratt's school. Between 1879
and 1918 the school educated some 12,000 children from seventy-seven
tribes, including a number of African-American as well as Native Ameri-
can students such as the Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe. 43
Boarding school students, as young as five, were separated from their
families, often by hundreds of miles. Indian agents were authorized to
withhold rations from families who refused to let their children go. At the
schools, students were prohibited from speaking native languages, wear-
ing native dress, or practicing native religions or native dances. Students
were pressured to convert to Christianity, and bounties were offered for
the return of runaway students, a measure that indicates a substantial re-
sistance to the program. Contagious diseases often swept through the
schools; at Carlisle, about one student in ten died. Vocational training in
simple crafts was central to the boarding school mission. Students devoted
half a day to reading, writing, and arithmetic and the rest of the day to
domestic arts for the girls and industrial arts for the boys. Indian girls
sewed, set tables, cooked meals, and worked as servants; boys performed
manual labor, took part in military drills, and worked as farm laborers.
172 Huck-'s Raft
The schools' psychological impact was even more detrimental than the
course of study. Zitkala-Sa, a Dakota girl who later taught at Carlisle and
founded and served as president of the National Council of American In-
dians, was born in 1876 to a Yankton Sioux mother and a white father
she never knew. She spent her first twelve years living in a tipi near the
Missouri River before being sent to a Quaker-run charity school in
Wabash, Indiana, where she was forced to wear tight shoes and a
confining dress. She frequently hid under her bed. As an adult she wrote
"The Soft-Hearted Sioux," a story of a young man unable to readjust to
tribal life after his years in boarding school. 44
At the turn of the twentieth century, there were 150 boarding schools,
most operated directly by the Bureau of Indian Affairs while others were
under contract with Christian missionaries. At the schools' peak, in the
1920s, they were educating more than 30,000 Indian children a year. Not
until the late 1920s did the government begin to build neighborhood
schools on reservations to allow Indian children to attend school closer to
home. By the 1960s, as a result of mounting protest from Native Ameri-
cans, Indian children were no longer forced to attend boarding schools,
and by 2002 only four remained. But the impact of the boarding school
experience persisted even after the system began to decline. The trauma of
early separation from parents and culture, the assumption of Indian infe-
riority, and the uprooting and alienation at the boarding schools left a
lasting imprint on many Native Americans. 45
A new phase in the history of child welfare arose in the 1890s. Invoking
the principles of professionalization, scientific expertise, and rational ad-
ministration, child-savers of the Progressive era greatly expanded the role
of the state and of trained experts in addressing problems of children's
health, education, and welfare. But Progressivism's legacy was mixed.
While the Progressive commitment to child welfare justified new measures
to combat infant and child mortality, increase access to kindergartens and
high schools, restrict child labor, and assist single-parent families, it also
expanded the definition of the status offenses for which juveniles (but not
adults) could be punished, weakened due-process protections for minors
accused of wrongdoing, and instituted harsh measures, including steriliza-
tion, for children regarded as feeble-minded. 46
One symbol of a more aggressive approach to youth problems was the
George Youth Republic, a prototype for Boys' Town. Founded in 1895 by
philanthropist William R. George on 600 acres in Freeville, New York,
the republic provided a refuge for delinquent and potentially delinquent
adolescents. Convinced that city life quashed many of society's democratic
Save the Child 173
ideals, George sought to implement a self-governing republic in a rural

setting, complete with its own currency, workshops, fire department, po-
lice force, and system of justice. Disturbed by the segregation of young
people from meaningful activities, he viewed self-government as the best
way to prepare young people for adult life. With "nothing without labor"
as his motto, George expected young people to work for their board,
lodging, and pocket money to build up their self-respect and civic spirit.
The young residents levied their own taxes and elected their own officials.
Theodore Roosevelt called it "a manufactory of citizens," and the repub-
lic inspired experiments with student government in public schools. 47
In the mid-1910s George's republic was struck by scandal, complete
with charges of brutality and sexual immorality. It also came under attack
from a new generation of psychologically trained child professionals, who
decried the republic's unsystematic, unscientific methods and the absence
of testing and individualized therapy. Nevertheless, the republic survived,
and by the time of George's death in 1936, 3,000 boys and girls, mainly
from New York City slums, had lived in the republic. 48
The Progressive era marked a watershed in the history of child welfare.
Progressive-era achievements included reducing infant mortality through
aggressive public health measures, establishing playgrounds so that urban
children would not have to play in the streets, and providing day nurseries
and kindergartens for the children of working mothers. These years also
saw enactment of the first effective compulsory school attendance laws,
extensive revisions in school curricula, the rapid expansion of the high
school, and passage of legislation to regulate the hours and conditions of
children's labor. 49
During the early twentieth century, government's supervisory, regula-
tory, and caregiving role greatly expanded. Children born out of wedlock
received the right to support and inheritance. Beginning with Ohio in
1911, states enacted the first children's codes to provide uniform legal
protections for children. At the same time, public agencies assumed func-
tions previously provided by private and religious institutions, and profes-
sionally trained female social workers replaced amateur male charity
workers and adopted a new approach-casework-to address child wel-
fare. The greatest achievement of the Progressive era was reducing infant
and child mortality by more than 50 percent. Public health reform suc-
ceeded because it had a measurable goal and relied on scientific principles.
The greatest disappointment of the Progressive era was the failure to
move children out of almshouses, orphanages, and other large, regi-
mented institutions as the number of institutionalized children rose from
174 Huck's Raft
61,000 early in the Progressive era to 205,000 in 1923. Nevertheless, the

child-savers did succeed in expanding government's role and reducing the
role of private agencies. 50
In pursuit of child welfare, progressive educators sought to create a
child-centered school curriculum. In 1892 Joseph Mayer Rice, a pediatri-
cian, wrote that the typical public school "has been converted into the
most dehumanizing institution that I have ever laid eyes upon, each child
being treated as if he possessed a memory and the faculty of speech, no in-
dividuality, no sensibility and no soul." Teaching emphasized memoriza-
tion, drill, repetition, and strict discipline. In the early 1870s the Quincy,
Massachusetts, school board discovered that while students could read
their textbooks, they were unable to read unfamiliar materials. They
. could recite rules of grammar and mathematical formulas, but could not
apply them. Francis W. Parker was hired as the district's new superinten-
dent, and he sought to integrate the ideas of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a
Swiss educator who called for learning through direct experience and ac-
tivities, into the district's curriculum. Parker promptly did away with the
textbooks, readers, and spellers and called on teachers to show interest in
their students as individuals. He incorporated geography, history, and na-
ture study into the curriculum and taught these subjects through investi-
gation and other forms of active learning. An 1879 state examination
showed that the Quincy students surpassed the performance of students in
other Massachusetts schools in traditional subjects. 51
The Progressive era brought dramatic growth to the nation's schools.
Between 1870 and 1915 the number of children in school increased from
seven to twenty million, and school expenditures jumped even faster,
from $63 million to $605 million. By 1918 every state had enacted com-
pulsory education laws, with thirty-one states requiring attendance until
the age of sixteen. Progressive educators also had some success in restrict-
ing corporal punishment in schools, convincing seven major cities to ban
the practice. Meanwhile, Gary, Indiana, pioneered an extended school day
that combined academic studies with a wide range of nonacademic activi-
ties. Instead of spending just four hours a day at school, students went
from nine to five, participating in school assemblies, gym, and vocational
training in shop and home economics. Modified versions of the Gary plan
were adopted by many cities. 52
Schooling was extended both in the early years-through the establish-
ment of kindergartens-and in the upper grades-through a massive ex-
pansion in high schools. The first kindergarten in the United States was
founded in Boston in 1860 by Elizabeth Peabody. Inspired by the nine-
teenth-century German educator Friedrich Froebel, who emphasized the
Save the Child 175
importance of teaching young children through organized play, the use of

the hands and the senses, and nature study, the Transcendentalist educa-
tor believed that children's play had intrinsic educational and develop-
mental value. Most early kindergartens were sponsored by wealthy female
philanthropists like Pauline Shaw of Boston and Jane Stanford and
Phoebe A. Hearst of California, who viewed kindergartens as an adjunct
to other charitable endeavors for the poor. Kindergarten teachers in these
privately financed institutions spent half their day visiting the homes of
their pupils, providing mothers with information about their children's
nutritional, hygienic, and moral needs. Kindergarten advocates split about
whether the institution was primarily childcare for needy children or a
mechanism for promoting all children's emotional and intellectual devel-
opment. Those who favored making kindergartens available to all chil-
dren established the first publicly financed kindergarten in St. Louis in
1873; Boston and Philadelphia public schools took over charitable kin-
dergartens in 1888. By 1912 kindergarten enrollment reached 312,000,
but even as late as the 1920s, only about 10 percent of five-year-olds at-
tended kindergartens. 53
High schools grew even more rapidly. It took a century to increase the
proportion of young people in high schools from 10 percent (in 1815) to
20 percent (in 1915). It took only another thirteen years to reach half the
high school aged population. Between 1890 and 1918 high school atten-
dance soared by over 700 percent, from 200,000 to 1.6 million, while the
number of graduates doubled, to 213,000. A new high school opened
every day in the first thirty years of the twentieth century. 54
Progressive educators, led by John Dewey, launched a revolt against
drill and rote memorization in favor of a more natural, child-centered ed-
ucation. They called upon teachers to cultivate a respect for diversity and
a critical, engaged intelligence that would prepare young people to partici-
pate in community affairs. Progressive educators emphasized develop-
mentally appropriate instruction and methods of pedagogy that appealed
to all of a child's senses and were tailored to children's individual needs.
Ironically, the Progressive era also saw the rise of standardized testing.
During World War I the U.S. army used intelligence testing to identify
officer candidates. When the war was over, psychometrics, the measure-
ment of psychological variables such as intelligence, became associated
with the modern, scientific school system, which used intelligence testing
to measure students' academic potential and to guide students into appro-
priate curricular tracks. Critics argued that intelligence testing threatened
democratic ideals. Almost always, racial or ethnic minorities received
lower test scores and were tracked into vocational courses of study. 55
176 Huck~s Raft
The Progressive educators' ideal of involving children in civic affairs

found tangible expression in organizations designed to spread the gospel
of cleanliness. In New York City in 1915, 25,000 young people partici-
pated in juvenile street cleaning leagues. Wearing buttons inscribed with
the slogan "We Are for Clean Streets," boys and girls deposited litter in
the city's "red robin" trash cans and reported overflowing trash recepta-
cles, filthy lots, missing street signs, dead animals in roadways, broken
curbs, potholes, and blocked fire escapes. They also distributed multilin-
gual circulars calling for civic cleanliness, confronted litterers, visited ten-
ements and businesses, and ridiculed sanitation workers who neglected
their duties. The cleanliness campaign sought to check the outbreak of
communicable diseases, beautify city streets, and combat the appeal of
gangs in order to curb juvenile crime. 56
Cleanliness was one way to attack the problem of child mortality. At
the turn of the century, 20 percent of children died by the age of five,
mainly from gastrointestinal, respiratory, and infectious diseases. First
recognized as a social problem in the 1850s, child mortality was initially
blamed on the unhygienic conditions in crowded cities. During the 1870s
pediatricians linked high infant death rates to impure milk, and promoted
farm and bottling inspection programs modeled on earlier European ef-
forts. In 1893 Nathan Straus, whose family owned Macy's department
store, opened one of the first pure milk stations in the United States,
which cut the death rate in New York City's orphan asylum on Randall's
Island in half. In 1908 Chicago became the first city in the world to re-
quire pasteurization of the city's milk supply. Meanwhile a growing num-
ber of physicians and social workers became convinced that the only way
to reduce infant mortality was to educate mothers about proper hygiene
and nutrition. Milk stations expanded to include medical consultations
and education in childcare, while visiting nurses brought instruction into
the home. By the early 1910s settlement houses, well-baby clinics, Baby
Week campaigns, and home visits by public health nurses sought to edu-
cate mothers to raise healthier babies. 57
The most celebrated achievement of the Progressive era was the estab-
lishment of the juvenile court, introduced in Illinois in 1899. In July of
that year, eleven-year-old Henry Campbell was brought before Judge
Ricl).ard S. Tuthill by his own mother, who accused the boy of stealing
from her. With his courtroom filled with representatives from the Chicago
Women's Club, Judge Tuthill agreed to send Campbell to live with his
grandmother in upstate New York, hoping that a rural environment
would give the boy a fresh start. In the two years before passage of the Ju-
Save the Child 177
venile Court Law, more than 1,700 children were sent to adult jails and
prisons. In the first two years after the law passed, only 60 went to jail. 58
Settlement house worker Jane Addams considered the creation of the
juvenile court a landmark in the history of childhood. "There was almost
a change in mores when the juvenile court was established," she declared.
"The child was brought before the judge with no one to prosecute him
and none to defend him ... The element of conflict was absolutely elimi-
nated and with it all notions of punishment with its curiously belated con-
notations." But at least part of the juvenile court's appeal was that it
promised to reduce the costs of institutionalization. The juvenile court in
Denver claimed to save the state $88,000 in eighteen months by reducing
institutional commitments. 59
Based on the idea that young people were less culpable than adults and
became delinquent as a result of immaturity, poor parenting, neglect, and
poverty, the juvenile courts provided wayward youths with the opportu-
nity to turn their lives around. Functioning as a parent, not a prosecutor,
judges had broad leeway to devise alternatives to a prison sentence, such
as requiring a youth to attend a vocational school. Judg~s held informal
hearings rather than a trial, talked to the child in a casual manner, and
took testimony from trained probation officers and social workers who
described the youth's background in detail. The juvenile court handled
not only criminal cases but also status offenses that only juveniles could
commit, such as underage drinking, running away, and curfew violations,
as well as vagrancy, begging, and peddling on the streets. In 1913 half the
juvenile arrests in one New York neighborhood were for such offenses as
"playing with water pistol ... shooting craps, snowballing, subway dis-
turbances, and throwing stones. " 60
The juvenile courts had their own distinct language. Unlike the adult
courts, cases were begun by petition, not indictment, and judges presided
over hearings, rather than trials, and made findings rather than rendering
verdicts. The accused were called respondents, not defendants, and were
described as offenders rather than criminals. In theory, juvenile courts
were supposed to emphasize counseling and treatment over punishment,
and rehabilitation over retribution. Court records were kept private, and
when a youth reached adulthood, the criminal record disappeared, so that
a youth was not stigmatized for life. Instead of being incarcerated, most
youthful offenders were handled by a probation system that was supposed
to provide a middle ground between incarceration and unsupervised re-
lease back into the community. In exchange for this informality, however,
juveniles had to give up certain rights to due process, including the right
178 Huck's Raft
to a trial by jury, the right to an attorney, and the right to confront wit-
nesses . Drawing support from charity reformers and local civic groups, es-
pecially middle-class women's organizations, the juvenile courts spread
rapidly. By 1925, forty-six states adopted the idea. 61
The juvenile court's basic components were not as revolutionary as its
proponents maintained. As early as the 1870s, several states, including
New York, had special judges and separate procedures, including parole
systems, for juvenile delinquents. What was new was the conviction that a
probation officer, like a trained social worker, would conduct a "complete
and thorough" investigation of family conditions, and propose sanctions
and treatment that would rehabilitate the youngster, often in the young
person's own home. In practice, however, probation staffs were too small
to provide anything but superficial services. To trim costs, twenty-one
states experimented with voluntary probation officers. 62
During the century after the juvenile court was founded, the basic as-
sumptions that contributed to its rise eroded as public concern over juve-
nile crime escalated and faith in the power of the juvenile justice system to
rehabilitate wayward youth waned. The defining characteristics of the ju-
venile justice system-informal procedures, confidentiality, individualized
treatment, and probation-gave way to a new emphasis on formal, bu-
reaucratic procedure, rigid sentencing guidelines, and incarceration of vio-
lent offenders. At the end of the twentieth century, every state had
adopted legislation that made it easier to transfer juveniles to adult courts,
hold them in adult jails, and sentence them to adult prisons. Yet even as
lawmakers got tough on juvenile crime, it became glaringly apparent that
a punitive approach did not serve society well. Incarceration in adult pris-
ons too often transformed youthful offenders into career criminals. Pro-
gressive ideals-a recognition of the special developmental characteristics
of the young and of the importance of early intervention, individualized
treatment, and rehabilitation-stand as a rebuke to the simplistic solu-
tions to juvenile crime favored today. 63
Eugenicist ideas linking heredity and criminality gained ascendance
during the Progressive era. Prompted by The jukes, Richard Dugdale's
1875 study of seven generations of a family of criminals, prostitutes, and
paupers, a panic ensued over hereditary criminality and the purported
"menace of the feebleminded." To prevent insane or retarded children
from reproducing, thousands were confined in sexually segregated institu-
tions beginning in the early twentieth century; by 1964 about 60,000 had
been sterilized, a practice upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court
in the 1927 decision of Buck v. Bell. Many were _institutionalized by hard-
pressed parents, who found it difficult to supervise or care for these chil-
Save the Child 179
dren. The institutionalization and sterilization of mentally retarded or ill

children stands as the most haunting example of the misuse of the concept
of child protection. 64
More positive reforms included the establishment of playgrounds and
day nurseries as an alternative to street play for slum children. In 1906 the
Boston philanthropist Joseph Lee, the pioneer in physical education Lu-
ther Gullick Jr., and the educator Henry Curtis, with encouragement from
Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Jacob Riis, started the Playground Asso-
ciation of America. Staunch advocates of the value of games and team
sports, they argued that supervised playgrounds promoted Americaniza-
tion, reduced ethnic conflict, and taught children the value of teamwork
without undermining competitiveness and initiative. The number of play-
grounds rose from fewer than 100 -in 1905 to nearly 4,000 in 1917. 65
To meet working mothers' desperate need for childcare, reformers es-
tablished day nurseries modeled on the creches established by France in
the early nineteenth century. There was a crying need for childcare. Jane
Addams described three children crippled while their mothers were at
work: "One had fallen out of a third-story, another had been burned, and
the third had a curved spine due to the fact that for three years he had
been tied all day long to the leg of the kitchen table." By 1892 there were
ninety day nurseries in the nation's cities, including institutions estab-
lished by African Americans, Catholics, and Jews. Most mothers kept
their children in these institutions briefly, in part because the caregiver ra-
tio was extremely poor. In one nursery, a single woman cared for as many
as fifty children. Day nurseries quickly acquired an unsavory reputation
that retarded the development of daycare in the United States. They were
regarded as an unfortunate necessity for families in crisis rather than as an
educational institution or as an institutional mechanism to allow mothers
to work. Most reformers favored state-funded pensions that would permit
mothers to stay home with their children. 66
A leading goal of Progressive child-savers was to end the institu-
tionalization of dependent children. At the first White House conference
on children in 1909, participants agreed that children should be kept in
their own families rather than warehoused in huge institutions. Starting
with Illinois in 1911, states enacted "mothers' pensions" to allow widows
to care for children in their own homes. By 1919, thirty-nine states and
the territories of Alaska and Hawaii adopted mothers' pensions. Yet the
impact of these measures was insignificant. The amount of aid provided
was so small that most eligible mothers had to work to support their fam-
ilies. Because of "local option" provisions, most counties-probably
around 60 percent-offered no pensions at all. Eligibility was severely re-
180 Huck!Js Raft
strictive. Many states excluded African Americans and established "suit-

able home" provisions for receiving aid, barring divorcees, unmarried
mothers, and even women separated from their husbands from receiving
pensions. Drinking, smoking, or failure to attend church were grounds for
denial of aid. 67
During the Progressive era the federal government entered the field
of child welfare for the first time. In 1912, after a determined campaign
by Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and other college-educated female settle-
ment house and social workers, the federal government established the
Children's Bureau to collect and disseminate information on child welfare.
Although the agency had no administrative powers, and initially received
only a $25,000 appropriation, it compiled data about children's health,
labor, and legal status and distributed childrearing advice. Under the lead-
ership of Julia Lathrop and her successor Grace Abbott, it pushed for a
federal child labor law. 68
The bureau advocated a "whole child" philosophy based on the idea
that every child had a right to a protected childhood, free from poverty,
exploitation, and ill health. To achieve this objective, the agency called for
an expansion of juvenile courts, federal support for infant and children's
health, and aid to poor families with dependent children. To reduce infant
and maternal mortality and improve child health, the bureau lobbied suc-
cessfully in behalf of the Maternity and Infancy Protection Act (the
Sheppard-Towner Act), adopted by Congress in 1921, which provided
grants to states to expand visiting nurses' services, especially in rural ar-
eas, and to train midwives, nurses, and mothers in maternal and children's
health. Before the act expired in 1929, it helped the states (all but three of
which participated) distribute twenty-two million educational publica-
tions, establish 2,978 prenatal centers, and sponsor three million home
visits. More negatively, the bureau supported the sterilization of mentally
handicapped girls in the belief that disabilities were transmitted geneti-
cally.69
Of all the reform campaigns of the Progressive era, the one that at-
tracted the most attention was the crusade against child labor. Many Pro-
gressives regarded the movement to abolish child labor as the twentieth-
century equivalent of the abolitionist campaign to end slavery. Child
labor, they charged, damaged children's health, impeded their education,
and imperiled their moral health. Children in Bondage (1914), by Edwin
Markham, Ben Lindsey, and George Creel, described the two million child
laborers, "mangled, mind, body, and soul, and aborted into a maturity
robbed of power and promise. " 70
Twelve-year-old Rose Gollup, who emigrated from a small village in
Save the Child 181
western Russia in 1892, was one of those two million children. Her job
entailed stitching the sleeve linings of men's coats, breathing "filthy air"
and the "cloth dust" twelve hours a day. Her sweatshop was cramped, the
width of "two ordinary sized wagons"; dark, with just two gas jets to
provide light; and crowded with sixteen employees and four sewing ma-
chines. In 1911 Rose and 700 other employees were at work in the Trian-
gle Shirtwaist Factory when a fire broke out, killing 154. With their cloth-
ing in flames and the fire doors leading to the stairs locked, many workers
leapt off window ledges to their death. "I couldn't stop crying for hours,
for days," Rose later wrote. "Afterwards, I used to dream I was falling
from a window, screaming . . . Then I would start crying and couldn't
stop. " 71
Eleven-year-old Boots McAleenan, another child laborer, was one of
dozens of newsboys who went on strike for two weeks after William
Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York
World raised the price they paid for papers. Declared one striker: "Ten
cents in the dollar is as much to us as it is to Mr. Hearst . . . We can do
more with ten cents than he can with twenty-five." With sales down by 40
percent, the publishers offered a compromise: the price would remain
where it is, but the World and Journal would take back unsold papers at
' 100 percent refund. Boots and the other newsboys agreed to the terms
and returned to the streets. 72
Several factors accounted for mounting public concern over child labor,
including the increasing contrast between middle-class and working-class
childhood and organized labor's fear of competition from child workers.
Especially significant was the notion that all children, regardless of class,
deserved a protected childhood, one devoted to play and education. No
one was more effective in arousing public passion over child labor than
Lewis Wickes Hine. Hired by the National Child Labor Committee in
1908 to document child labor, he took more than 5,000 photographs of
children working in agriculture, canneries, coalmines, factories, mills, and
sweatshops, mainly in the South. His photographs revealed the brutal
conditions of child labor and the inadequacy of existing child labor laws
and awoke the nation's conscience in a way that statistics and reports had
failed to accomplish.
Quite selective in their targets, child labor law reformers bitterly op-
posed child labor in factories, mines, and the street trades, but said little
about farm labor, the single largest employer of child labor, since they
considered this kind of work valuable in building moral character. Nor
did they object to part-time teenage employment in the growing services
industries, where teenagers worked as delivery boys, soda jerks, and store
182 Huck"'s Raft

At the turn of the twentieth century, two million children toiled in factories,
mills, and mines. The girl in this 1908 photograph had already worked in a
North Carolina textile mill for two years when Lewis Wickes Hine took her
picture. Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.
clerks. In the North, the kinds of child labor that the reformers most ob-
jected to were rapidly declining as a result of compulsory education laws,
an abundance of inexpensive immigrant labor, and technological innova-
tions (such as the telephone, which reduced the need for messengers). But
in the South, the use of child labor in textile mills continued to rise until
World War 1. 73
The crusade against child labor drew support from such groups as the
National Consumer League, founded in 1890, and the National Child La-
bor Committee, established in 1904. Trade unions argued that child labor
depressed adult wages, while southern advocates of child labor restric-
tions, like Alexander J. McElvey of the National Child Labor Committee,
maintained that having white children work in mills, mines, and factories
endangered the "Anglo-Saxon race." Spearheading opposition to any re-
strictions were southern textile manufacturers, who charged that the Na-
tional Child Labor Committee was the mouthpiece of New England mill
owners, who were out to eliminate their southern competitors. The Cath-
olic church also denounced government interference in the family, partly
out of a recognition that poor families desperately needed their children's
earnings. Thirty-five states adopted laws restricting child labor in the
Save the Child 183
1910s, but lax enforcement convinced reformers that federal legislation

was necessary. 74
The first federal child labor law, which would have prohibited children
under fourteen from working in factories and mills (but not on farms),
was introduced in Congress in 1906. After its defeat, opponents of child
labor persuaded Congress to authorize a federal investigation of the
working conditions of women and children, which renewed pressure for
reform. In 1916 the Keating-Owen bill passed Congress, prohibiting in-
terstate shipment of products from mines employing children under six-
teen or factories using children under fourteen. It also barred fourteen-
and fifteen-year-olds from working more than eight hours a day, six days
a week, or after seven at night. Altogether, the law would have ended
child labor for only 150,000 children. Several million other child laborers,
notably those who lived on farms, would not have been covered. 75
Keating-Owen was in effect just 273 days before the Supreme Court, by
a five-to-four vote in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), struck it down, ruling
that the federal government had no power to regulate manufacturing in
individual states. ,Four years later the Supreme Court in Bailey v. Drexel
ruled that a law taxing the profits of corporations utilizing child labor was
also unconstitutional. In 1924 Congress passed a constitutional amend-
ment authorizing legislation to restrict child labor. This amendment,
which did not prohibit child labor or require Congress to pass any laws,
was not ratified by the states. In 1926 the National Association of Manu-
facturers proposed a minimum age of fourteen for employment as well as
restrictions on dangerous work and on work between nine at night and
seven in the morning for older children. But the association failed to sup-
port any legislation to enact these measures. 76
In 1892 Kate Douglas Wiggin, the author of the bestselling novel
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, the story of a rambunctious, rule-breaking
ten-:year-old orphan, wrote an article for Scribner~s magazine titled
"Children's Rights." In it she drew a distinction between child protec-
tion-the child's right to special protection from extreme forms of abuse
and neglect-and children's rights-which included an independent legal
identity, a degree of autonomy from parents, and the right to a "free, se-
rene, healthy, bread and butter childhood," unburdened by heavy labor.
In answer to the question "Who owns the child?" Wiggin answered point-
edly: no one. "The parent is simply a divinely appointed guardian," she
wrote. Wiggin's notion that children have a right to a proper childhood
and that adults have a duty to serve as their stewards remains a challenge
to Americans today, who need to duplicate the child-savers' passion,
while overcoming their limitations. 77
Throughout American history, interest in children's welfare has ebbed
and flowed. The Progressive era represented a high point. However
circumscribed the Progressive reforms might appear in retrospect, they
represented an effort, not wholly unsuccessful, to universalize the middle-
class ideals of childhood as a period devoted to play and education. Fol-
lowing World War I, public concern over children's issues faded. Contrib-
uting to the decline in interest was staunch opposition from the Catholic
church to government interference in the family and a hostile Supreme
Court, which repeatedly struck down child labor legislation. Equally im-
portant, child welfare professionals shifted their focus away from
broader political and economic issues and instead focused on psychologi-
cal maladjustments within individual families. It was not until the Great
Depression greatly intensified problems of child welfare that a new phase
of reform emerged. 78
chapter nine
Children under the Magnifying Glass
LIE PERIOD from 1865 to 1910 was the golden age of Ameri-
can children's fiction. From the late 1860s-when Horatio Alger's Ragged
Dick, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich's
Story of a Bad Boy were published-to the early 1900s-when Lucy
Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Booth Tarkington's Penrod,
Eleanor Porter's Pollyanna, and Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of
Sunnybrook Farm appeared-a new kind of children's literature arose,
fundamentally different from the fiction that preceded it. Unlike postrevo-
lutionary literature, with its wooden characters and simplistic plots, later
children's books sought to excite young readers' imagination rather than
instruct them or shape their character. 1
Children's fantasy literature arose during the 1850s. For boys, there
were plot-driven adventure stories like Richard Henry Dana's Two Years
before the Mast. For girls, there were sentimental domestic novels, like
Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, which typically featured a female
orphan who must find her way in a threatening world. After the Civil
War, imaginative, literature proliferated. While there was no American
counterpart to the German Bildungsroman, a chronicle of a young per-
son's self-discovery, spiritual and emotional development, and growing
psychological self-awareness, American children's fiction placed recogniz-
ably realistic children at the heart of the narrative and explored the pro-
cess of growing up. An essay in the December 1865 issue of the Atlantic
Monthly attributed the sudden outpouring of children's literature to the
increasing regimentation of young people's lives. Imaginative literature
186 Huck~s Raft
sustained children's spirits as their lives grew more rigidly structured:

"What shall we do with our children? ... The Slaveholder's Rebellion is
put down; but how shall we deal with the never-ceasing revolt of the new
generation against the old? And how to keep our Young American under
the thumb of his father and mother without breaking his spirit?" In the
free-floating world of fiction, children's fantasies of adventure and free-
dom were realized. 2
These books allayed children's fears while providing them with fanta-
sies of escape and empowerment. They allowed middle-class children to
imagine adventures and challenges no longer attainable in real life. The
heroes of many American childhood classics were orphans, like Tom Saw-
yer, or half-orphans, like Huck Finn. Freed from parental authority, these
books' protagonists experience a freedom that is at once exhilarating and
terrifying. Many of the books featuring female protagonists, like Little
Women, also dealt with the challenge of controlling the emotions of anger
and envy considered inappropriate for middle-class girls. 3
Today children's literature is radically separate from adult literature,
but after the Civil War this was not the case. Many of the era's greatest
authors, including Mark Twain, wrote stories for children, and readers of
all ages devoured tales about barefoot rascals and mischiefmakers, exu-
berant tomboys, and adorable cherubs who redeem curmudgeonly adults.
At a time when middle-class children's lives were becoming more regi-
mented, children's books expressed nostalgia for a simpler past and fanta-
sies of youthful freedom. Through literature, children and adults alike got
a sense of childhood as adventurous and precarious. But like other golden
ages, the golden age of children's literature proved fleeting. Freudian psy-
choanalysis, with its recognition of childhood sexuality and sibling ri-
valry, and its conception of children as creatures of unappeasable drives
that must be repressed, sublimated, and redirected during the passage to
adulthood, made the earlier literature, with its emphasis on childhood in-
nocence and the essential goodness of even the "bad" boy, seem hope-
lessly na'ive and unsophisticated.
Scientific understanding of children's emotional, physical, and sexual
development increased markedly at the end of the nineteenth century, giv-
ing rise to two developments with far-reaching repercussions for the his-
tory of childhood. The first was the advent of scientific childrearing ad-
vice; the second was the emergence of the modern concept of adolescence.
The heightened awareness of children's developmental stages contributed,
in turn, to institutional developments that continue to structure children's
experience today: the appearance of the kindergarten; the rapid expansion
of the high school; and the proliferation of adult-controlled environments
Children under the Magnifying Glass 187
for middle-class girls and boys in their teen years, of which the best
known are the Boy Scouts, Boys' Clubs, Camp Fire Girls, and Girl Scouts.
Contributing to the development of scientific information on child-
rearing were the high child death rate, the desire to upgrade the maternal
role and treat motherhood as a serious vocation, and the sense that the
world of white-collar employment required children to be socialized in
new ways. A concern with personality development replaced an earlier
preoccupation with shaping children's moral character as mothers and
childrearing experts expressed a new interest in such psychological traits
as shyness, timidity, and bravado. Alongside the emergence of a new sci-
ence of parenting came an awareness of adolescence as a distinct, conflict-
riven stage characterized by intense passions, a penchant for risk -taking,
and wildly fluctuating emotions. G. Stanley Hall, the psychologist whose
1904 book on adolescence helped popularize the concept, convinced
many parents and educators that young people were growing up too fast,
that adolescence needed to be prolonged, and that the early and
midteenage years needed to be spent in specialized institutions designed to
meet adolescents' special psychological needs. Worried that "our urban-

In this late nineteenth-century elementary classroom in Aspen, Colorado, the girls wear dresses with
puffed sleeves and high collars; the boys wear jackets. The formality of the pupils' clothing illustrates
the seriousness with which their parents took their schooling. Courtesy of the Denver Public Library.
188 Huck's Raft
ized hothouse life ... tend[s] to ripen everything before its time," Hall ar-
gued for institutions where adolescent energies might be sublimated
through sports and other age-appropriate activities, and where young
people could be shielded from adult pressures and temptations. 4
One indicator of a shift in outlook was the emergence of pediatrics as a
medical specialty. In 1860, when the German-born physician Abraham
Jacobi established the country's first clinic for the treatment of children's
diseases in New York, 15 to 20 percent of American infants died before
their first birthday. Of those who survived to the age of one, another 10
percent were dead before the age of five. By 1880, when the American
Medical Association established a section on children's diseases, ten medi-
cal schools offered courses in pediatrics and some 700 doctors specialized
in treating children's illnesses. No longer were affluent parents or their
physicians willing to respond to childhood diseases with resignation. The
rise of pediatrics as a distinct specialty was the first sign of a growing in-
terest in "scientizing" childhood. 5
Charles Darwin inaugurated the scientific study of child development in
1877, when he published "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant," based
upon his observations of his son Doddy thirty-seven years earlier. During
the infant's first week, the British scientist discovered that his newborn
son "was capable of various reflex actions, namely sneezing, hickuping,
yawning, stretching, and of course sucking and screaming." "With a natu-
ralist's curiosity and a father's empathy,'' he tried to determine when his
son first exhibited affection, anger, fear, pleasure, shyness, a moral sense,
development of language, reaction to his self-image, and a capacity for
abstract reasoning. Comparing his child with various primates, Darwin
tried to determine which of his son's behaviors were instinctual and which
were the product of nurture. 6
Darwin's sketch inspired the first systematic studies of mental and emo-
tional child development. In September 1880, under the direction of psy-
chologist G. Stanley Hall, four experienced kindergarten teachers inter-
viewed more than 400 children entering Boston's schools. The teachers
asked each child 134 questions dealing with animals, astronomy, geogra-
phy, mathematics, meteorology, and plants. Hall was startled by the chil-
dren's ignorance. Eighty percent did not know what a beehive was. Fully
90 percent did not know what the ribs were, 65 percent couldn't identify
their ankles, and 93 percent did not know that leather came from animals.
Hall concluded that teachers could not assume that children came to
school with a common fund of basic knowledge. 7
In the 1880s and 1890s the study of child development was institution-
alized as educators, physicians, and psychologists, notably Hall, the presi-
dent of Clark University, and Earl Barnes, a professor of education at

Stanford, gathered empirical information about children's physical
growth, psychological development, and sexual maturation. Through
questionnaires and close observations of thousands of children, research-
ers investigated language development, hearing, and eyesight; children's
ethical and religious impulses; and their psychological lives, including
their ideas about old age, disease, and death. Known as the "Child Study"
movement, the scientific study of child development carried profound
consequences for the experience of childhood. It identified a series of
sharply differentiated developmental stages, each with its own distinctive
characteristics and psychology. It isolated certain norms-including
norms about weight, size, and cognitive development-that could be ap-
plied to children of particular ages. Its standardized norms also altered the
way young people were reared by inspiring new kinds of childrearing
manuals, written by physicians and psychologists rather than by ministers
and moralists, and espousing rational rather than spiritual advice.
The central figure in the scientific study of children was G. Stanley Hall,
a student of William James and the recipient of Harvard's first Ph.D. in
psychology, who is best remembered today for bringing Sigmund Freud
and Carl Jung to the United States in 1909. During the 1880s and 1890s
Hall enlisted large numbers of teachers and college-educated mothers to
keep detailed records of children's behavior and to participate in regular
discussions about child development and children's problems. Through
child study, Hall hoped to augment the scientific understanding of child
development and awaken the public to children's needs. The first organi-
zation formally dedicated to child study was the Society for the Study of
Child Nature, founded by mothers in the Ethical Culture movement in
New York in 1889, who were especially interested in the toys and punish-
ments appropriate for their children. Three years later the American Asso-
ciation of University Women formed child study groups of its own. By
1897, when the National Congress of Mothers held its first convention,
women's clubs and the new parent-teacher associations had also taken up
child study activities. Child study appealed primarily to women who were
more conservative than those engaged in suffrage agitation or child-saving
activities among the poor. Relying on questionnaires drawn up by Hall
and others addressing such topics as doll-playing, children's lies, and
childhood fears, the groups collected 20,000 questionnaires in 1895. 8
During the 1910s and 1920s Hall's reliance on data collected by un-
trained mothers and teachers was dismissed by professional psychologists
as amateurish and unscientific. The anthropologist Margaret Mead at-
tacked the movement as well because it emphasized biologically innate
190 Huck!Js Raft
stages of development and downplayed the importance of cultural condi-

tioning. The movement, however, contributed much useful knowledge.
The anthropologist Franz Boas discovered that children's physical growth
occurs in spurts, with wide variations among young people. The studies
also detected alarming rates of health problems among schoolchildren,
which led to 'the first eye and hearing tests in schools. 9
The child study movement promoted the first serious attempts to study
children's play, culture, and personal ideals. A particular object of atten-
tion was young people's tendency to form cliques, gangs, and clubs. The
movement contributed to a new view of juvenile delinquency, which was
regarded less as a precursor of criminality than a product of impulsive be-
havior, misguided instincts, and a faulty environment. The concern with
the child's inner life was evident in the movement's emphasis on the im-
portance of children's imagination; for the first time, large numbers of
adults took children's impulses, fancies, dreams, and fears seriously. But it
was primarily the notion that children develop through clearly differenti-
ated cognitive, emotional, and physiological stages, marked by distinctive
psychological and emotional characteristics, that was the movement's
lasting legacy. 10
Heavily influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution, early studies of
childhood development embraced the notion of "recapitulation," that the
development of each individual mirrors the evolution of the species from
savagery to civilization. The child study movement identified a stage of
early childhood, a period that should be devoted to free play, healthful ex-
ercise, and oral instruction, devoid of premature learning; a succeeding
stage suitable for intensive instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic;
and, most important of all, adolescence, a period of psychological and
emotional storm and stress that began with puberty and marked a young
person's social and sexual maturation. The institutional settings of child-
hood were radically restructured to meet children's needs in each of these
stages. Kindergartens, junior high schools, and new kinds of high schools
represented public responses to the new understanding of child devel-
opment.
In 1897 the New York Times published an editorial to mark the found-
ing of the National Congress of Mothers: "Given one generation of chil-
dren properly born and wisely trained, and what a vast proportion of hu-
man ills would disappear from the face of the earth!" In the 1890s there
was a growing sense that modern science offered a fresh and correct ap-
proach to childrearing, echoing the Progressive era's preoccupation with
expertise in other realms. Earlier childrearing manuals had emphasized
loose schedules for feeding and toilet training. But in the mid-1890s the
most popular advice manuals favored a systematic approach that was

strictly regimented, standardized, and rationalized. The child was seen as
a small animal with fearsome appetites, who had to be broken in and
trained to be a well-adjusted adult, a creature of habit and self-control. To
produce a responsible adult, parents needed to impose regular habits, feed
and attend infants at appointed times, and refrain from "spoiling" them
with unnecessary displays of affection. 11
The Dr. Spack of his day was L. Emmett Holt, a pediatrician whose
Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and
Children!ls Nurses, published in 1894, served as a guidebook for Benjamin
Spock's own mother. Dr. Holt described the child as a "delicately con-
structed piece of machinery" and recommended a highly regimented ap-
proach to parenting, which he considered necessary to ensure children's
health. He advised mothers not to pick up babies when they cried, to en-
force rigid feeding schedules, and to use stationary cribs instead of rock-
ing cradles. Dr. Holt did not consider breast-feeding necessary. Instead he
advocated precise feeding schedules to encourage regular habits, as well as
forceful measures to discourage bad ones; he suggested fastening splints to
infants' elbows to prevent thumb-sucking. His child was to be forcibly
molded into a socially acceptable state. 12
The dictates of scientific childrearing received their most extreme ex-
pression in the writings of the behaviorist psychologist John B. Watson,
who believed that the modification of behavior through positive and nega-
tive reinforcement was the key to proper childrearing. He claimed that if
mothers followed behaviorist principles, they could produce whatever cat-
egory of child they wanted: "A doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and
yes, even a beggar-man and thief." Watson insisted that "at three years of
age the child's whole emotional life plan has been laid down"; his ap-
proach was to mold human behavior by scientific control. He called on
mothers to put children on four-hour feeding and sleeping schedules; to
begin toilet training no later than the age of six months; to prohibit
pacifiers; and, above all, to avoid displays of affection. "When you are
tempted to pet your child," he warned, "remember that mother love is a
dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing
wound." He placed particular emphasis on the need to suppress thumb-
sucking and infantile masturbation, which could be restrained through
leather cuffs, aluminum mittens, splints that would keep babies from
bending their arms, tape, and bad-tasting ointments placed on babies'
fingers and thumbs. It was childrearing by constraint and deprivation. 13
In the late 1920s there was a sharp reaction against scientific child-
rearing advice. Freudian theory, with its emphasis on the importance of
192 Huck~s Raft
psychological and emotional nurture, cast an ugly light on Watsonian re-

pressiveness, and affluence made the inner-directed, rigidly self-disciplined
adult obsolete. Now the well-adjusted adult was a softer, more easygoing-
creature, capable of enjoying leisure as well as work. In consequence, the
baby began to look less beastly and more justified in its demands. Partly
in reaction to Watson's cold-blooded advice, pediatrician Dr. C. Anderson
Aldrich in 1936 wrote Babies Are Human Beings, which Benjamin Spock
would acknowledge in his own manual on baby and childcare. 14
While the child study movement and the childrearing experts focused
their attention almost exclusively on young children, the problems of
older boys and girls commanded increasing public attention. Boys seemed
less hardy, virile, and manly than their fathers and grandfathers. There
was a growing fear that feminine supervision and the comforts of urban
life had rendered boys soft and effeminate. Theodore Roosevelt-who
had been asthmatic and bespectacled as a boy, before taking up gymnas-
tics, boxing, and shooting-summed up this attitude when he claimed
that native-born males were lapsing into "mere animal sloth and ease"
and succumbing to a "gradual failure of vitality." Exacerbating fears of
emasculation were broader social transformations, such as the closing of
the western frontier, the lure of pool halls, and the growth of bureaucratic
organization, office work, and age-graded schools, which reduced the op-
portunities for individual initiative. Urban and industrial life was trans-
forming boys into "flat-chested cigarette smokers with shaky nerves and
doubtful vitality." 15
To cope with the popularly perceived boy problem, youth workers es-
tablished a number of adult-sponsored youth organizations targeted at
middle-class teens, including the boys' department of the Young Men's
Christian Association, the Boys' Clubs, and the Boy Scouts, founded in
the United States in 1910. For millions of American boys, participation in
these organizations would serve as a rite of passage, signaling the transi-
tion from boyhood to adolescence. Unlike earlier youth organizations,
formed by youths themselves and containing a wide range of ages, these
new organizations were adult-directed and targeted at a narrow range of
young people.
Temperance organizations and Protestant churches took the lead in
sponsoring young people's societies aimed at moral renovation. During
the 1870s and 1880s Boys' Brigades and chivalric orders modeled on the
court of King Arthur sought to help young men navigate the teen years.
Through a program emphasizing character building and "muscular Chris-
tianity"-including competitive sports and physical education-these
organizations sought to promote an ideal of Christian manliness and
counteract the widespread impression that religion was a feminine phe-

nomenon. After the turn of the century, secular organizations, such as the
Woodcraft Indians (formed around 1902) and the Boy Scouts, sought to
revitalize masculinity through various forms of primitivism, including In-
dian lore and woodcraft. It was their belief that structured activities su-
pervised by adult men provided the best solution to the boy problem.
Many of these organization's founders were deeply uneasy about puberty,
adult sexuality, and coeducation, and believed that physical activity
would take boys' minds off girls and stave off masturbation. Fears that
boys were "overcivilized" and cut off from physical challenges prompted
a yearning for a return to the primitive life in the rugged, invigorating wil-
derness. Deeply fearful of feminine weakness, worried that modern life
was emasculating, they wanted to prepare boys for the strenuous life. Em-
phasis on bodily vigor, outdoor exercise, and other wholesome activities
would ensure that boys would not become sissies, itself a new word
coined around the turn of the century.
Though modeled on the British Boy Scout movement founded by Rob-
ert Baden-Powell, the Boy Scouts of America was fundamentally different.
Baden-Powell had formed the Boy Scouts partly in response to British re-
verses during the Boer War and wanted to prepare British boys for mili-
tary service. His American counterparts, such as Ernest Thompson Seton,
Daniel Carter Beard, and James West, were much more interested in in-
stilling the character traits in boys that would help them succeed in the
rapidly shifting occupational world of the middle class by encouraging
group bonding and leadership skills. Between 1910 and 1919 the Boy
Scouts recruited 300,000 members, almost exclusively from the urban
middle class and the sons of skilled workers. Farm boys and working-
class youth were too busy or too poor for scouting and Catholics too
suspicious of its Protestant Americanism. Though highly successful in re-
cruitment, the Boy Scouts was much less successful in retention. Member-
ship turnover was high, and boys preferred the athletics and camping to
the moralizing of scoutmasters. Most boys left the Boy Scouts by the age
of fifteen as they became more interested in school sports and girls than in
wearing uniforms. As a Salt Lake City Scout executive noted in 1922,
"when the girl comes, the Scout goes. " 16
Anxieties about girls echoed the worries about boys. While some par-
ents wanted their daughters to be "young ladies," a class-laden term con-
noting propriety and rectitude, increasingly adults encouraged them to be
"real girls," a phrase signifying wholesome vitality and energy. During the
last decades of the nineteenth century, girls acquired growing freedom
from societal restraints. The women's bicycle, introduced around 1890,
194 Huck:~s Raft
BLOCKEDIMAGEATTHE
A Boy Scout troop parades through downtown Denver, Colorado, around 1918. Courtesy
of the Denver Public Library.
gave girls greater freedom to move about in public. Late nineteenth-

century girls were the first to participate in team sports. In addition to cal-
isthenics and drills, which had been common since the mid-nineteenth
century, a growing number participated in field hockey, basketball, cro-
quet, and tennis. As a result of the influence of women physical educators,
however, girls' sports were fundamentally different from boys'. Inclusive
rather than competitive, they tended to emphasize participation over vic-
tory and rhythmic grace over strenuous physical activity. Many girls
found elements of boys' culture appealing, such as scouting, with its uni-
forms and emphasis on outdoor activity. Unlike their British counterparts,
who were called Girl Guides, American girls embraced the name Girl
Scouts (over strenuous opposition from the Boy Scouts), with its connota-
tions of danger and daringe In contrast to the Boy Scouts, however, nei-
ther the Girl Scouts nor the Camp Fire Girls emphasized character build-
ing. The Camp Fire Girls' final law, revealingly, was "Be Happy. " 17
Toward the end of the nineteenth century there was a great outpouring
of advice manuals, career handbooks, health guides, magazines, stories,
and ,works of fiction featuring the word girl in their title. Girls, for the first
time, had sufficient money to purchase books and magazines for them-
selves; those that they bought exposed them to new kinds of social roles
and situations about which they could dream. Unlike the obtrusively di-
dactic fiction of the prewar years, the new girls' literature focused on the
world outside the home. Decades before the appearance of Nancy Drew,
books for girls featured girl detectives, nurses, college girls, and typists.
Workplaces were imagined as places of adventure, where young women
could assert their independence and prove their mettle, while college was
depicted as a place where they could forge strong friendships and exhibit
self-sufficiency. Grossly disproportionate to the actual number of women
who worked in offices or attended college, these books offered a fantasy
world where young women could live free of adult supervision. 18
One recurrent theme in popular girls' books such as Anne of Green Ga-
bles, Pollyanna, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was an optimistic
young girl's power to redeem adult curmudgeons. Although the word
Pollyanna has become a synonym for na'ive optimism, these literary char-
acters were anything but passive creatures. They consciously deployed
their ingenuity and charm to alter adult behavior. Popular girls' books
also exposed the bleak underside of family life. Anna Sewall's heartbreak-
ing 1877 tale of animal cruelty, Black Beauty, revealed abuse, alcoholism,
and family rupture. 19
During the 1890s the concept of girlhood shifted in two divergent di-
rections. In Charles Dana Gibson's illustrations, the term girl is applied to
young women in their twenties. The Gibson Girl, with her hourglass
figure, upswept hair, and haughty, aristocratic air, personified the spirit of
a changing culture. Shapely and self-assured, the Gibson Girl was con-
scious of her erotic power in ways that Victorian girls were not. "Before
her," wrote the New York World, "the American girl was vague, nonde-
script, inchoate." Slim and athletic, she played golf and tennis, rode bicy-
cles, and provided a new model of how postadolescent women were to
carry themselves. 20
At the same time, a juvenilized image of girlhood also took shape as the
expansive late nineteenth-century category of girlhood was subdivided
and sequenced. Early twentieth-century girls' books, such as those written
by "Carolyn Keene," were of interest exclusively to girls younger than
their mid-teens, much as girls' organizations, such as the Girl Scouts and
the Camp Fire Girls, appealed mainly to early adolescents. Meanwhile,
well before World War I, the word flapper entered the language, referring
not to the bobbed hair, short-skirted young woman but, initially, to the
boy-conscious, flirtatious teenage girl. The boundaries separating school-
girls from older adolescents were hardening, with schoolgirls regarded as
children and adolescence acquiring heightened sexual overtones. 21
At the beginning of the twentieth century the term adolescence came
into popular use to describe the turbulent period between puberty and
physical maturity. In 1904, in a book titled Adolescence: Its Psychology
and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Re-
ligion and Education, G. Stanley Hall described adolescence as a distinct,
conflict-ridden stage of development. Brought on by rapid physical, men-
tal, and emotional growth, sexual maturation, and an impulse to separate
from parents, adolescence was a "new birth," a phase of emotional up-
heaval and fluctuating emotions marked by contradictory tendencies to-
ward hyperactivity and inertness, selfishness and altruism, bravado and a
sense of worthlessness. Adolescence, in Hall's view, was a biological stage,
not a cultural construct. Environment could exacerbate adolescent up-
heavals, but their roots lay in intrinsic biological forces that accompanied
puberty. He asserted that behavior that might be diagnosed as insane in
adults was perfectly normal in an adolescent. 22
The word adolescence comes from the Latin adolescentia, a term fre-
quently used in medieval discussions of the stages of life. Yet the word did
not acquire widespread usage or associations with puberty, generational
conflict, identity formation, and psychological volatility until the early
twentieth century. 23 Far from inventing the concept single-handedly, Hall
systematized earlier ideas about youth that could be traced at least as far
back as Rousseau's Emile: that the onset of puberty brought on a stormy
period of strong fluctuating passions. There can be no doubt, however,
that his conception of adolescence-as a time of passion, energy, and
emotional instability-was a product of specific cultural and social cir-
cumstances. In part, it was a response to late nineteenth-century fears of
overcivilization, emasculation, and degeneration. It was also related to
changing patterns of middle-class family life. By the beginning of the
twentieth century, larger numbers of young people were living at home
and remaining in school through their mid-teens. The term adolescence
provided a handle that urban middle-class parents used to understand the

special difficulties they faced in raising teenage daughters and sons. Hall's
conception of adolescence was highly gendered, and was much more
closely associated with male than with female behavior. The kinds of
behaviors that Hall linked with adolescence-such as "storm and
stress" and assertions of independence-were associated mainly with
masculinity. 24
Hall believed that adolescence should be prolonged. During this psy-
chologically turbulent period, adolescents needed to be protected from
premature adulthood and insulated from contact with older youths who
might lead them astray. Adolescents needed to be separated from the
world of adults, except for those who would guide and nurture them
through the upheavals of adolescence and prepare them for a responsible
adulthood. Hall considered adolescence so important to the development
of healthy adulthood that any attempt to cut it short would carry dire
psychological consequences. In retrospect, it is clear that adolescence is at
once a stage of social, psychological, cognitive, and physiological develop-
ment and a structural status imposed on youth. Psychologists, educators,
and youth workers invoked biology and psychology to promote their own
middle-class notions of a proper adolescence. Convinced that adolescence
was a period of emotional instability and vulnerability, the architects of
modern adolescence argued that the best way to promote a healthy ad-
justment to adulthood was to give adolescents time to mature in carefully
controlled, adult-monitored environments, such as the high school, and
adult-directed extracurricular activities. Work, they were convinced, was
not a proper solution to the problems of adolescence, since it exposed the
young prematurely to the stresses and corruptions of the adult world.
Rather, it was the high school that was to provide a suitably secure, adult-
supervised environment. But if adolescent status was an adult invention
and a product of shifts in demography, economics, and institutional ar-
rangements, adolescent culture was largely the creation of young people
themselves, who created a distinctive high school culture centering on
sports, dating, and the peer group. 25
As late as 1920, only 16 percent of seventeen-year-olds-less than one
in six-graduated from high school. Already, however, high school atten-
dance had become a normative experience among the children of the pro-
fessional and business classes. Between 1880 and 1900 the number of
public high schools increased 750 percent. As the high school student
body grew larger and more diverse, intense controversy erupted over the
curriculum. Leading college educators wanted high schools to maintain a
classical academic curriculum that would prepare students for post-
198 Huck's Raft
secondary study. This view found its most influential expression in the
1893 report by a Committee of Ten, chaired by Harvard President
Charles Eliot, which argued that all students should study the same core
subjects but that they should also have an opportunity to take a limited
number of elective courses that would address their individual needs. To
ensure that students were properly prepared for college, the committee in-
sisted that all students study core courses a specific number of hours each
week for a prescribed number of years. 26
Public school educators disagreed, and called for a highly differentiated
high school curriculum, with tracks appropriate to students' abilities and
career goals. They believed that the high school should be adapted to the
distinct needs of adolescents, not the goal of college admission, thus be-
ginning a gulf in purpose between high schools and colleges that persists
to this day. The highly influential1918 report, The Cardinal Principles of
Secondary Education, emphasized vocational and practical education for
the majority of high school students, along with civics education, health
education, and a basic command of reading, writing, and mathematics.
To place students in the appropriate track, high schools, beginning in the
1920s, instituted intelligence tests premised on the idea that each person
has a fixed intelligence quotient that should determine her or his course of
study. 27
In addition to providing practical vocational training, public school ed-
ucators believed that high school should serve as an agency of socializa-
tion. High schools were to provide "the worthy use of leisure" and "the
general social training of the child" by offering a wide range of extracur-
ricular activities, including music and drama clubs, speech and debating
societies, sports, and student government. A key issue was whether these
activities would be student- or teacher-supervised. By the second decade
of the twentieth century, the answer was clear: Schools had assigned fac-
ulty advisers to every extracurricular activity. 28
Sports was the first bastion to succumb to teacher control. Partly at the
request of students themselves, high school administrators took over the
organization of high school sports teams. Recruitment of athletes had
grown so competitive and corrupt that many students felt that only the
organization of sports by school officials could clean up athletics. But the
drift to adult control was not confined to sports. Debate, too, became a
school-organized activity, and as early as 1911 observers complained that
high school debate coaches were writing their students' speeches. Perhaps
the most contentious conflicts involved high school fraternities and sorori-
ties. After the turn of the century, high schools embarked on a prolonged,
concerted, and ultimately successful campaign to prohibit these organi-

zations.29
Why did the autonomous student organizations of the mid and late
nineteenth century disappear, and why did students submit to administra-
tive control of their activities? One reason was that the schools offered
better facilities and coaching than students could provide for themselves.
But it also reflected a shift in students' self-perception. As high schools
grew more important as placement agencies and assumed a more all-en-
compassing role in middle-class lives, students began to see themselves as
juveniles and became more and more acquiescent. It seemed appropriate
that adults who knew better should organize their leisure as well as their
academic activities. 30
The history of middle-class childhood can be seen as a story of prog-
ress, a Rousseauian tale of middle-class children lavished with more ma-
ternal attention, freed from early labor, given extended time to play and
mature, and offered the opportunity to pursue extended education and to
take part in new institutions, such as the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and
the Camp Fire Girls, designed to meet their needs for recreation and socia-
bility. But in fact the story is much more problematic. The association of
the very young with fragility and vulnerability, and of older children with
immaturity and psychological volatility, resulted in the denial of many
opportunities for young people to associate with adults other than their
parents and teachers and to demonstrate their growing maturity and com-
petence. Yet if the contours of young people's lives were increasingly im-
posed by adults, the content would be largely shaped by young people
themselves. Within the boundaries set by schools and adult-sponsored or-
ganizations, the young created cultures of their own, in which they would
strive, only partly successfully, to assert an independent identity and a
sense of competence.
chapter ten
New to the Promised Land
L E PROGRESSIVE ERA's preoccupation with child welfare was

inextricably connected with an influx of immigrants unequaled in Ameri-
can history. In the quarter-century before World War I, eighteen million
immigrants entered the United States, mainly from southern and eastern
Europe. By 1920 immigrants and their children formed between half and
three-quarters of the population of Boston, Cleveland, Milwaukee, San
Francisco, and St. Louis. Tens of thousands of immigrant children, many
of Catholic or Jewish background, were set adrift in a new culture with-
out the aid of parents to support them. Confronting a new language and
novel customs as well as the stresses of poverty, they struggled to make
their way in a new and challenging social environment.
Mary Antin was thirteen years old in 1894 when she, her mother, and
two siblings migrated from Polotzk in the Pale of Russia to the slums of
Boston to join her father, who had arrived three years earlier. Her descrip-
tion of her experiences, The Promised Land, published in 1912, is the
classic account of the Jewish-American immigrant experience and a pro-
totype for the entire genre of immigrant autobiographies. Mary viewed
migration to the United States as a second birth and a liberation from Old
World constraints. She was free from both the oppressions of czarist Rus-
sia and the restrictions of religious orthodoxy. As a symbol of their Amer-
icanization she and her siblings quickly shed their "despised immigrant
clothing" and their "impossible Hebrew names." 1
A seemingly naive sense of hopefulness pervades her memoirs. Mary
saw opportunity all around her. The school, where "no application [was]
New to the Promised Land 201
made, no questions asked," and there were "no examinations, rulings, ex-
clusions; no machinations, no fees," offered a doorway to advancement.
The "dazzlingly beautiful palace called a 'department store,"' where her
family "exchanged our hateful homemade European costumes," was an
agency of assimilation and upward mobility. She even marveled at the
streetlights in her slum neighborhood, which provided light all night long,
freeing her from having to carry a lantern. Mary celebrated cultural as-
similation, and was preoccupied with acquiring English, shedding her ac-
cent, and dressing, speaking, and eating like an American. For Mary, the
United States was truly the promised land. 2
It is jarring to read The Promised Land today, when so much value is
attached to the cultures that the immigrants shed. Later writers, who re-
garded the second and third generations as vacuous and materialistic,
were much more conscious of the Faustian bargain that immigrants struck
in order to become Americans. But The Promised Land itself contained
bleak undertones that reveal the price of Americanization. Mary's home
life disintegrated as she grew older and became more fully American. Her
father, unable to master English, grew increasingly bitter. She not only
had to earn money to help her family pay the rent; she had to parent her
own parents.
The challenges that Mary's family faced were not unique. During the
late nineteenth century, eastern European Jews found it ever harder to sur-
vive as petty traders or artisans in Russia. Facing mounting population
pressures, competition from factory industry, and rising waves of anti-
semitism, a third of all eastern European Jews migrated to the United
States. With no homeland to return to, migration was not confined to
adult men. Nor were daughters passive followers of pathways pioneered
by their fathers. Like Irish daughters before them, large numbers of single
young Jewish women migrated on their own. For many immigrant chil-
dren, migration proved to be highly disruptive. Early in the twentieth cen-
tury, Jewish charities identified 100,000 cases of desertion, meaning that a
quarter of Jewish fathers deserted their families in the new land. In an at-
tempt to locate these men, the Jewish Daily Forward ran a column, com-
plete with photographs, called "The Gallery of Missing Husbands. " 3
As a self-described nation of immigrants, Americans are especially
prone to romanticizing the immigrant family as a symbol of strength and
cultural continuity. Viewed through the eyes of early twentieth-century
immigrant children, however, it is clear that movement from one society
to another was accompanied by intense feelings of psychological disloca-
tion and marginality. Within immigrant households, generational roles
were inverted, since the young found it easier to learn a new language and
202 Huck"'s Raft
to pick up new customs than did their parents. Immigrant children not
only became wage earners, but served as guides who helped their parents
adjust to American customs and fashions, and as cultural intermediaries
who had to negotiate with landlords, school officials, and others. Many
immigrant families were beset by severe strains as parents and children
clashed over religion, language, children's names, and dress. Americaniza-
tion was a particularly divisive issue for immigrant daughters, who fre-
quently quarreled with their parents about control over their paychecks,
socializing with boys, and attendance at commercial, mixed-sex amuse-
ments. For many first-generation immigrant children, the lure of assimila-
tion proved extremely strong, and this collided with their parents' desire
to maintain older traditions and ensure that their offspring contributed to
the family economy.
Thirteen-year-old Jack Moy and his mother sailed to the United States
from China in 1927 and spent a month in the Angel Island detention cen-
ter in San Francisco Bay separated from each other. Concerned about the
entry of Chinese immigrants with false documentation, immigration
officials asked embarrassingly personal questions, such as whether Jack's
mother had bound feet, how many water buffalo his village had, or "who
occupies the house on the fifth lot of your row in your native village."
Discrepancies in an answer would result in deportation to China, a pros-
pect that terrified the newcomers. Immigration officials noted every iden-
tifying mark, including scars, boils, and moles, on all immigrants before
letting them enter the country. 4
Whether they arrived at Castle Garden or Ellis Island, the receiving sta-
tions in New York; Galveston, Texas; or Angel Island, immigrant children
shared certain problems. Their new land was not paved with gold. Poor
housing; crowded, dirty neighborhoods; precarious economic conditions;
a hostile reception from the native born; poorly prepared teachers and
crowded classrooms; and child labor cut across ethnic lines. The prema-
ture death of children was especially common in immigrant families. In
Buffalo in 1900 only about six of every ten Italian and Polish children sur-
vived childhood. Overcrowding was rampant in immigrant neighbor-
hoods. In one three-room Russian-Jewish apartment, the parents shared
their bedroom "with two, three, or even four of their younger children,"
while the older children slept in the kitchen on cots or on the floor, and
two or more lodgers slept in the front room. In a three-room Philadelphia
house, sixteen immigrants slept in two rooms each measuring eight by ten
by seven feet. 5
Psychological and emotional strains posed a special burden. Many im-
migrant children felt themselves caught between two worlds. Their im-

Japanese families await interrogation by immigration officials at the Angel Island immigra-
tion center in ,San Francisco Bay. Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.
poverished homes seemed another world from what they discovered be-
yond them. Maria Ganz, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia in southern
Poland, was just five years old when she took her first ride uptown, out of
New York's Lower East Side. Along Fifth Avenue she saw "gorgeous car-
riages ... and inside surely princes and princesses." "All the splendors I
had seen" made her realize how "miserable our home was." 6
It was in school that immigrant children confronted the new culture
most intensely. Leonard Covello, who was born in southern Italy in 1887
and arrived in East Harlem in 1896, was placed in a "soup school" run by
a Protestant mission. He sat in class, "trying to memorize words written
on the blackboard, words which had absolutely no meaning to me be-
cause the teacher had never explained them." At the turn of the century,
immigrant children made up a substantial majority of the students in the
nation's largest cities. In New York City'in 1905 as many as 125 children
were admitted to one school in a single day, resulting in classes of 60 or
even 70. Space was in such short supply that a hospital ship was deployed
as a school. Many schools operated on two four-hour shifts. 7
204 Huck's Raft
School classrooms frequently became sites of cultural conflict between

immigrant pupils and native-born teachers, who attached little value to
cultural diversity and sought to transform immigrant children into "little
citizens" by forbidding them to speak their native language. Viewing
schools as instruments of physical and moral uplift, educators emphasized
American traditions and history. In addition to requiring students to recite
lessons in arithmetic, spelling, grammar, and geography aloud, teachers
inspected children's fingernails and their heads for lice, and lectured their
students on "nail brushes, hair ribbons, shoe polish, pins, buttons, and
other means to grace." In New York City schools, Jewish students were
sometimes punished by having their mouths washed out with nonkosher
soap. 8
It is a myth that immigrant parents were, on the whole, indifferent or
hostile toward schooling. Some parents, to be sure, did not want to make
their children "better than you are." Parents who had recently arrived
from rural, peasant backgrounds were particularly likely to discount the
value of education. But it was family income, size, and children's birth or-
der that best predicted how long a child remained in school. Immigrant ,
families needed to balance their income and labor needs with their chil-
dren's education. Many poorer families made the rational calculation that
the child could best contribute to the family economy by going to work at
an early age. Younger immigrant children were as likely as their native-
born white peers to be enrolled in elementary school, but relatively few
immigrant children attended high school. Less than a third of German
children and a quarter of Italian children enrolled in secondary school,
compared with 60 percent of native-born children, since older children's
income was often essential for a family's survival. A typical adult male
breadwinner was unemployed for an average of three months a year, and
children had to fill this gap. As one immigrant father in St. Louis put it, "a
family's wealth depends on the number of hands it has. " 9
Some groups subordinated their children's education to the goal of
maximizing family income and acquiring property. Italian immigrants
were especially likely to view their sojourn in America as temporary and
thus felt pressed to make money quickly. Between 1907 and 1911, for
every 100 Italians who arrived in the United States, 73 returned to the old
country. It was their children's desire to remain in the United States that
ultimately led many southern and eastern European immigrant families to
settle here permanently. Other groups, notably Jewish immigrants from
Russia, Poland, and Austria-Hungary, had no homeland to return to and
planned to settle in the United States permanently, and thus kept their
children in school longer. But while Jews used public schools to a greater
extent than any other immigrant group, poverty prevented most Jewish
children in the first or even the second generation from going beyond
grade school. 10
Among native-born whites and older immigrant groups-such as the
Irish, Swedes, and Germans-girls were more likely to attend high school
than boys. Among Russian and Polish-born Jews, southern Italians, and
Poles, boys predominated. Jewish immigrants placed a premium on
school attendance for boys, while first-generation southern Italian immi-
grants were particularly averse to sending girls to school. Catholic Slavic
and Polish immigrants were particularly likely to regard public schooling
as a threat to their religious and cultural values, and a substantial minor-
ity turned to parochial schools to shelter their children from the impact of
Americanization. In Chicago, half the Catholic school-age population at-
tended parochial schools, with separate parish schools for Irish, German,
Polish, French, Bohemian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian immigrants, allow-
ing these ethnic groups to preserve their distinctive traditions. It was only
in the 1920s that a more centralized parochial system, with common texts
and curricula, emerged. 11
During the nineteenth century some immigrant groups, notably Ger-
mans, had persuaded local communities to authorize tax-supported na-
tive-language schools. But by the early twentieth century most urban
school systems sought to educate children in English as rapidly as possible
and discouraged the use of native languages. Most immigrant children
were assigned to a separate "English-immersion" class for five or six
months before being moved into a class appropriate for their age. Immi-
grant children who could not speak English found schools to be an espe-
cially threatening and frustrating environment, with absenteeism reaching
60 percent or more in Chicago. Dropout rates were also extremely high. It
took enormous determination and discipline for a child to manage the
novelty of language, customs, school, and neighborhood alone. Some
failed, but many succeeded. 12
Settlement houses helped immigrant children to assimilate. Modeled af-
ter Toynbee Hall, a British charity established in an impoverished part of
London in 1884, settlement houses were the most important social service
agencies in slum neighborhoods. By 1918 there were 400 across the coun-
try. Before there were public libraries, kindergartens, adult evening
classes, or community centers, settlement houses provided childcare, rec-
reation, and adult education in immigrant neighborhoods. They taught
immigrants English and "modern" forms of childrearing, cooking, and
hygiene. They also offered limited job training, including classes in sewing
and dressmaking. Unlike the more extreme Americanizers who wanted
206 Huck-'s Raft
immigrants to immediately renounce their language, culture, and ethnic

identity, settlement house workers, in order to attract clients, were accept-
ing of ethnic cultures. 13
The settlement houses were run largely by young college-educated
women who had middle-class upbringings but felt called to work for the
social welfare of less privileged people. Hull House founder Jane Addams,
who spoke of the "snare of preparation"-prolonged schooling that
seemed purposeless-rebelled against the demands of domesticity and felt
called to serve the poor. These pioneering social workers combined a deep
concern for the poor with a paternalistic impulse to teach immigrants to
adopt scientific ideas about infant care, diet, and hygiene. As one put it,
"These strangers from across the water must be taught to discard un-
American habits and conventions, to accept new ideals." Immigrants and
settlement house workers frequently clashed over such issues as the use of
midwives in childbirth, nursing on demand, prolonged lactation, and the
use of swaddling clothes and pacifiers-practices that immigrant mothers
favored and many settlement workers opposed. The radical Emma
Goldman denounced the settlement house movement for seeking to teach
"the poor to eat with a fork," but many settlement workers overcame
their class bias and worked closely with the immigrant community to alle-
viate its ills. 14
The workplace, like the school and the settlement house, was an impor-
tant site of cultural adjustment for immigrant children. Children's labor
was grueling and unlike anything they had experienced before. The exam-
ple of twelve-year-old Rose Gollup, who emigrated from a small village in
western Russia to New York in 1892, underscores the work responsibili-
ties that many immigrant children assumed. She lived with her father in a
rented room on the Lower East Side, saving money to bring over her
mother and younger brothers and sisters. One day her father told her he
had found work for her in a garment shop where he knew the presser. "I
lay awake long that night," she later recalled. "I was eager to begin life on
my own responsibility but was also afraid." Her new boss asked her to
demonstrate her skills. "All at once the thought came," she wrote, "If I
don't do this coat quickly and well he will send me away at once." By the
end of the first day, she discovered that she could do almost as much work
as older women, and that they despised her for her ability, decrying that
"snip of a girl coming and taking the very bread out of our mouth." Her
chair had no back, and after a fourteen-hour day her neck was stiff and
her back aching. For her labors she was paid $3 a week. 15
Sweatshop discipline was harsh. Child laborers were charged for nee-
dles and thread and even the electricity they used. They were fined a half-
day's pay if they were fifteen minutes late, and charged for a whole length
of cloth if they spoiled a portion. They were even fined for singing and
humming. To prevent the workers from leaving, doors were often locked
in garment shops. After Rose was laid off from the garment factory, an
agent placed her as a domestic servant. Rose regarded domestic service as
especially demeaning. She found it hard to eat at the table with her em-
ployer's family, where she compared the "soup, meat, [and] potatoes"
served at their meals with the bread and sugar-sweetened water that her
family ate. As a servant, Rose had to wash and iron clothes, scrub floors,
scale fish, clean fowl, and run errands to the nearby store. While her em-
ployers had beds, she was expected to throw two quilts over chairs at the
end of a day's work. After two months she quit domestic service, saying to
herself, "I would rather work in a shop." There, though she might be put
upon by a demanding boss, at least she could go home at the end of the
day and did not have to tolerate the obvious inequities that made domes-
tic service such a trial. 16
Most immigrant families depended on children's labor, whether this in-
volved childcare, shopping, cooking, scavenging in the streets, or paid
work inside or outside the home. Low wages made income pooling neces-
sary. A federal study found that only 20 percent of Jewish immigrant fa-
thers in seven major cities could support their families on their earnings.
Immigrant families expected children to sacrifice their individual inclina-
tions for the family's sake. A survey of Polish immigrants in 1911 found
that the children of unskilled workers contributed 46 percent of their fam-
ily's income and the children of skilled workers 35 percent. 17
Among Russian-born Jewish girls under the age of sixteen, about 30
percent worked, mainly outside the home. Italian-born girls, in contrast,
labored inside the home, making artificial flowers or sewing coats and
trousers. Young children transported bundles of clothing and boxes of
flowers back and forth from contractors to their homes, performed
childcare, and scavenged wood and coal in the streets, a practice that re-
sulted in the largest number of children's arrests. But work was not mere
drudgery. For many young immigrants, work connected them to a world
outside their family and ethnic community. It also offered them the money
they needed to enjoy the pleasures of their new land. 18
Immigrant parents held a very different view of childhood from the na-
tive-born middle class. Just as parents had a responsibility to support their
children, their offspring had a reciprocal obligation to contribute to their
household's economic well-being. Many immigrant parents considered
American-born children, who were supported but not expected to recip-
rocate, as mere juveniles. Their children, in contrast, were "a little more
208 Huck"'s Raft
advanced-not babies like they are here." Many immigrant children, in

turn, wanted to be active contributors to the family economy. Jennie
Matyras, the oldest daughter in a Russian-Jewish family, said: "My ambi-
tion in life was to get to be a good worker because being the oldest daugh-
ter, it was my job to do the dressmaking for the family." 19
The challenge of cultural adjustment was as difficult, for many immi-
grant children, as adapting to the workplace. Rose Gollup was shocked to
discover that many immigrant adults abandoned Jewish traditions in this
new country. "The first thing men do in America," she observed, "is cut
their beards and the first thing the women do is to leave off their wigs."
When she arrived at Castle Garden she scarcely recognized her father,
who had trimmed his beard and forelocks. Later she was aghast to realize
that he carried money and bought her fruit on the Sabbath. Soon, how-
ever, she too became Americanized, and urged her mother to go without
the traditional kerchief worn by married Orthodox Jewish women. Rose
went from being a resisting traditionalist to an enthusiastic Americanizer
in the course of her first year in the United States. 20
Rose became briefly engaged to a young Jewish grocer from Broome
Street in a courtship that involved a mixture of Old and New World tradi-
tions. She met the young man after her mother asked her to make a pur-
chase at the store where he worked. She learned about her parents' inten-
tions when they announced that the young man and his uncle would be
paying a visit to their apartment. As a dutiful daughter, Rose accepted the
engagement. But she did not believe she should marry someone she did
not love, nor could she accept the traditional view that love would follow
marriage. She found that books meant almost nothing to her husband-to-
be, and she had no interest in becoming an assistant in her future hus-
band's store. Unable to imagine herself happy in the marriage, she broke
off the engagement. Rose was moved by the New World conception that
one should marry someone one loved rather than follow one's parents'
wishes. In the failed engagement we see the triumph of New World expec-
tations over those of the old country. 21
For many immigrant children, becoming American involved the rejec-
tion of older identities and adopting distinctively American styles and
consumer products. Dress and personal appearance were critical symbols
of Americanization. For eastern European Jews and southern Italians,
everyday clothing had been practical and plain in the old country. After
marriage, Jewish women were expected to cover their hair by wearing a
sheitel, or wig. In the United States, many Jewish women rejected this cus-
tom. "My mother never wore a wig," said one immigrant. "She was mod-
ern." Wearing ready-made clothing was one of the first markers of Ameri-
canization. Few things were more painful than to be labeled a

"greenhorn," an unsophisticated foreigner. Leonard Covello, an Italian
immigrant, was proud that even if he couldn't speak English, he still
looked "to all outward appearances" like "an American." Many young
immigrants were struck by the emphasis that Americans placed on the
head and the feet-elaborate hairdos, fancy plumed hats (instead of head-
scarves or wigs), and shoes (rather than work boots)-and by the stress
on slimness. Shawls were discarded and replaced by store-bought dresses.
Flamboyant dress-or what was called "putting on the style"-often be-
came a source of tension between parents and children. Turn-of-the-
century young immigrants exhibited little nostalgia for the clothing of the
Old World. They wanted to fit in, not stand out, and leave the limitations
of tradition behind them. 22
Leisure activities, even more than clothing, were crucial symbols of
Americanization. One immigrant child remembered being asked by her
mother: "What does it mean when everybody says, 'Let's have fun'?" For
the children of immigrants, fun meant new forms of commercial enter-
tainment: candy stores, ice cream parlors and soda shops, nickelodeons,
and, later, movie theaters. For many young immigrants, leisure was asso-
ciated with freedom, romance, and the joys of consumption. 23
Immigrant children's rapid acculturation frequently resulted in parent-
child tensions. In the pages of the jewish Daily Forward, a mother com-
plained about her daughter's behavior. "During the first few years she was
here without us she became a regular Yankee," the mother wrote, "and
forgot how to talk Yiddish." The mother continued: "She does not like
me to light the Sabbath candles, to observe the Sabbath. When I light the
candles, she blows them out." Especially shocking was her daughter's lack
of deference. "Once I saw her standing on the stoop with a boy." Her
mother "asked her when she would come up," but her daughter didn't re-
ply, and later "she screamed at me because I called her by her Jewish
name." A New York City social worker observed a similar phenomenon.
"The child attends the public school, and within a few months may come
to despise that which he formerly held sacred. He sees no further use of
Hebrew and laughs at his father for his pride in the knowledge of it. " 24
In the New World, family and age hierarchies were frequently inverted
as immigrant children served as translators, interpreters, and cultural me-
diators. An Italian doctor observed: "The majority of adult Italians do not
read any language, either Italian or English. On the other hand, most of
the children read English, but few read Italian." Young immigrants be-
came agents of acculturation. Often the first members of their family to
learn English, children served as brokers with landlords, employers, and
210 Huck~s Raft
shopkeepers. The young also demanded changes in cultural practices they

considered shamefully backward. Severe generational tensions often re-
sulted from this inversion of family hierarchies. 25
Hilda Satt Polacheck, a young Jewish immigrant from Poland, was de-
termined to become a real American. Her mother was disappointed by her
new country, never learned to speak English, and retreated into a religious
piety that distanced her from her daughter. Hull House, the Chicago set-
tlement house, became Hilda's second home and Jane Addams her surro-
gate mother. After her father's death, Polacheck went to work in a factory
to support her family. Although her formal education ended when she was
thirteen, she began to teach English to new immigrants at Hull House.
Hilda Satt willingly Americanized her name when she entered the German
Jewish Training School and took evening classes at Hull House, where she
eventually taught Shakespeare and Dickens, but nothing about her Polish
or Yiddish culture. 26
The bitterest fights involved control over language, money, and leisure
time. Language was a particular source of contention. One Jewish child
remembered her mother declaring: "This is a Yiddish house and no Gen-
tile languages are going to be spoken here." Jerre Mangione's sister some-
time spoke English in her sleep; her mother forgave her because "she
could not be responsible for her unconscious thoughts." Fam~ly battles
frequently erupted over how much of children's wages had to be turned
over their parents, and whether daughters would be allowed un-
chaperoned out of their parents' house. Some immigrant children, like
Amalia Morandi, willingly handed their unopened pay envelopes to their
parents. "I wouldn't dare open it up," she said, as a symbol of respect.
But others refused. Abraham Bisno explained: "While the majority of
them turned their money over to the family chest, there was quite a
significant minority who would themselves be holders of their earnings,
pay regular board to their families, and either save or spend money for
themselves ... They acquired the right to a personality which they had
not ever possessed in the old country." One immigrant explained why he
treated his children harshly: "If you don't keep control over them from
the time they are little, you would never get their wages when they are
grown up. " 27
Generational tensions were especially intense for daughters as they
sought to break free from cultural and religious restraints. Immigrant par-
ents were much more restrictive of daughters than of sons. Many immi-
grant fathers jealously guarded their daughters, restricted educational op-
portunities to sons, and limited female employment to unskilled labor in
the home or in all-female environments. Immigrant parents expected
daughters to turn over their earnings and delay marriage to contribute to

the household. Coming out of a patriarchal tradition that privileged sons,
many young women resented the expectation to subordinate their own
freedom and education for their brothers' benefit. Grace Grimaldi's sister
told her father "that she wouldn't let him prevent her from educating her-
self." Because her father needed his daughter's wages, he was forced to
compromise.28
Many young immigrant women rejected the rigid gender separation
that was a key component of Old World life and embraced the coedu-
cational world of dating and commercial leisure. Young Jewish women,
who had been confined to a separate place in the synagogue and denied a
religious education in eastern Europe, were particularly eager to attend
schools, movies, and dance halls. Daughters found ways to evade their
parents' controls. Some immigrant parents turned to the police to buttress
their authority over their daughters. Fearing the loss of daughters' wages

Between 1910 and 1920 at least 219,000 Mexican immigrants entered the United States,
doubling the Hispanic population in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and quadrupling
California's. In this 1913 photograph, children account for most of the refugees fleeing
revolutionary unrest, crossing the Rio Grande River into Brownsville, Texas. Courtesy of
the Robert Runyon Collection, Center for American History, University of Texas.
212 Huck~s Raft
and of their moral respectability, immigrant parents sometimes invoked

newly enacted statutory rape laws to regulate their daughters' behavior. 29
Becoming American was more complicated than just learning the lan-
guage, embracing the customs and conventions of the new land, and los-
ing accents and changing Old World habits and clothing. There was great
tension over how much had to be sacrificed on the road to Americaniza-
tion. In The Rise of David Levinsky, the 1917 immigrant classic by Abra-
ham Cahan, the protagonist progressively breaks his religious, political,
and family ties to achieve business success. Becoming American entailed
costs as well as gains. It still does, although today sustaining older cultural
traditions has become somewhat easier.
When Lucy Robbins Lang arrived in the United States at the turn of the
century, her Aunt Chaye insisted that she and other family members drink
a dose of castor oil to "purge Europe from [their] systems." Immigration,
for many newly arrived children, entailed fitting in. Greenhorns had to
transform themselves from outsiders and embrace the conventions of their
new country. With today's higher valuation of multiculturalism, immi-
grant children find it somewhat easier to retain elements of their home
culture. In a mobile, interconnected world, immigrants can not only retain
ties to their home society but also consider that society part of their global
community. Immigrant children can pick and choose which aspects of
America they will adopt and which they will reject. In a 1996 novel,
Mona in the Promised Land, written by Gish Jen (a second-generation
Chinese-American whose birth name was Lillian), one sister decides to be-
come Jewish like her school friends while another decides to devote her
life to studying China. Unlike their turn-of-the-century counterparts who
struggled to lose their accents and abandon Old World clothing and cus-
toms, today's immigrant children feel a greater ambivalence toward main-
stream American culture. This is especially true of immigrant children of
color, who do not easily fit into this country's bifurcated racial system.
The new immigrant children reflect much more self-consciously on the
costs and gains that come with migration-the mixture of shame and
pride that they feel about their heritage and Old World customs and the
difficulties and frustrations that come with adapting to a new culture. 30
chapter eleven
Revolt of Modern Youth
IT WAS THE first of many crimes of the century. In 1924 two

teenage heirs to great wealth abducted and murdered a fourteen-year-old
neighbor. Outside Chicago's elite Harvard School for Boys, eighteen-year-
old Richard Loeb and nineteen-year-old Nathan Leopold lured Bobby .
Franks into a rented car. As they drove away, one of the kidnappers frac-
tured the schoolboy's skull with a chisel, then allowed him to bleed to
death. To hinder identification, the murderers sprinkled acid over the
body before dumping it in a remote culvert. This thrill killing was a vi-
cious and senseless act, intended to demonstrate the superiority of the ab-
ductors' intellect. "The killing was an experiment," Leopold later told his
defense counsel. "It is just as easy to justify such a death as it is to justify
an entomologist in killing a beetle on a pin." Yet despite their arrogance
and lack of remorse, the perpetrators were spared the death penalty. 1
Leopold and Loeb were inseparable friends, academically precocious
and socially well connected. Both boys had completed high school at
fifteen. Dickie Loeb, the son of a retired Sears vice-president, had an I.Q.
of 160 and had graduated from the University of Michigan at seventeen.
"Babe" Leopold, whose father was a millionaire box manufacturer, was a
University of Chicago graduate fluent in fourteen languages. The two in-
habited an elaborate fantasy world. Convinced that they were Nie-
tzschean supermen above ordinary standards of morality, they had
thrown bricks through car windshields, started small fires, and engaged in
petty theft before deciding to commit the perfect murder.
Their defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, persuaded a judge to spare
214 Huck's Raft
their lives by getting four psychiatrists to explain how his privileged cli-
ents had developed the impulse to kill. The expert witnesses depicted the
crime as a reaction to loveless childhoods, sexual abuse by an overly con-
trolling governess, feelings of physical inferiority, trauma over a mother's
death, and pressures for extreme academic overachievement. One psy-
chologist described a homosexual relationship between the two, although
his testimony was not reported by the press. 2
Before the 1920s, explanations of juvenile violence emphasized de-
ficiency and deprivation. Juvenile delinquents were assumed to be subnor-
mal in intelligence, neglected by their families, and deprived of education.
But the case of Leopold and Loeb suggested that any child, regardless of
background, could suffer from a psychological disorder. Explained a juve-
nile court judge: "Let no parent flatter himself that the Leopold-Loeb case
has no lesson for him ... It is more than the story of a murder. It is the
story of modern youth, of modern parents, of modern economic and so-
cial conditions, and of modern education." Many observers agreed that
the Leopold and Loeb case embodied in extreme form "the story of mod-
ern youth": the weakening of parental authority, the growth of peer at-
tachments, and the decline of traditional morality. 3
Early twentieth-century parents sensed that they were living in a new
era, fundamentally different from the one preceding it. Self-conscious mo-
dernity was the defining characteristic of this era. Every aspect of child-
hood was transformed. Instead of clothing infants in white gowns, a sym-
bol of asexual innocence, baby girls began to be dressed in white and
baby boys in blue. In another symbol of gender difference, boys started to
wear pants and have their hair trimmed at two or three, three or four
years earlier than in the past. Meanwhile a new commercial children's cul-
ture appeared, as store-bought toys replaced their homemade predeces-
sors and children's book series proliferated. But the development that
dominated public attention was the impression that the young were far
more independent and less deferential than their predecessors. As a result
of cars, telephones, and the movies, the young had broken away from the
world of adults and established their own customs, such as dating, which
were regulated by the peer group and not adults. This was the revolt of
modern youth. 4
A sociological study of Muncie, Indiana, a manufacturing town of
38,000, forty miles northeast of Indianapolis, underscored the changes
taking place in young lives. Muncie's mothers were flabbergasted by their
children's insolence. Fourteen-year-olds called them old-fashioned and
said they were cruel when they wouldn't let them stay at a dance until
eleven. Times had certainly changed. The town's adults had grown up on
Revolt of Modern Youth 215
farms and had attended just eight years of school. Their parents had ex-
pected them to spend their free time plowing fields, weeding gardens,
tending chickens, toting water, and churning butter. Their children, in
contrast, grew up listening to the radio, going to movies, driving cars, and
attending high school. The parents' mothers and fathers had assumed that
their children would comply with their demands, and most did; but by the
mid-1920s the younger generation had grown much more assertive. Par-
ents and adolescents clashed over church attendance, curfews, dress, time
spent with members of the opposite sex, and use of the family car. Espe-
cially disturbing to parents were teenage smoking and petting parties,
"machine riding to other towns at night with dates," and the number of
times their children went out on school nights. 5
In certain respects, Muncie's young people remained staunchly conser-
vative. Less than a third of high school students believed that the theory
of evolution offered a more accurate account of humanity's origins than
the Bible. Ninety percent of the boys and 97 percent of the girls believed
that Christianity was the one true religion and that all people should con-
vert to it. But in behavior, the worlds of adults and the young had drifted
far apart. Muncie's parents complained about "the diminishing place of
the home in the life of the child," the "sophistication" of young people's
"social life," and the "aggressiveness" of teenage girls. Their children
spent too much time on the telephone, and cars provided them with exces-
sive amounts of privacy; a judge called autos "houses of prostitution on
wheels." Girls' growing freedom evoked alarm. "Girls aren't so modest
nowadays," said one resident. "We can't get our boys decent when girls
dress that way." Said another: "Girls are far more aggressive today. They
call boys up to try to make dates with them, as they never could have
when I was a girl." N9 longer was leisure time devoted to family activi-
ties. Instead parents and children spent a significant amount of time apart.
Adolescents spent half their evenings outside the family home. 6
During the half-century between 1880 and 1930, parent-child relations
underwent a profound transformation. Middle-class family life grew more
democratic, affectionate, and child-centered, and the school and the peer
group became more significant in young people's lives. Bronislaw
Malinowski told a story that underscored the shift. He and his five-year-
old daughter argued, but despite his best efforts, the Polish-born anthro-
pologist was unable to sway her opinion. The girl brought the argument
"to an abrupt conclusion by announcing: 'Daddy, what an ass you are.'"
Malinowski "tried to imagine what would have happened had I thus ad-
dressed my father some forty years ago. I shuddered and sighed."
Malinowski's story struck a responsive chord among American parents,
216 Huck's Raft
whose domestic authority had diminished while they envied their chil-
dren's newfound freedom of expression. As sociologist Ernest Burgess put
it, "In speech, in manner, and in attitude, boys and girls still in the teen
age show heedless disregard for convention; a contempt for the advice of
their elders, or worse yet, a smug indifference to it. " 7
By the 1920s families were less important in transmitting status and so-
cial position than schools and jobs. As a result, the family became a more
private institution, a development reinforced by a rapid decline in family
size, which made strict discipline less necessary than in the past. Early
twentieth-century families contained, on average, just three children, half
the number in 1850, allowing more self-expression for each family mem-
ber. But there was a decrease in the physical interdependence of family
members. Middle-class children were freer to take part in activities with
peers, who played a growing role in shaping tastes, regulating behavior,
and serving as a source of approval. "The time has passed when parents
supervised the morals of their children," the North American Review an-
nounced in 1913. 8
A commercial children's culture was a powerful force for change. To-
day toys like Teddy bears, Lincoln Logs, and Raggedy-Ann dolls evoke
images of innocence and nostalgia for simpler times. But these toys were
actually an early twentieth-century invention, reflecting new ideas about
childhood and the emergence of a modern consumer economy. Cuddly,
store-bought stuffed animals were given to infants a~d toddlers as a way
of allaying their anxieties at the moment when they began to sleep by
themselves in ~heir own room. The first Teddy bear received its name from
an event in 1902. President Theodore Roosevelt, in Mississippi to settle a
border dispute with Louisiana, went hunting and, after nine fruitless days,
was told that his dogs had cornered a bear in a clearing. Finding a baby
bear tied to a tree, he refused to kill the defenseless cub, an incident illus-
trated in a newspaper cartoon. Morris and Rose Michtrom, candy store
owners in Brooklyn, honored the president's gesture by manufacturing a
stuffed toy, which they called "Teddy's Bear." Much more than a play-
thing, the Teddy bear became a source of emotional comfort for small
children, an archetypal psychological bodyguard that helped the young to
sleep through the night and deal with their frustrations and anxieties. 9
Children received few store-bought presents before the early twentieth
century. Earlier girls and boys had handmade rag dolls, which both sexes
used as "action figures," but store-bought dolls were a rarity. Fragile and
expensive, most were imported from Europe and made of unglazed porce-
lain or wax. In 1836, eight-year-old Susan Blunt of Merrimack, New
Hampshire, a blacksmith's daughter, had received a wax doll with glass
eyes and real hair, the only purchased doll she ever had. "One day," she
wrote regretfully, "I went to look at it and it was ruined. The sun had
shown in so hot that it had melted the wax to my great greef." Dolls were
so delicate and costly that the Sears catalog sold various replacement
parts, including heads and body parts. 10
Most playthings-marbles, kites, skates, jump ropes, hoops, and
balls-were meant for group play. Modern manufactured toys implied a
solitariness that was not a part of childhood before the twentieth century.
By 1903-the year that Crayola introduced the first affordable, multicol-
ored crayons-toy production had advanced so rapidly that manufactur-
ers held the first annual toy fair to promote their products. Initially, store-
bought toys were marketed to parents rather than children, as a way to
teach the young adult values and skills. Toys for boys centered on science,
technology, transportation, construction, and combat and hunting. Jack-
knives, popguns, air rifles, and BB guns were especially popular. The first
modern construction toy, Crandall's Building Blocks, had appeared in
1867, but demand for construction toys took off only after the marketing
of Erector Sets in 1913 and Lincoln Logs three years later. Toys for girls
emphasized homemaking, child nurture, and the rituals of domestic life.
Tea sets, doll houses, and dolls were intended to socialize girls to become
housewives and mothers. 11
At first toys remained relatively static, with the same dolls, stuffed ani-
mals, construction sets, and train sets appearing year after year. Store-
bought toys continued to prepare children for adulthood or, like western
outfits, drew upon America's past for models of adventure and heroics.
But in the late 1920s toys began to be marketed directly to children. The
chubby-cheeked, pot-bellied Patsy, the first doll with an extensive ward-
robe, accessories, and companions, was introduced in 1928. Also in 1928,
an entrepreneur named Donald Duncan purchased a small Mexican-
American-owned yo-yo company in Los Angeles and promoted the toy
nationwide-transforming yo-yos into the first children's fad, a toy that
children felt they had to have. During the Great Depression toy compa-
nies appealed to children with an outpouring of fantasy and novelty toys.
The toy industry's revenues fell by nearly half between 1929 and 1933,
from $336 million to $181 million, and toy manufacturers responded
with tie-ins to movies and cartoons, introducing celebrity-inspired toys,
including Mickey Mouse watches, Shirley Temple dolls, and Buck Rogers
pistols.
The emphasis on fantasy and adventure could be seen even earlier in
book series targeted at young readers. First came the gadget-loving Tom
Swift, whose first adventure novel, Tom Swift and His Motorcycle, ap-
218 Huck's Raft
peared in 1910. In 1913 the Bobbsey Twins arrived, two sets of mystery-
solving twins, the dark-haired eight-year-olds Bert and Nan and the fair-
haired four-year-olds Flossie and Freddie. They were followed in 1927 by
the Hardy Boys-Frank and Joe, the teenage sons of a celebrated detec-
tive-and in 1930 by the spirited, blue-eyed, roadster-driving sixteen-
year-old sleuth Nancy Drew. Like toys, book series for children were the
product of a transformation in the consumer economy. Decades before
Goosebumps, the Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley High, or Harry Potter,
the young were initiated into reading by book series produced by a syndi-
cate founded in 1905 by Edward Stratemeyer. The son of German immi-
grants and an admirer of Horatio Alger, Jr., Stratemeyer mass-produced
books for specific groups of young readers much as Henry Ford mass-
produced cars. He provided book outlines to freelance ghostwriters who
were paid $75 to $100 a book and wrote under such pseudonyms as Vic-
tor Appleton, Franklin W. Dixon, and Carolyn Keene. By the time of his
death in 1930, Stratemeyer had created almost a hundred different series
of books that sold for between 40 and 60 cents. Highly formulaic and
contrived, each volume contained approximately twenty-five chapters, all
of which ended with a cliffhanger. The novels contained no murders,
guns, or kisses, and no epithets stronger than "Jumping willigers!" But
their very predictability proved highly appealing to young readers.
Children's literature, like children's toys, provided a simulacrum of reality
for increasingly structured lives. 12
Book series for children were not entirely new. Alongside Louisa May
Alcott, a host of lesser-known writers such as John Frost, Elijah Kellogg,
and Oliver Optic (William T. Adams) had produced book series. But
Stratemeyer's were different: his characters did not grow up; his books
emphasized action and adventure, omitting any hint of introspection or
character development. As in the Frank Merriwell books, which first ap-
peared in 1896 and featured a Yale-educated star athlete, problems are
solved as much by brain power as by physical prowess. In the fantasy
world of fiction, young readers, whose everyday lives were increasingly
confined to schools, could envision a world in which they solved mysteries
and undertook fantastic adventures.
Adults regarded children's toys and literature as much more than mere
playthings or pastimes. They were intended to meet children's psychologi-
cal needs, which loomed increasingly large in adults' minds. In 1938 Lois
Barclay Murphy, a child psychologist, drove her family from New York to
California. As they approached the Kansas border, her six-year-old
daughter, Midge, demanded that the family avoid the state, because she
did not want to be blown away like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. "Since
we could not truthfully guarantee that there would be no tornado in Kan-

sas," the mother wrote, "and since it seemed a minor concession to make .
to a strong-minded child whom we respected, we changed the plan and
drove through Nebraska." It is unlikely that earlier parents would have
attached such weight to a child's fears. But during the 1920s and 1930s
there was a heightened recognition of children's anxieties, phobias, and
emotional needs. In ever-increasing numbers, mothers turned to psycholo-
gists for expert advice. By the mid-1930s, half of all middle-class mothers
reported that they subscribed to a magazine on childcare, and most moth-
ers said they read at least five books or pamphlets on the subject each
year. 13
It was during the 1920s that middle-class parents began to turn topsy-
chologists for help in dealing with such problems as sibling rivalry,
bedwetting, moodiness, rebelliousness, and sleeping problems. During
that decade, knowledge about children's psychological needs increased
substantially. In 1922 Arnold Gesell, a student of G. Stanley Hall and the
founder in 1911 of Yale's Child Study Center, developed the first school
readiness test, based on his theory that children develop in comprehensi-
ble patterns but at different rates. The test allowed educators to evaluate
children's social skills, language development, motor skills, and adaptive
behavior. Subsequently Gesell and his colleagues Frances L. Ilg and Louise
Bates Ames demonstrated that at around two and a half years children be-
came inflexible and rigid, popularizing the concept of the "terrible twos."
They also showed that inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity were
characteristic of a normal child under seven years of age, and that mis-
chievousness was an expression of children's natural desire to be active.
A key figure in funding and disseminating research on child psychology
was Lawrence K. Frank, associate director of the Laura Spelman Rocke-
feller Memorial and author of a popular advi~e column in the New York
Times. Frank not only promoted the development of child guidance clin-
ics to treat juvenile delinquents and "problem" children; he came up with
the idea for Parents!~ Magazine. Through his advice columns, Frank
helped popularize the notion that juvenile delinquents were children who
had been neglected, maltreated, and subjected to intolerable brutality, re-
quiring psychiatric care rather than punishment. He also drew on psycho-
logical research to show that childish behavior that appeared to be evil,
naughty, or impertinent was often symptomatic of psychological confu-
sions or conflicts, or responses to situations and demands beyond the
child's capacities. 14
The psychologizing of childrearing raised parental anxieties consider-
ably. It suggested that parenting was a skill that had to be learned and
220 Huck~s Raft
that improper parenting could have disastrous psychological conse-

quences. Above all, child psychologists tended to blame almost all of chil-
dren's misconduct on faulty mothering. During the 1930s and 1940s child
psychologist David M. Levy, drawing in part upon studies of children in
orphanages, developed the concepts of maternal deprivation and overpro-
tective mothers as explanations for children's psychological problems. 15
In addition to raising parental anxieties, the psychologizing of child-
hood convinced a growing number of mothers and fathers that profes-
sional therapy offered the best hope of taming troublesome behavior.
Many young people behaved in "defiantly modern" and "self consciously
different" ways, spending more time with friends and staying out late on
school nights. Parents like the mother of a girl named Eleanor turned to
psychologists for help. "Is it right," she asked in 1925, for her daughter
"to go out with Tom, Dick, and Harry automobiling to roadhouses and
getting home at two or three o'clock in the morning?" Another parent felt
equally confused and upset. Her fifteen-year-old daughter refused to re-
move her makeup, in violation of school rules. In desperation, this mother
and many others turned to child guidance clinics for help. 16
The child guidance clinic, the forerunner of modern mental health clin-
ics and child counseling centers, originated as an adjunct to the expanding
juvenile court system. The most famous, the Judge Baker Guidance Clinic,
was founded in Boston in 1917. Initially most referrals involved urban
immigrant and working-class youngsters charged with delinquency, tru-
ancy, theft, shoplifting, and, for girls, sex delinquency. Most offenses were
trivial, such as begging, selling fruit on the street without a license, play-
ing ball on Sunday, and petty theft. Rejecting monocausal explanations of
delinquency (such as feeblemindedness, heredity, or mental defect), the
child guidance centers identified a variety of contributing factors-envi-
ronmental, familial, and psychological-including poverty, bad compan-
ions, an unstable home environment, and the temptations of saloons,
dance halls, and unaffordable goods found in shop windows. Especially
worrisome was poor parenting: "For every problem child is a problem
parent" was the way one expert put it. Discarding the notion that trouble-
some children were inherently wicked, the guidance clinic's psychiatrists
and social workers argued that they suffered from behavioral and per-
sonality problems that could be solved through counseling. Recom-
mendations included advising the family to move to a new neighborhood,
sending the child to a summer camp, and, in extreme cases, institu-
tionalization.17
During the 1920s middle-class parents-upset by sons and daughters
who tried their patience, defied their authority, and rejected their values-
turned to the clinics for advice. No longer was generational rebellion

confined to the children of immigrants. In a rapidly changing society,
where many middle-class adolescents clashed with parents over curfews,
dating, dress, and appropriate forms of entertainment and leisure activi-
ties, mothers and fathers turned to professionals for expert guidance and
assistance. Meanwhile, behavior considered unnoteworthy in the past,
such as sibling rivalry, came to be viewed as psychologically problematic.
Among the problems parents brought to the clinics were eating and sleep-
ing disorders, nail-biting, bedwetting, phobias, sibling rivalry, and temper
tantrums. Other concerns included school failure, running away, and dis-
obedient, defiant, impertinent, and rebellious behavior. The advice parents
received emphasized conflict avoidance and adaptation to the realities of
modern life. It was normal, parents learned, for the young to have a "de-
sire for emancipation." As the Judge Baker staff told the parents of
Phoebe Campbell, "over-restriction" was "much more dangerous than
anything she would get into if they allowed her more liberty." The child
guidance clinics both reflected and contributed to escalating parental con-
cern about children's psychological and emotional well-being, and con-
vinced many parents that youthful misbehavior could best be addressed
through proper psychological treatment, avoidance of conflict, and per-
sonality adjustment. 18
One area that demanded greater intervention involved sexuality. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, many children grew up in an environ-
ment of extreme sexual ignorance, superstition, and fear. Girls were par-
ticularly poorly prepared for the physical and psychological changes that
accompanied sexual maturity. Sixty percent of young women in a Boston
high school reported that they were totally unprepared for menstruation.
One woman recalled that although her mother had told her the basic facts
of menstruation, she had also "taught her that such things were not talked
about [and] also not thought of." A study of forty-three women who had
been born before 1890 found that only six had discussed sex with their
mothers before marriage. 19
Sexual ignorance was not confined to girls. The early twentieth century ,
was preoccupied with adolescent masturbation. No stronger condemna-
tion of the practice appeared than in the Boy Scouts handbook, which
told boys: "In the body of every boy who has reached his teens, the Cre-
ator of the Universe has sown a very important fluid ... Any habit ...
that causes this fluid to be discharged from the body tends to weaken his
strength ... and ... fastens upon him habits which later in life can be
broken only with great difficulty." Reformers known as "social hygien-
ists" called for sex education in schools, not to teach students the details
222 Huck"'s Raft
of human reproduction, but to preach abstinence from masturbation and

premarital sex. By 1922 about half the secondary schools in the United
States offered instruction in social hygiene. 20
As a high school student, Alfred Kinsey, born in 1894, was a loner and
a misfit. Bookish, religiously devout, a bird-watcher and collector of but-
terflies, he was considered a "Momma's boy." In his hometown of South
Orange, New Jersey, high school boys were expected to play team sports,
and every boy in his 1912 high school graduating class played varsity
sports except Kinsey. The high school itself was a jockocracy. Kinsey was
selected the "brightest" and "most respectable" boy in his class, but it
was athletes who dominated senior class offices and led most high school
clubs. In South Orange in the 1910s, boys' lives centered on competitive
sports, the main way in which boys forged bonds with each other and es-
tablished their status. Local adults shared this preoccupation with athletic
prowess. Convinced that sports built character, sublimated sexual im-
pulses, and was the most effective way "to impress upon our lads the no-
blest lessons of real manhood," South Orange's school superintendent in-
troduced team sports shortly after he arrived in South Orange at the
beginning of the century. 21
As a sixteen-year-old high school junior, Kinsey joined the Boy Scouts,
and in 1913 he became one of the first seventy-seven Eagle Scouts in the
United States. But this achievement did not bring him status as a "real
boy." Uniforms might impress preadolescents, but they seemed childish to
older boys, who chided Kinsey as a goody-goody. Even in affluent suburbs
like South Orange, middle-class boys took part in activities detested by
parents: playing pool, smoking cigarettes, and going to the movies on
dates. In Kinsey's own school, they challenged adult authority by smug-
gling flasks of liquor into a high school dance and breaking the school's
dress code. Kinsey's parents enforced a very different moral code, forbid-
ding him to drink, smoke, and date, and instilling a deeply rooted sense of
guilt about his sexual impulses. One incident that took place while Kinsey
served as a young camp counselor illustrates how deeply he had internal-
ized his parents' moral code. When a camper confessed to masturbating,
Kinsey responded by admitting that he shared this problem. He then knelt
down by the boy's cot and prayed to God to relieve him of this terrible
vice. 22
Many adults worried that boys were becoming "feminized" as mothers
and female teachers dominated their early upbringing and fathers became
little more than parenting assistants. The personality traits valued in the
home were not those that won approval in the peer group, nor were they
values conducive to adulthood success. The late nineteenth-century em-
phasis on vigilant self-control championed by such figures as John Harvey

Kellogg, whose cold cereals were intended to curb masturbation, gave
way, in the early twentieth century, to an emphasis on the need for boys to
assert masculinity through sports and other physical activities. Boys who
were perceived as weak, timid, or effeminate were teased, tormented, and
taunted with humiliating names like "sissy" and "pussyfoot." Advertisers
exploited boys' anxieties about their masculinity. Self-help books prolifer-
ated, such as How to Get Strong and How to Stay So (1879) and The Vir-
ile Powers of Superb Manhood (1900), written by Bernard Macfadden, an
early bodybuilder and inventor of the peniscope, a glass tube with a vac-
uum pump engineered to enlarge the penis. "Let me make you a new man
in just 15 minutes a day," Charles Atlas told generations of young males.
"I rebuild skinny rundown weaklings-fellows so embarrassed by their
second-rate physical condition that they always hang back, let others
walk off with the best jobs, the prettiest girls, the most fun and pop-
ularity. " 23
Worries about their sons' masculinity led a number of parents to con-
sult child guidance clinics. John Montgomery's parents took him to a
clinic because he lacked ambition and exhibited "nervousness, careless-
ness and [a] tendency to dawdle." Psychologists and social workers in the
1920s and 1930s drew upon a growing scholarly literature on masculinity
and femininity. By 1933 there were already 249 studies of sex differences
in children, most of which posited sharp gender differences in attitudes,
aptitudes, and behavior. One study concluded that boys demonstrated
"reliably greater interest than girls in health, safety, money study, recre-
ation and civil affairs," while girls were more interested in "etiquette, per-
sonal attractiveness and getting along with other people." In 1936 psy-
chologists Lewis M. Terman and Catherine Cox Miles created the
Attitude-Interest Analysis Test to measure children's masculinity and femi-
ninity and their likelihood of acquiring an appropriate gender identity.
Like other early students of sex role differences, they considered masculin-
ity and femininity opposite poles on a single continuum, and their test
exaggerated gender differences. Of particular concern to child guidance
professionals were authoritarian or emotionally absent fathers and con-
trolling and overly directive, indulgent, protective, or possessive mothers,
family configurations that they linked to effeminacy in boys. 24
At the same time that anxieties about boyhood rose, distinctly modern
patterns of girlhood behavior emerged. In 1890 thirteen-year-old Mary
Anderson Boit complained in her diary: "We can not do anything in this
house[;] as soon as we start to have any fun we are stopped ... It seems as
though we are kept in a glass case. " A few months later, after her mother
224 Huck,s Raft
sent her to her room for being "ungrateful & rude," the thirteen-year-old
wrote: "I said I had not been rude since spring but had been trying not to
be & she would not believe me." The diaries and letters of girls and young
women in the early twentieth century have a recognizably modern tone.
The deference that distinguished earlier references to mothers disap-
peared, and girls expressed their feelings and desires for independence far
more openly than in the past. When her mother would not let her go to an
eighth-grade graduation party in 1916, an eighth-grader exclaimed:
"Mother says I can't go with any boy! It isn't the boy that I want to go for
but all the other girls are going with them and I don't want to be the only
one ... left out ... Maybe fourteen is too young but I don't care. " 25
Some authorities resisted the growth in girls' independence, arguing
that their physiology unfitted them for strenuous physical and intellectual
activities. Dr. Edward Clarke, a professor at Harvard Medical School,
warned that "both muscular and brain labor must be remitted enough to
yield sufficient force for the work of [menstruation]." But such arguments
met with mounting resistance. If American girls were "pale and weak,"
one proponent of an active girlhood wrote, this phenomenon was due to
lack of exercise. Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi won Harvard's 1876 Boylston
Prize for an essay titled "The Question of Rest for Women during Men-
struation," in which she argued on the basis of an investigation of 246
young women that exercise during schooling reduced menstrual pain. 26
In the 1910s, movie serials such as The Perils of Pauline, The Exploits
of Elaine, and The Hazards of Helen featured athletic, adventurous girls,
who rejected ladylike behavior and stay-at-home femininity. In their per-
sonal lives, girls consciously rejected Victorian assumptions about gender
in favor of distinctly "modern" forms of behavior. Discarding older no-
tions of propriety, they adopted new hairstyles and forms of dress, bob-
bing their hair, powdering and rouging their faces, and abandoning long
skirts and shirtwaist blouses in favor of shorter skirts, sleeveless tops, and
sheer silk stockings. With its emphasis on short hair and a slender appear-
ance, the new look struck many as boyish, sparking fears of "masculini-
zation." The most striking development was smoking, which numerous
young women regarded as a symbol of modernity, sophistication, and
generational independence. 27
Young women defended the new styles as more comfortable and less
constraining than the restrictive fashions and- elaborate hairstyles of the
past, but the new look imposed its own demands. Girls might no longer
wear crinolines or corsets, but they were very interested in the body's
shape and appearance. Slenderness and a clear complexion were the
defining characteristics of the new ideal of beauty, and the 1920s brought

In this 1927 photograph, high school girls learn about auto mechanics. Courtesy of the
Library of Congress.
an unprecedented emphasis on dieting. Sixteen-year-old Margaret

Gorman, who became the first Miss America in 1921 and whose measure-
ments were 30-25-32, embodied the new emphasis on thinness. Women's
magazines recommended a multitude of diets, including diets emphasizing
grapefruit or other foods. Fifteen-year-old Yvonne Blue, who later mar-
ried psychologist B. F. Skinner, started to diet in 1926. "I'm so tired of be-
ing fat," she complained to her diary, as she described clashes with her
mother about calorie counting. Girls also began to agonize about their
complexion, a concern that was related to the declining frequency of scar-
ring diseases like smallpox and the arrival of mirrors in middle-class bath-
rooms. During the 1920s a commercial industry of skin cream, acne treat-
ment, and sanitary-pad products shamelessly exploited young people's
growing anxieties over their personal appearance. Young women became
increasingly aware of themselves as physical objects who were evaluated
according to their appearance. 28
Girls expressed a growing desire to lead a modern life. Just as modern
young women did not wear frumpy and constricting clothes, they did they
did not sit at home or accept a gender-segregated world. A 1911 article in
The Independent observed that modern daughters preferred going out on-
226 Huck~s Raft
the town to "dying of asphyxiation at home." Modern femininity was as-

sociated not with innocence, modesty, and reserve, but with spunk, vivac-
ity, and exuberance. Young women showed a new enthusiasm for outdoor
exercise-especially swimming, tennis, gymnastics, field hockey, and bicy-
cling. Adamant that their lives were going to be different from their moth-
ers', they insisted on the right to go out at night and to dress in new ways.
A frequent theme in women's fiction was intense mother-daughter
conflict. In her popular semiautobiographical 1916 novel, Mary Olivie1;
May Sinclair wrote: "Ever since I began to grow up I felt there was some-
thing about Mamma that would kill me if I let it." It was Mary's "true
self"-"the thing she can't see and touch and get at"-that her mother de-
spised. Yet while fiction emphasized estrangement and hostility, letters
and diaries illustrate a more complex pattern combining intimacy and ten-
sion. Many mothers encouraged greater freedom for their daughters and
regarded their emancipation as fulfillment of their own aspirations. 29
Youthful independence became a cultural obsession for early twentieth-
century parents and children. The prophet of the early twentieth-century
cult of youth was Randolph Bourne, a fiercely independent intellectual
and brilliant political essayist who extolled cultural diversity and con-
demned American involvement in World War I. Equally important,
Bourne issued the "Declaration of Independence" of American youth in a
series of essays that he wrote as a college undergraduate. These essays,
published between 1909 and 1911, harshly condemned the middle-class
family as a repressive institution that chilled the passions of the young and
turned them into robots, replicating their parents' hollow lives. His at-
tacks on the older generation, his declaration of generational revolt, and
his celebration of youth's vision, which, he said, "is always the truest,"
made Bourne "the flying wedge of the younger generation," in literary
critic VanWyck Brooks's words. 30
As a result of a messy forceps delivery and spinal tuberculosis, Bourne
was left with a partially paralyzed face, a mouth permanently askew, and
a twisted frame. His ideas about the disabled influenced his view of the
place of the young in modern America. Like the disabled, the young felt
superfluous, cut off from real life in a modern wasteland. They had inter-
nalized unconscious feelings of inadequacy, and felt alienated from their
elders, who had no relevant knowledge to pass on. Youth, in his view, rep-
resented "the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradi-
tion." Youth welcomed experiment, while their elders feared innovation.
The young were a cultural avant-garde, "ever laying the foundation for
the future." Bourne admonished young people to live "contemporane-
ously," to dodge the pressures for conformity, break free from tradition

During World War I teenage girls took on jobs, like carrying ice, previously reserved for
men. Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.
and outmoded authority, and refashion America in a modern image. "No

wonder the older generation fears and distrusts the younger," he pro-
claimed. "Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail. " 31
The radicalism of early twentieth-century youth was not political, but
cultural and behavioral, as young people defined new behavior patterns
and social values. Nowhere was this more evident than in the invention of
dating. In a 1919 novel titled Betty Bell, Fannie Kilbourne described a
new practice of cross-sex socializing among high school students. The
teenaged Betty received phone calls inviting her to high school dances, the
movies, and ice cream shops. Asked out by a member of the school's foot-
ball team, she wanted to be seen and envied by her peers. When Kilbourne
wrote her novel, dating was a new phenomenon. The term itself origi-
nated within Chicago's working class in the 1890s and was introduced
into the middle class by George Ade, a Chicago journalist. 32
During the nineteenth century, boys and girls had socialized together,
taking strolls, attending dances, and participating in sleigh rides and other
outdoor activities. Some went further. In a diary she kept during the late
1860s, Antha Warren, a nineteen-year-old school teacher in St. Albans,
228 Huck~s Raft
Vermont, placed an asterisk whenever she and her suitor kissed. After one
of his visits, she wrote: "Too many ,'" to count." But dating differed dra-
matically from earlier forms of socializing. It not only took place away
from home; it usually involved some form of commercial amusement paid
for by the male. It was unchaperoned and not subject to a parental veto. It
was not exclusive (the phrase "going steady" appeared only around the
late 1930s) and existed independently of the courtship process. It re-
mained the chief form of adolescent heterosexual recreation until the
1970s, when it was replaced with "hooking up" and "hanging out" in
mixed-sex groups. 33
Compared with the earlier and formal process of courting, dating was
much more casual. It permitted young females and males to interact with-
out proclaiming an intention to marry. Dating also provided acceptable
ways to demonstrate physical intimacy. It allowed a girl to have erotic in-
teraction-petting and necking-without endangering herself with an un-
wanted or out-of-wedlock child. Petting could mean kisses or fondling,
but it stopped short of intercourse; although parents equated petting with
fornication, teenagers did not, and their peer group still accepted andre-
spected them. Through gossip, teasing, and labeling, the peer group regu-
lated dating, including how much sexual intimacy was permissible. But as
the sociologist Willard Waller observed in his influential1937 study of the
"Rating and Dating Complex," dating involved something more than ca-
sual cross-sex socializing; it was part of the adolescents' status system.
Whom and how many people one dated determined one's popularity. Suc-
cessful dating was a measure of a person's social skills and physical attrac-
tiveness. It was a defining element in a new youth culture that worshipped
popularity and fitting in. 34
Gender asymmetry was one of dating's defining features. A young man
initiated the date: he asked a girl out; paid for the date; and sought, in-
deed expected, physical intimacy in exchange. As one boy complained, he
"gave a girl a good time but when I ask for a kiss she refuses. Don't I de-
serve at least one?" he asked rhetorically. A 1933 government pamphlet
described dating as a "wholesome" abandonment of "Victorian" conven-
tions, but it is clear in retrospect that dating established a new double
standard in which a young woman was responsible for imposing limits on
the young man's sexual demands. 35
As a dating system evolved, new terminology appeared. The word crush
described an infatuation, while the word love acquired more transitory
and less serious connotations. Degrees of commitment were also conveyed
through language. "Going out" represented the lowest level of serious-
ness. During the 1920s the words girlfriend and boyfriend gained their
modern connotations, and by the 1930s the expression going steady had
entered the popular vocabulary. More tangible symbols of deepening
commitment included pinning a girl or giving her a letter sweater earned
in a varsity sport. 36
Dating was a product of the spread of commercial amusements, a
weakening of parental authority, and, above all, a generation that con-
sciously defined itself against its elders. It began in urban areas and only
gradually made its way into rural parts of the country. Because the dating
system placed a premium on money, working-class youth were less likely
to date. Young women appear to have been largely responsible for the rise
of dating. In their book The Revolt of Modern Youth (1925), the juvenile
court judge Ben B. Lindsey and coauthor Wainwright Evans concluded
that "generally, she sets the pace, whatever it is to be, and he dances to her
piping." Through dating, young women succeeded in modifying young
men's behavior. Dating encouraged boys to display patterns of emotional
intimacy that had long been valued by girls' culture. During the 1910s
fewer boys had their first sexual experience with prostitutes, and
their premarital sexual experiences and those of girls grew increasingly
similar. 37
Modern adolescence grew up hand in hand with the rise of modern
commercial amusements. Amusement parks, ice cream shops, and, above
all, movie theaters provided spaces where new patterns of behavior, like
dating, emerged. The movies also helped reshape values and behavior. A
sixteen-year-old girl explained the movies' significance in blunt terms.
"No wonder girls of older days, before the movies, were so modest and
bashful. They never saw Clara Bow and William Haines ... If we did not
see such examples in the movies, where would we get the idea of being
'hot'? We wouldn't." "Movies," another young woman told an inter-
viewer, "are a liberal education in the art of making love." It was at the
movies that she learned "how two screen lovers manage their arms when
they are embracing." Movies not only provided models of behavior; they
shaped ideals of beauty. A young African-American woman compared her
appearance with Clara Bow's. "After seeing her picture," she said, "I im-
mediately went home to take stock of my personal charms before my van-
ity mirror and after carefully surveying myself from all angles I turned
away with a sigh, thinking that I may as well want to be Mr. Lon
Chaney." 38
Some Progressive-era reformers praised movies as a benign alternative
to dance halls and city streets and thought they could serve a valuable ed-
ucational function. Others viewed nickelodeons and movie theaters as
breeding grounds of delinquency and sexual promiscuity. Settlement
230 Huck,s Raft
House founder Jane Addams called the nickelodeon "a house of dreams"
and described how, after seeing a Western, a nine-year-old and a thirteen-
year-old boy bought a lariat and a gun and ambushed a milkman, nearly
killing him. In 1907 the Chicago Tribune threw its editorial weight
against the movies, declaring that they were "without a redeeming feature
to warrant their existence ... ministering to the lowest passions of child-
hood." That year Chicago established the nation's first censorship board,
to protect its youthful population "against the evil influence of obscene
and immoral representations. " 39
In the late 1920s social scientists conducted the first serious studies of
movies' effects on children. With support from the Payne Fund, a private
foundation that financed research on children, nineteen psychologists and
sociologists from seven universities investigated film's impact on children's
conduct, attitudes, and emotions. The researchers wanted to know the ex-
tent to which the movies' unique features-the darkness of the theater
and the intense emotionality and hypnotic quality of the images-
influenced children's sleep patterns, their school work, moral standards,
delinquency, and ideas about race and world affairs. The project's funders
had their own agenda: to demonstrate that the movies "constituted a seri-
ous menace to public and private morals." The studies were sober, if
methodologically flawed, attempts to understand the movies' impact. The
researchers found that children attended movies more frequently than
adults and that even very young children attended movies unchaperoned.
They also discovered, on the basis of a content analysis of 1,500 films,
that virtually no movies were produced exclusively for children, identify-
ing just one such film in 1930. The investigators found that children had
an impressive ability to recall information from the movies; that
moviegoing influenced children's attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and
crime; that films featuring violence or horror interfered with children's
sleep; and that frequent moviegoers performed worse in school than their
classmates. A summary volume, titled Our Movie-Made Children, pro-
vided a misleading but popular digest of the studies' findings. The volume,
which went through seven printings between 1933 and 1935, asserted
that the movies fueled cravings for an easy life and wild parties and con-
tributed significantly to juvenile delinquency. 40
Other authorities agreed that the movies left an indelible and negative
effect on youthful behavior. A leading neurologist, Frederick !Peterson,
claimed that violent movie scenes had "an effect very similar to shellshock
such as soldiers received in war." Seen once, cinematic violence caused no
harm, "but repeating the stimulation often amounts to emotional de-
bauch ... sowing the seeds in the system for future neuroses and psycho-
ses." In a study of an all-white midwestern community, where almost no

child had seen a Negro, a University of Chicago professor found that
screening of The Birth of a Nation caused racial prejudice to spread like a
weed. Interviews with children intensified adult concerns about the im-
pact of movies. A boy convicted of robbery claimed that the "luxuries
showed in the movies ... made me want to possess them"; another said
that he got his ideas about stealing "from watching pictures where the
hero never worked but seemed always to have lots of money to spend."
Over half of a group of truants and boys with behavior problems said that
gangster pictures made them want to follow their example. Auto thieves
claimed that the movies had shown them "how to jimmy a door or win-
dow," "how to use a glass cutter and master key," and "the scientific way
of pulling jobs-leave no fingerprints or telltale marks. " 41
Of particular concern to adults was the impact of the movies on young
people's sexual ideas. One girl reported that she learned that movie stars
kissed with their eyes closed, that romance is something that happens
quickly, and added: "I kiss and pet much more than I would otherwise."
A high school girl stated that "the only benefit I ever got from the movies
was in learning to love and a knowledge of sex. When I was about twelve
years old I started browsing around and I remember I used to advantage
my knowledge of how to love, to be loved, and how to respond." The
movies, according to the Payne Studies, were powerful instruments of cul-
tural modernization that helped explain the far-reaching transformations
taking place in young people's lives. Like later moralists, their focus was
on the mass media rather than on the broader institutional changes-such
as the expansion of an age-segregated realm of youth, cut off from the
world of adulthood-that were at the heart of the emergence of a modern
youth culture. 42
In 1911 Cornelia A. P. Comer, a Harvard professor's wife, published "A
Letter to the Rising Generation" in the Atlantic Monthly. The younger
generation, she grumbled, couldn't spell, and its English was "slipshod."
Today's youth were selfish, discourteous, lazy, and self-indulgent. Lacking
respect for their elders or for common decency, the young were hedonis-
tic, "shallow, amusement-seeking creatures," whose tastes had been
"formed by the colored supplements of the Sunday paper" and "the mov-
ing-picture shows." The boys were feeble, flippant, and "soft" intellectu-
ally, spiritually, and physically. Even worse were the girls, who were
brash, loud, and promiscuous with young men. 43
Randolph Bourne responded to this indictment by acknowledging its
truth. Young people couldn't care less about proper English or outmoded
standards of propriety. The revolt of the young against the conventions of
232 Huck's Raft
their parents' world reflected a fundamental generational rupture in expe-

rience and attitudes. "The modern child," Bourne explained, "from the
age of ten is almost his own 'boss.'" A healthy camaraderie had emerged
among girls and boys. Kept at home and in school longer than previous
generations, the young chafed under the tutelage of adults, "nominal
though it is." Fearful of "being swallowed up in the routine of a big
corporation," the young hungered for pleasure, gaiety, and intense ex-
perience.44
Bourne was not alone in thinking about society in terms of generational
conflict. In Europe social theorists like Karl Mannheim, Antonio Gramsci,
and Jose Ortega y Gasset popularized the notion that society was divided
into distinct generations. In their view, age cohorts-which shared a com-
mon experience and consciousness-were units of analysis as significant
as economic class. But Bourne went further. He argued that generational
conflict was the engine of cultural transformation. With words that antici-
pated the cult of youth of the 1960s, he argued that it was the young who
were "ever laying the foundations for the future." Insisting that "very few
people get any really new experience after they are twenty-five," he an-
nounced that youth had a special mission: to overturn the outmoded val-
ues of a staid culture and remake a stale and static world. 45
chapter twelve
Coming of Age in the Great Depression
LEIRS WERE the most famous multiple births ever. In 1934 a

French-speaking couple in northern Ontario gave birth to five identical
baby girls. Annette, Cecile, Emilie, Marie, and Yvonne Dionne were
thought to be the first quintuplets to survive infancy. Their combined
weight at birth was just fourteen pounds, five ounces; they had to be fed
with eye-droppers. The Dionne quintuplets quickly became the object of
public adulation, with opinion polls finding them more popular than Shir-
ley Temple. Hollywood made three movies about them: The Country
Doctor, Reunion, and Five of a Kind.
Desperate for money to support their family, the parents, who already
had five children, agreed that the quints could be displayed in Chicago in
exchange for $200 a week. The Ontario government responded by declar-
ing the parents unfit to rear the sisters, and placed them under a doctor's
care. To protect the children from germs and kidnappers, the government
constructed a hospital and nursery. Ontario also built a highway to ac-
commodate the five million visitors who came to view the quints through
the one-way glass that surrounded their playground. Their father opened
a souvenir shop near the facility, and an uncle opened a gas station with
five pumps, one named for each quint. Tourism related to the quintuplets
reportedly brought $500 million to northern Ontario. 1
As a result of fertility drugs, multiple births have grown increasingly
common. But when the Dionne quints were born, such births were rare.
At a time when many couples were postponing marriage and childbirth
234 Huck-'s Raft
because of economic constraints-and just two years after the headline-

blaring kidnapping of the baby of aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne
Morrow-the Dionne quints were a symbol of hope. The odds of giving
birth to quintuplets without fertility drugs were one in fifty-seven million,
making the quints a modern medical miracle. In retrospect, however, the
story of the Dionne sisters carries a more ambiguous meaning. The quints
were two years old before they met their older siblings; only once over a
five-year period were the girls allowed to leave "Quintland." Not only
were the sisters robbed of a normal upbringing, which was probably inev-
itable given that they were the first surviving quintuplets; their story dem-
onstrates how easy it is to commercially exploit the public's sentimental-
ization of childhood and deprive children of fundamental emotional and
psychological needs in the name of helping them.
Adults dominate our memories of the Great Depression. Our most vivid
images of Depression hardship show haggard men standing in breadlines
or selling apples on street corners and exhausted women and men crowd-
ing into aging Model T's, heading from the Dust Bowl to California's fruit
farms. In fact children were the Depression's most vulnerable victims,
both economically and psychologically. When a teacher told a young girl
to go home to eat, the child replied, "I can't. This is my sister's day to
eat." During the worst years of the Depression one child in five in New
York City suffered from malnutrition. In coalmining regions of Illinois,
Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, the figure was nine in
ten. Thousands of schools cut their hours or closed their doors, depriving
a million school-aged children of access to an education. Teens suffered
the highest jobless rate of any age group, as private businesses preferred to
hire adult males. In 1933, when the economy hit rock bottom, only one of
every ten or fifteen high school graduates could find work, and as late as
1938, over half of all sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds were out of work
and out of school. Meanwhile a quarter-million children became drifters,
taking to the roads and rails in search of jobs that didn't exist. 2
There were widespread fears that the Depression had ignited a youth
crisis. Books with such titles as The Lost Generation (1936) and Youth-
Millions Too Many (1940) underscored the depths of the nation's youth
problems. America's young were "discouraged, disgusted, sullen and bit-
ter," and many worried that they, like their counterparts in Germany and
Italy, were highly vulnerable to the lure of demagogues. As one observer
warned in 1931, "When a boy has walked the streets for weeks in search
of employment; has slept in parks and has lived only by means of soup
kitchens and hand-outs on the way, he is a very likely subject for anyone
who might preach a doctrine of revolution or revolt against existing con-
Coming of Age in the Great Depression 235
ditions." Anxiety over this youth crisis led the country to reject a key
tenet of American political life. The Depression toppled the notion that
children's welfare could be left to individual families, private charities,
and local and state governments. It created a consensus that the federal
government had a responsibility to promote children's well-being. Debate
still rages over how successful Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal pro-
grams were in dealing with the nation's youth problems, but there can be
no doubt that the New Deal marked the first time that the federal govern-
ment intervened in children's lives on a significant scale. To aid the na-
tion's children, the New Deal launched the nation's first free school lunch
programs, opened hundreds of free nursery schools, and established the
nation's first federally funded work-study programs. Federal aid to educa-
tion through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration prevented
thousands of schools from closing their doors. Through the National
Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the
federal government provided employment to over seven million young
people. The New Deal's most important innovation was Aid to Depend-
ent Children (later called Aid to Families with Dependent Children),

A boy hops a freight train in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1940. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
which provided financial assistance to the families of children who lacked
a wage-earning parent. 3
In addition to expanding the federal presence in children's lives, the De,-
pression marked a watershed in childhood experience in several other
ways. The economic crisis of the 1930s not only ended child labor; it ulti-
mately made high school attendance a modal experience for adolescents.
The Great Depression also led financially hard-pressed marketers and
manufacturers to target children as independent consumers. The young
became a market for comic books (the first featured Superman), movie se-
rials (starring superheroes like Batman), children's radio shows (such as
"The Lone Ranger"), and new kinds of children's toys (including Shirley
Temple dolls and Mickey Mouse watches). By the end of the decade a new
age category, the teenager, had emerged, personified in the movies by
Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Lana Turner. One of the Depression's
lasting legacies was nationalizing and commercializing childhood.
The Great Depression left an indelible mark on children's lives. Russell
Baker was just five years old when his thirty-three-year-old father died af-
ter entering an acute diabetic coma. Russell, his mother, and two sisters
were left with an aging Model T Ford, a few dollars of insurance money,
and several pieces of Sears, Roebuck furniture. Having no way of making
a living and no prospects for the future, Russell's family left their home in
rural Morrisonville, Virginia, and moved in with a younger uncle in
Belleville, New Jersey, a commuter town on the outskirts of Newark. But
before she packed up the family's meager belongings, Russell's mother did
something that haunted him for the rest of his life. To lessen her family's
burden, she gave up her dimpled, blond-haired, ten-month-old baby, Aud-
rey, to a childless aunt and uncle's care. 4
A few Americans believed that the Depression had a salutary effect on
the family. One writer claimed that the economic crisis encouraged family
members to turn "toward each other with greater, more intelligent inter-
dependence." The Depression sharply curtailed activities outside the
home and forced family members to pool their resources and find comfort
in each other. Divorce rates declined, and popular magazines championed
this time of family "comradeship, understanding, affection, sympathy, fa-
cilitation, accommodation, integration [and] cooperation." Families
turned to new board games like Monopoly and gathered together in the
evening to listen to the radio. As a Muncie, Indiana, newspaper editorial-
ized, "Many a family that has lost its car has found its soul. " 5
But most observers agreed that the Depression had a destructive impact
on family life. Unemployment, part-time work, reduced pay, and the de-
mands of needy relatives tore at th~ fabric of family life, devastating many
Coming of Age in the Great Depression 23 7
men's self-esteem and undermining family members' self-respect. In Cleve-

land in 1935, a fifteen-year-old whose father had been out of work for five
years wrote: "I just can't stand anymore to look at the crying & thinking
my parents do." Divorces declined for the simple reason that fewer could
afford them; but desertions soared. By 1940 more than 1.5 million mar-
ried women lived apart from their husbands. Family disintegration was
evident in a 50 percent increase in placements of children in custodial in-
stitutions during the Depression's first two years. For the first time in
American history, the birthrate dropped below the replacement level;
Americans had nearly three million fewer babies during the 1930s than
they would have had at the 1929 rate. 6
In Arkansas some families found shelter in caves; in Oakland, Califor-
nia, whole families inhabited sewer pipes. In St. Louis children and adults
dug through garbage dumps for rotten food; in Harlan County, Kentucky,
families subsisted on dandelions and blackberries. During 1932, the De-
pression's worst year, 28 percent of the nation's households, containing
thirty-four million men, women, and children, did not have a single em-
ployed wage earner. But even those fortunate enough to hold jobs suffered
drastic pay cuts and reductions in hours. Only one company in ten did not
reduce wages, and by mid-1932, three-quarters of the nation's workers
were on part-time schedules. 7
Pooling family incomes provided a buffer against loss of work. The De-
pression thrust adult responsibilities upon the young. Especially in the
poorest families, sons were expected to earn money at odd jobs, while
their daughters took on household tasks so that their mothers could work
outside the home. Part-time jobs-running errands, mowing lawns,
babysitting, shining shoes, carting groceries, and returning soda bottles
for two cents apiece-supplemented their family's income. A Los Angeles
family subsisted on a teenage daughter's earnings as a five-and-ten-cent-
store clerk. Russell Baker was forced to go to work at the tender age of
eight. In Oakland, California, half of all teenage boys and a quarter of all
teenage girls took up part-time jobs. 8
The Depression had adverse effects not only on family income but also
on family relations. For many children, the Depression meant a declining
standard of living, heightened family tension, inconsistent parental disci-
pline, and an unemployed father. Many children experienced severe psy-
chological stress, insecurity, deprivation, and intense feelings of shame.
Parents became more irritable, marital conflict increased, and parents dis-
ciplined their children more arbitrarily. The impact of family conflict may
have been worst for young children, since they were not insulated by the
buffer of peers or jobs outside the home. 9
238 Huck~s Raft
Thousands of young people, desperate for help and a sympathetic ear,

wrote letters to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Their letters described their
families' hardships and revealed the humiliation and impotence they felt.
An eighth-grader from Salida, Colorado, told the first lady that her family
was so poor that "every week we go to bed one or two days without any-
thing to eat." An African-American girl from Old Saybrook, Connecticut,
asked Mrs. Roosevelt to try to find a job for her unemployed father: "You
don't know what it would mean to me if you would do it for me." Many
poor children said they were ridiculed for their poverty. A ten-year-old
from Mason, Wisconsin, wrote that after Christmas vacation, "all the
children" at her school "talk about how many presents Santa has brought
them and I felt so bad because I had nothing to say." Two girls from
Lackawanna, New York, explained that they were "mocked and scorned
and left out of many social activities" because they didn't have a bicycle.
A lack of decent clothing was a particular source of shame. In the winter
of 1936 a thirteen-year-old girl from Arkansas asked Mrs. Roosevelt if
she could spare "some of your old soiled dresses if you have any. I am a
poor girl who has to stay out of school on account of dresses, and slips,
and a coat." At her school, a fourteen-year-old from Dows, Iowa, ex-
plained, "the kids at school all make fun of you if you can't dress fine." A
fifteen-year-old from Port Morris, New Jersey, whose father had been job-
less for two years, wrote: "I have no money and no means of getting any
... How I wish I could have at least a coat." These letters provide a mov-
ing and disquieting record of the Depression's impact on the young, from
their family roles to their schooling. 10
During the early years of the Depression, economic hardship forced
many schools to cut their hours and even close their doors. Terms were
abbreviated in one of every four American cities, and 20,000 schools were
shuttered. For 175,000 children during the 1933-34 school term, schools
did not open at all. Schools in Dayton, Ohio, were open just three days a
week, and more than 300 Arkansas schools were shut for ten months or
more. In Arkansas and Mississippi, fewer than 5 percent of black youths
of high school age were in school. A fourteen-year-old on the Great Plains
described what it felt like to be deprived of an education: "With the
school closed (I feel like crying every time I see it with the doors and win-
dows boarded up) I'll be too old before I am ready to go to high school.
Do you think that you could get on without a school or even a set of
books?" 11
By the decade's end, however, school enrollment had reached an all-
time high. As adult unemployment mounted, there was a growing consen-
sus that children had to be removed from the labor force and put in the
classroom. Local school boards and state legislatures raised the minimum
age for leaving school to sixteen. From 1930 to 1932, high school enroll-
ment jumped 17 percent, and over the next two years enrollment rose an-
other 10 percent. By 1939 three-quarters of fourteen- to seventeen-year-
aids were high school students, and by 1940 half the nation's seventeen-
year-aids were high school graduates-twice as many as in 1929. The ex-
pansion of high school enrollments carried profound consequences for the
future: it institutionalized the teen years as a distinct stage of life. Al-
though the term teenager did not enter the vocabulary until the early
1940s, the phenomenon was apparent by the late 1930s. 12
The economic crisis of the 1930s brought previously ignored inequities
in educational opportunity to public attention. Mississippi spent just
$20.13 per child in 1935-36, less than a sixth of New York's $134.13.
Clinch Valley, Tennessee, did not get a high school until 1937-a "small,
four-room building constructed of undressed, unpainted pine boards,"
with thirty-five desks for the eighty-three students. Racial discrimination
was pronounced. In 1930 just 11 percent of black teenagers were in high
school, and almost 300 counties in fourteen states provided no high
schools for black students. Black schools in the South were open just 146
days a year, compared with 182 days for white schools. The curriculum
was also circumscribed. In 1935 a journalist reported that a black teacher
was allowed to "teach the art of planting ... how to build a house or re-
pair steps, but she may not teach either children or adults how to keep a
receipt or how to compute their earnings." 13
Depression hardship was particularly acute in the South, where three-
quarters of the black population lived. In Macon County, Alabama, the
lives of children were little more than a step removed from slavery. Their
diet consisted almost entirely of salt pork, hominy grits, cornbread, and
molasses, with red meat, fresh vegetables, fruit, and even milk almost un-
known luxuries. Their homes had dirt floors and no windows or screens;
three-quarters had no sewage disposal. Economic exploitation, social iso-
lation, and poverty shaped young people's lives. Schooling was brief-
most dropped out at fourteen-and even very young children were ex-
pected to work. Macon County spent thirteen times as much on the edu-
cation of a white child as upon a black child, and many children could not
attend school at all because they lacked shoes. Several children had to
walk fourteen miles to school daily. 14
Conditions were equally distressed in the North. In Chicago most black
families resided in apartments euphemistically called "kitchenettes," six-
room apartments that had been subdivided into six separate units. Yet
some still experienced the normal pleasures and pains of adolescence. In a
240 Huck's Raft
diary that she kept in 1931, fifteen-year-old Hattie Lee Cochran provides
a window into black teenage life. Born in Daleville in the Mississippi's
"Cotton Belt," Hattie Lee moved with her family to Cleveland, Ohio,
when she was still an infant, where her father found work in a food pro-
cessing plant. 15
In some ways, her diary reads like any adolescent's. She stayed up until
two on Saturday night. She went to the beauty parlor, attended high
school basketball games, read True Confessions magazines, enjoyed mov-
ies and carnivals, and listened to popular songs like "Minnie the
Moocher." She took pleasure in car rides with friends and wore a boy's
class ring. "What a pleasant life this is," she exclaimed. Her diary entries
sound familiar decades later. She referred to a teacher as a "big Sap." Af-
ter a friend "tried to act mad all day," she noted in her diary: "Ho. Hum."
She hung out at a nearby barbeque stand, sometimes remaining there for
hours. But as the year progressed, and the Depression intruded more and
more upon her life, references to fun and leisure became fewer. After an
older brother's wife gave birth to their third child, Hattie had to care for
the couple's two older daughters. She worked outside the home and fre-
quently cooked dinner for her own family. "What a life this is," she sighed
in frustration. 16
Compared with many African Americans, Hattie was fortunate. Her
family had a car and a radio, and her father had a job. In Cleveland in
1931, more than half of all African-American adults were unemployed,
and fewer than one black family in four owned a radio. North and South,
African Americans faced the Depression's full fury. A year after the stock
market crash, 70 percent of African-American adults were jobless in
Charleston and 75 percent in Memphis. In Chicago black families had an
average annual income of $728 in the middle of the decade, less than half
the $1,580 earned by native-born white families. 17
Mexican-American children, too, faced severe hardship. In Crystal City,
in Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the average annual family income was $506
at a time when authorities considered a subsistence income to range from
$2,000 to $2,500. Less than one Mexican-American child in five com-
pleted five years of school. Transience and family separation were charac-
teristics of early twentieth-century Mexican-American life. Many lived in
isolated mining towns; rural communities called colonias~ near agricul-
tural or railroad work camps; or segregated urban neighborhoods, called
barrios~ near factories or packinghouses. Most families supported them-
selves through migratory farm labor, in which children toiled alongside
their parents, or through piecework in canneries or railroad construction
work, earning just $1 or $1.25 a day. 18
Even before the stock market collapse, intense pressure, spearheaded by

the American Federation of Labor and municipal governments, sought to
reduce Mexican immigration. Opposition from local chambers of com-
merce, economic development associations, and state farm bureaus sty-
mied efforts to impose an immigration quota, but in 1930 the Bureau of
Immigration (forerunner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service)
rounded up immigrants and naturalized citizens and shipped them back to
Mexico. The average cost of repatriating a family was $71.14, including
food and transportation, a fifth the cost of providing relief. During the
Depression, 82,400 repatriados were involuntarily deported to Mexico,
and more than 300,000 others, many of them American citizens by birth,
were forced to leave because of the threat of unemployment, deportation,
or loss of relief payments. Texas' Mexican-born population fell by a third.
Los Angeles, too, lost a third of its Mexican population. In Los Angeles, a
schoolgirl wept as she was forced to leave Belmont High School and
board a southbound train. The lone Mexican-American student at Occi-
dental College sang a painful farewell song, "Las Golondrinas" (literally,
"The Swallows," but metaphorically a reference to homelessness and dis-
placement) to serenade departing Mexicans. 19
In such precarious circumstances, many young people took to the road.
In 1931, nine black teenagers, ages thirteen to nineteen, hopped on a
freight train passing through Alabama. North of the small town of
Scottsboro, they got into a fight with some white youths. When the train
stopped, police were waiting. Two white females-Ruby Bates, seventeen,
and Victoria Price, twenty-one-got off and accused the black youths of
brutally raping them. The accused teenagers-the barely literate sons of
sharecroppers-were taken to Scottsboro to stand trial. Their lawyer, a
real estate salesman, advised them to plead guilty. All declared their inno-
cence. During the 1930s the Scottsboro case became a symbol of racial in-
justice and a rallying cry for civil rights activists. During the next two de-
cades there would be sixteen trials, and the defendants would spend
between six and nineteen years in prison, even though one of the women
recanted her claim. One defendant was tried, convicted, and sentenced to
death three times. The case led to two landmark Supreme Court decisions:
one overturning a conviction based on inadequate defense and another
declaring all-white juries unconstitutional. 20
The Scottsboro boys were among a quarter of a million youths who
went "on the bum." Out of school, jobless, and homeless, these young no-
mads offered a frightening premonition of the future: of young people
susceptible to radical appeals of all persuasions. This adolescent army
evoked comparisons with the bezprizorni, the Russian street children left
242 Huck~s Raft
homeless as a result of the civil strife and famine that followed the 1917
revolution. A special section in the New York Times in October 1932 de-
scribed "A Tragic Aftermath of the Days of Prosperity: The Army of
Homeless Boys Now Roaming the Country." A soup kitchen in Yuma,
Arizona, fed 7,500 boys and girls between November 1, 1931, and March
15, 1932. In one community center in Los Angeles, the 623 boys who ap-
plied for shelter in a five-month period came from forty-five states and the
District of Columbia. Girls as well as boys took to the rails. A survey con-
ducted over three days in January 1933 identified 256,000 homeless
Americans, of whom 11,323 were female, with 35 to 40 percent under the
age of twenty-one. 21
The Depression nomads were not the first boys and girls to adopt the
hobo life. The novelist Jack London was just fifteen years old when he be-
gan riding the rails in 1891. But there was nothing romantic about tramp
life during the Great Depression. "There comes a day when the boys are
alone and hungry, and their clothes are ragged and torn; breadlines have
just denied them food, relief stations an opportunity to work for clothes.
A man of God at a mission has kicked them into the street. A brakie [rail-
road brakeman] has chased them from the yards." On the rails, youthful
enthusiasm and eagerness quickly gave way to despair. 22
In 1932 Thomas Minehan, a graduate student in sociology, dressed
himself in tattered clothing and began to interview the homeless. He dis-
covered that "many were not youths, but boys. And some were girls-
children really-dressed in overalls or army breeches and boys' coats or
sweaters." For more than a year he lived among America's ragtag army of
wandering children. He asked the boy and girl tramps many questions:
"How did they live? What did they eat? Where did they sleep? How did
they get clothing? What did they do all day?" By the time he completed
his research, Minehan had interviewed more than 500 boys and girls in
six states. Nine of the girls had prostituted themselves for bread. Boys ex-
plained that when they needed shoes, they had simply stolen them. Desti-
tution, family troubles, and wanderlust were the main reasons young peo-
ple left their homes. Some took to the road to spare their parents the
burden of feeding another mouth. Others were told to fend for them-
selves. Jim Mitchell was sixteen years old when he learned that his father
had lost his job. He left a note on his pillow saying, "I'll write. " 23
For children riding the rails, the euphoria of freedom gave way to hun-
ger, homesickness, and loneliness. Many suffered from malnutrition and
lived in squalor. Robert Mitchum, who would play tough guys and cynics
in such movies as Cape Fear, was sixteen when he left his home in Bridge-
port, Connecticut. He rode the rails, supporting himself as a coalminer,
deckhand, ditchdigger, and professional boxer, lasting twenty-seven

fights. In Savannah, Georgia, he was placed on a chain gang, escaping
after six days in captivity. Director William Wellman's 1933 drama Wild
Boys of the Road painted a bleak picture of the lives of young people
leading a hand-to-mouth existence. One of the train hoppers slips and
loses a leg; a girl is sexually assaulted. Such images were realistic. The no-
mads were beaten by brutal railroad police called bulls. They had to learn
to beg or steal food and clothing. One boy worked all day in a wheat field
only to be paid 15 cents. A traveler recalled a pair of girls who "received
30 or 40 men and boys in a boxcar, some men doubling back on the line."
When the girls quit, they had earned a total of 70 cents in nickels and
dimes. 24
Homeless children riding the rails became a defining symbol of youth in
crisis. Their example inspired the federal government to inaugurate a host
of federal policies to assist the young. "I have moments of real terror," El-
eanor Roosevelt wrote in 1934, "when I think we may be losing this gen-
eration. We have got to bring these young people into the active life of
the community and make them feel that they are necessary." Unlike the
Hoover administration, which did little to assist the young, Franklin D.
Roosevelt's New Deal program from its earliest days adopted specific
measures to address the youth crisis. The Civilian Conservation Corps, es-
tablished in 1933, hired young men to work in reforestation, park, and
soil conservation projects. Before it closed in 1941, it assisted 2.6 million
young men between eighteen and twenty-five. The Federal Emergency Re-
lief Administration, set up in 1933, funded teacher salaries in poor states,
preventing 4,000 schools from closing; its college aid program provided
75,000 work-study jobs to keep college students in school. It also set up
transient camps for 54,000 young people "bumming" their way across
the country. In 1934 the National Recovery Act prohibited employment
of children under the age of sixteen. After the Supreme Court struck down
the NRA, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 reaffirmed the prohibi-
tion on child labor. Other New Deal programs funded a free school lunch
program for 500,000 students daily in 10,000 schools throughout the
country; financed construction of 1,600 nursery schools in rural areas, in
crowded city districts, in lumber camps, and in mining districts; and paid
70 percent of the construction cost of new schools. 25
Two programs established in 1935 carried special significance for
young people's lives. In addition to offering retirement benefits to the el-
derly and unemployment compensation, the Social Security Act provided
aid to the disabled, for maternity care, public health work, vocational re-
habilitation, and, most important of all, Aid to Dependent Children
244 Huck's Raft
(ADC). ADC replaced the mothers' pensions of the Progressive era, which
had provided aid to "deserving" single mothers and their children at
home rather than removing the children to institutions. Unlike the moth-
ers' pensions, ADC was available in all counties in all states. But like the
mothers' pensions, ADC provided inadequate support and included a
"morals" test for benefits. Inadequately funded, especially in comparison
with the far more generous programs for old age and unemployment,
ADC was implemented in ways that were demeaning and punitive, includ-
ing unannounced visits by state welfare officials seeking to determine
whether there was an adult male present (which would cancel the pay-
ment). Still, it marked a crucial first step toward the creation of a safety
net for children. 26
The other major New Deal program providing assistance to the young
was the National Youth Administration (NYA), established by executive
order as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). During the
mid-1930s, 40 percent of young people between the ages of sixteen and
twenty-four were neither gainfully employed nor in school. Some 80,000
college students dropped out of college in 1932-33, making this the only
peacetime period in the twentieth century when American college enroll-
ments declined. The NYA was intended to address these problems by pro-
viding work-study jobs for both high school and college students and job
training and employment for out-of-school youth. For the first time, the
federal government assumed a role in helping idle youth make the transi-
tion from adolescence into the adult job market. NYA participants con-
structed roads, schools, community centers, and public parks and play-
grounds. They served as hospital and nursery school aides and worked in
libraries, youth centers, and school lunchrooms. Young men learned car-
pentry and automobile repair; young women, typing, sewing, stenogra-
phy, and bookkeeping. Unlike the participants in the CCC, they wore no
uniforms and no insignia. College and out-of-school participants typically
worked six days a month for less than $16, while high school students re-
ceived $6 a month. NYA alumni included the guitarist Chet Atkins, the
architect of the Nashville Sound; and Ralph Shapey, the avant-garde com-
poser, who conducted the Philadelphia National Youth Administration
Symphony Orchestra before he graduated from high school. Altogether
the NYA helped close to five million young people from 1935 to 1943. 27
At first the NYA concentrated on providing jobs for unemployed youth.
It soon expanded its mission to providing work-study jobs for high school
and college students, establishing job training programs, and supporting
residential centers for rural youth. Some critics denounced the NYA, com-
paring its program for organizing, indoctrinating, and regimenting the
young to Nazi youth organizations in Germany. NYA officials, to the con-

trary, envisioned the youth agency as a mechanism for educating dis-
affected youth about democracy and preventing them from falling under
the sway of demagogues; they saw it as a vehicle for inculcating middle-
class values in the poor. The program's major goals were to prepare young
people to function effectively in a modern society, to provide adult super-
vision to idle youth, to inculcate a work ethic, and to teach the poor the
value of money. Rural girls learned to shampoo their hair, apply makeup,
and dress in middle-class styles, while their immigrant counterparts were
taught to prepare American-style meals. Participants in rural residential
centers moved back and forth between the agency's center and their
homes so that "they constantly see contrasts in diets, cleanliness, and
household management." The most radical of the New Deal programs,
the NYA sought to raise the skills and aspirations of the poor. 28
During its first two and a half years the NYA employed half a million
young people who were out of school and out of work. Most were in their
late teens and came from very large families, usually with more than seven
members. The NYA was the New Deal's most equitable program in terms
of gender and race. Over 45 percent of aid recipients were female, and the
NYA provided about 13 percent of its high school jobs and 14 percent of
the out-of-school jobs to nonwhites. Targeting its efforts at rural youth,
black and brown as well as white, the NYA represented the first federal ef-
fort to racially integrate education. Nevertheless, the NYA, like other
New Deal programs, was wholly inadequate to the Depression's scale. It
never employed more than a sixth of the nation's jobless youth at any one
time, and most NYA participants graduated not into private-sector jobs
but into other government relief programs, like the WPA. In Virginia, only
5,000 of 180,000 unemployed youth received aid. Of 400,000 black
youths between fourteen and sixteen on relief rolls, only 19,000 were on
the NYA lists. Still, the program did help many high school students re-
main in school and provided practical, if narrow, training in home eco-
nomics and industrial arts to unemployed youths. 29
The crises and challenges of the Great Depression gave rise to the first
mass youth movements in American history. In 1936 the American Youth
Congress, a coalition of student groups, issued a Declaration of Rights of
American Youth, which proclaimed: "We want to work, to produce, to
build, but millions of us are forced to be idle ... We refuse to be the lost
generation." The next year the Youth Congress staged a march on Wash-
ington, demanding that Congress provide needy students with jobs paying
$15 a month. Although this demand went unfulfilled, young people's lob-
bying prevented Congress from cutting the NYA's budget. 30
246 Huck's Raft

A tenant farm family's shack in Caroline County, Virginia, in 1941. Courtesy of the
The youth movement of the 1930s provided a historical precedent for

the student movement of the 1960s. Led largely by Socialists and Com-
munists, the student movement of the 1930s surfaced in response to two
issues: Depression-era unemployment and the mounting international ten-
sions that resulted in World War II. Student organizations-including the
American Student Union and the American Youth Congress-called for
federal student aid, government jobs for low-income and unemployed
youth, and an end to racial discrimination. Veterans of the 1930s student
movement included labor union leaders Walter and Victor Reuther, the
author and editor Irving Howe, the sociologist Daniel Bell, the writer Saul
Bellow, the historian Richard Hofstadter, the sociologist Seymour Martin
Lipset, the literary critic Leslie Fiedler, the film critic Pauline Kael, and the
journalist Eric Sevareid. All would later distinguish themselves as intellec-
tual and social critics and contributors to a liberal democracy. 31
The Depression touched off an unprecedented wave of student activ-
ism. During the 1920s the student left was limited to the 2,000-member
Socialist-led League for Industrial Democracy, an offshoot of the Intercol-
legiate Socialist Society, founded in 1905 by Upton Sinclair. But during the
Depression many new student groups appeared, such as the Communist-

led National Student League, founded in 1931. The two leading student
organizations were the American Youth Congress and the American Stu-
dent Union. The AYC, a loose coalition of youth groups, was organized in
1934 by a twenty-three-year-old writer, Viola lima, who had been in-
spired by European youth movements. The AYC claimed to represent 4.5
million American youths from affiliated organizations ranging from the
Young Communist League to the Young Women's Christian Association.
The AYC succeeded in winning support from Eleanor Roosevelt, who in-
vited AYC leaders to tea at the White House. The ASU, which emerged in
1935 from a merger between the Socialist-led Student League for Indus-
trial Democracy and the Communist-led National Student League,
claimed a membership of 20,000. While local chapters attacked segrega-
tion, the national organization sponsored "peace strikes," which attracted
hundreds of thousands of college students, including 175,000 in 1935.
Though initially isolationist in foreign affairs, the ASU's leadership grew
increasingly alarmed by the growing threat from Germany and Italy and,
in the late 1930s, emphasized collective security against fascism. In 1939,
however, the ASU tore itself apart when the organization's Communist
leaders endorsed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. 32
Economic hardship, fear of war, and the influence of parents and teach-
ers inspired many to join the student movement. Pacifist sentiment led
thousands of students to participate in antiwar rallies. After students at
Oxford University took a pledge not to fight "for King and country" in
1933, American student organizations circulated a similar pledge. A poll
of college students found that 39 percent said that they would "refuse to
support the government of the United States in any war that it might un-
dertake." The rise of fascism in Europe, economic strains, and the increas-
ing visibility of racism at home politicized youth in a new and personal
way. Many began to realize how much their lives were shaped by politics
at home and abroad. 33
Many student leaders came from working-class and immigrant back-
grounds and were disgusted by the frivolous atmosphere at colleges and
high schools. Rather than centering on fraternities, athletics, and socializ-
ing, they felt that academic life should focus on political issues. A sam-
pling of student activists found that many attributed their radicalism to
their family background. One ASU leader said that his father "was one of
the student leaders in pre-revolutionary Russia [who] ... carried on a
great deal of educational work among the peasants," and that "he left
Russia because he did not believe in compulsory military training." He
concluded: "It is interesting to see that youth of a previous generation
248 Huck's Raft
fought the same issues that we are fighting now." Some student leaders,
such as Nancy Bedford Jones, an activist in the Student League for Indus-
trial Democracy, revolted against what they regarded as their parents' po-
litical complacency, while others, like Alice Dodge, the daughter of liberal
Republicans, felt that only through political activity could they fulfill their
parents' reformist aspirations. 34
Despite superficial similarities to the 1960s student movement, the
1930s organizations differed in important respects. Student activists of
the 1930s did not exhibit the generational antagonism that characterized
their 1960s counterparts. Far from distrusting anyone over thirty, the stu-
dent protesters of the 1930s dressed in suits and skirts, and their leaders
rejected the idea that there were distinctive "youth problems." Their
problems were war and peace, poverty and prosperity. Nevertheless, the
student movement of the 1930s altered campus culture. High school and
college newspapers became much more political than in the 1920s, as did
student leadership. A 1936 New York Times student survey observed:
"Nowhere is the new liberalism more apparent than in the 1936-style
campus leader ... He is no longer the star athlete, [or] the 'smooth' prom
man ... His stigmata are more apt to be brains, a good grasp of student
and national problems and frequently leadership in the peace movement."
Student radicalism peaked in 1936 and 1937. On July 4, 1936, the AYC's
"Declaration of the Rights of American Youth" called for "full educa-
tional opportunities, steady employment at adequate wages, security in
time of need, civil rights, religious freedom, and peace." In February
1937, student organizations held one of the first marches on Washington,
a "Youth Pilgrimage for Jobs and Education," to demand a work-study
job for every needy student. But as world tensions escalated in 1938 and
1939, and Communist leaders in student organizations defended the
Nazi-Soviet Pact, the student movement of the 1930s splintered on the
shoals of world crises and impending war. 35
HILE OLDER youth became more serious about domestic and

international politics, American commercial culture became preoccupied
with entertaining the young. Comic books were one of the first products
directly marketed to young people. The first comic book carried a picture
on its cover of Superman brandishing a car over his head. By its seventh
issue, comics featuring the Man of Steel were selling half a million copies
a month. During the late 1930s a new breed of caped comic-book
superheroes appeared, defying Kryptonite and bullets. Beginning with Su-
perman and his meek-mannered alter ego Clark Kent in 1937, created by
Cleveland high school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, a train of
superheroes followed, including Batman, the Human Torch, the Green

Lantern, Captain America, and, in 1941, Wonder Woman, "fighting fear-
lessly for down-trodden women and children in a man-made world." Cor-
recting injustice and defeating evildoers, superheroes served as symbols
of empowerment and national pride for powerless Depression-era
adolescents.
The comic book was a product of the Depression. In 1933 two sales-
men at Eastern Color Printing Company persuaded their employer to re-
print Sunday comics as pulp magazines. At first the printing company dis-
tributed the magazines to companies that gave them away. It began to sell
them after discovering that young readers were willing to pay for cheap
fantasy-filled magazines. For children of immigrants, it was reassuring to
discover that Superman himself was an immigrant. At a time of mounting
international tensions, superheroes fought not just crime, but also alien
villains. By showing that hidden powers lurked behind shy appearances,
the comic books of the Great Depression provided reassurance to anxious
young people. 36
Hollywood also targeted the youth audience with growing intensity.
Two very different gangs of kids-the Dead End Kids and the Little Ras-
cals-became enormously popular during the 1930s. One was a gang of
incipient criminals who emulated a neighborhood gangster; the other con-
sisted of cute and rambunctious preadolescents. Both spoke to the public's
fears, hopes, and fantasies. In 1935, in a play titled Dead End~ Sidney
Kingsley explored the troubled lives of the poor who lived close by the
affluent Manhattan enclave ot Sutton Place. A gang of tough, fast-talking
juvenile delinquents stole the show. Wayward children with nothing to
do-"sneering, spitting, and shaking their fists"-the Dead End kids
spend their days hanging out on the docks, mocking their wealthy neigh-
bors, stealing, and engaging in various kinds of mischief. Neglected and
misguided, lacking any hopes for the future, the boys nevertheless showed
signs of inner goodness. They were, in the title of one of their movies,
"angels with dirty faces." The Dead End Kids, later known as the East
Side Kids and still later as the Bowery Boys, eventually appeared in eighty-
seven films with titles like They Made Me a Criminal. During the 1940s
their films were transformed into slapstick comedies, but in their early
films the Dead End kids illustrated how poverty and neglect might drive
adolescents who inhabited society's lower depths into a life of crime.
The Little Rascals were the urban offspring of Tom Sawyer and Huck
Finn. Cute, crude, spunky, and mischievous, they inhabited a kids-only
world in which adults rarely intruded except for comic relief. Their Our
Gang comedies chronicled the pranks and antics of a ragtag gang of pre-
250 Huck~s Raft
pubescent boys; their adversaries, the bullies Woim and Butch; and the
girls they sparred with. In 221 ten- and twenty-minute features, the kids
wreaked havoc. Each was a stereotype: the fat kid, the freckle-faced side-
kick, and the cherubic little girl. As they grew older, they were replaced by
younger performers who fitted the original characters. There was Joe, the
chubby kid with the beanie; Pineapple, with an Afro hairdo; the skinny,
freckle-faced Speck; and Alfalfa, the cowlicked kid with the screechy
voice, ears that stuck out, a bow tie, ankle-length pants, and missing front
teeth. Today the ethnic humor and the racial and gender stereotypes are
disquieting; but from the 1920s through the 1950s, the images of normal
children scheming and fighting on screen entranced young audiences.
Their appeal lay in the kids' unfeigned spontaneity, their freedom from
parental supervision and adult inhibitions and constraints, and their awk-
ward attempts to act like grownups.
Children in Depression-era films took many forms; there were heart-
warming infants, wide-eyed waifs hungering for a family and a home, re-
sourceful orphans, winsome cherubs, and savvy street urchins. Children
brought innocence, energy, optimism, and cartoon cuteness to the screen.
Unlike in post-World War II films, however, the mystery and otherness of
childhood were rarely depicted. It was not until the 1950s that audiences
saw depraved children-anticipated in Mildred Pierce in 1945, then real-
ized in The Bad Seed (1956)-and not until the 1970s that we saw self-
absorbed rich kids, in Harold and Maude (1971); children as emotional
footballs, in Kramer v. Kramer (1979); or the disappearance of childhood
innocence, exemplified by Louis Malle's Pretty Baby (1978). Few Ameri-
can films before the 1960s explored the complexity of children's emo-
tional life or tried to see the world through children's eyes; but many, like
the Our Gang comedies, depicted children's antics, energies, and everyday
experiences.
Hollywood in the 1920s and especially the 1930s was filled with under-
age stars. There was Jackie Coogan, who was six when he starred with
Charlie Chaplin in The Kid in 1921 as a streetwise orphan; Baby Peggy
Montgomery (Diana Serra Cary), who was.signed to a $1.5 million con-
tract at the age of four and served as the inspiration for What Ever Hap-
pened to Baby Jane?; the "Kleen Teens," Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland,
Roddy McDowell, Dickie Moore, Mickey Rooney, and Jane Withers, who
provided models of teenage innocence and exuberance; and the most pop-
ular child star of all, Shirley Temple. She was America's little darling, tap
dancing and singing through the Depression in fifty shorts and features by
the time she was eighteen. Beginning with Little Miss Marker, released in
1934, when she was five, she became one of Depression America's most
popular stars, topping the box office every year from 1935 to 1938. Part
of her attraction was her cuteness, charm, dimpled cheeks, and bouncing
curls. She was adults' ideal girl-athletic, flirtatious, independent, even-
tempered, but also adorable and infectiously optimistic. She was undeni-
ably talented: she could sing, dance, act, and melt the heart of the grouch-
iest sourpuss. Escapist fantasy, too, was part of her appeal. Lacking a
mother in almost all her movies, she was free from domestic constraints.
She danced with millionaires, slid down ropes made of bedsheets, and
stowed away on a slow boat from China. As Franklin D. Roosevelt ob-
served in 1933: "It is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents an American
can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his
troubles." But Temple's appeal went well beyond escapism. In many films
she served as a "spiritual healer" who resolved family disputes, bridged
class differences, and restored adults' confidence in themselves. Oblivious
to class and racial differences, she moved easily between poor and
wealthy homes without ever being greedy or envious. While some of her
films seem racially insensitive today, her characters were always unaware
of race. As the critic Graham Greene noted at the time, she often por-
trayed a miniature adult, dressed up in pants or even kilts, dispensing
moral advice to older characters. 37
Shirley Temple wasn't the first child star. The very first was four-year
old Cordelia Howard, who played Little Eva in a stage version of Uncle
Tom's Cabin in 1853. The first cinematic child stars were Little Billy
Jacobs, who appeared with Charlie Chaplin in Kid Auto Races at Venice
in 1914 and with Colleen Moore in Little Orphan Annie in 1918; and
Kenneth Casey, "the Vitagraph Boy." But without a doubt the most popu-
lar was the girl with fifty-six curls who was mass-produced for her ador-
ing public in the form of the Shirley Temple doll. She boosted the spirits of
a nation in crisis, gladdening hearts with her cheering innocence and exu-
berance. She held out the promise that children held the solution to the
nation's problems, reinforcing society's intensifying sentimentalization of
childhood.
By the end of the 1930s, popular culture and marketers had identified a
distinct age group, the teenager. Along with his costars Judy Garland and
Lana Turner, Mickey Rooney, the number-one box office star from 1939
to 1941, served as the model for the modern middle-class Kleen Teen. Be-
ginning with A Family Affair (1937), MGM released sixteen films in his
low-budget Andy Hardy series. With its lighthearted focus on family
problems and teenage romance, the series provided a prototype for televi-
sion family situation comedies, but it also played a critical role in shaping
and reinforcing cultural stereotypes about middle-class teenagers and
252 Huck~s Raft
teenage culture. Rooney's cheery and exuberant portrayal of the middle-

class teenager's crushes, infatuations, and humorous and embarrassing
mishaps provided the caricature that the troubled, misunderstood, and
alienated teen characters of 1950s films rebelled against.
The decade that began with Dead End kids and boxcar nomads ended
with a widespread perception of a lighthearted teenage world of ice cream
shops and high school dances in idealized small towns across America.
The emergence of the teenager as a popular and public figure was the
product of two major developments: the growth of the high school and
the emergence of a distinct teenage commercial market. Earlier in the
twentieth century, only a fifth of young people in their mid-teens were in
high school; 60 to 65 percent were wage earners, and the rest were work-
ing at home or in the street trades. But by 1936 more than half the na-
tion's seventeen-year-olds were high school students. By removing work-
ing-class youngsters from the labor force and making high school a
largely universal experience, the Depression had inadvertently created
teenagers as a common and ubiquitous presence. 38
The first published use of the word teenager occurred in September
1941, when a columnist in Popular Science Monthly remarked about a
young person: "I never knew teen-agers could be so serious." The nomen-
clature was quickly picked up, and the category took on diverse attrib-
utes. "They live in a jolly world of gangs, games, movies, and music," Life
magazine reported in 1941. "They speak a curious lingo ... adore choco-
late milkshakes ... wear moccasins everywhere ... and drive like bats out
of hell." In December 1941, the month of the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, MLJ Comics introduced Archie, a carrot-topped, gap-toothed,
bow-tie-clad teenager in loud checked trousers, who provided a popular
caricature of the middle-class male teenager. Assigned by his publisher to
develop an All-American teenaged character along the lines of Andy
Hardy, twenty-one-year-old cartoonist Bob Montana created the fictional
town of Riverdale, home to Archie Andrews and his high school friends,
based on his own experiences during the 1930s at high school in
Haverhill, Massachusetts. There was the sweet blonde ponytailed Betty;
her romantic rival, the sultry, spoiled Veronica; the hapless, hamburger-
hungry Jughead; the dumb jock Moose; and the handsome but conceited
Reggie. At its height during World War II, the Archie comic sold six mil-
lion copies a month. In the comic-book world of superheroes, the awk-
ward, indecisive, goofy teenager Archie seemed out of place. His comics
dealt not with crime and violence, but with teenage boys and girls and
their conflicts, gripes, and insecurities. Archie comics embodied the classic
world of middle-class teens: Pop Tate's Chok'lit Shoppe, a wheezing old
red jalopy, saddle shoes, checked knickers, letter sweaters, malt shops,
chaste kisses, a teenage love triangle, and the jitterbug. 39
At first the gulf between teen and adult culture remained narrow.
Bobby-soxers-as teenage girls were called after their white ankle-length
socks-and adults shared the same popular culture. Both adored the big-
band sound of Glen Miller and Benny Goodman, though the adults lis-
tened while the teens danced. However, within a few years teen culture
would sever its ties with the adult world as marketers began to discover
teens' purchasing power and distinctive needs and styles. Within a decade
and a half, Andy Hardy, the apple-cheeked small-town boy sipping sodas
at the corner candy store, gave way to a new cultural stereotype: the
bored, restless, volatile teenager who combined a child's emotions with an
adult's passions and was estranged from parents and other authority
figures. The Andy Hardy movies were replaced by teenpics with titles like
Young and Wild, The Cool and the Crazy, and High School Confidential,
targeted exclusively at a teenage audience. 40
In recent years the concept of the teenager that arose in the late 1930s
has grown increasingly obsolete. During the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s,
young people typically attained full-adult status in their late teens or early
or mid-twenties, either by entering military service or an adult career, or
by marrying and having children, thereby giving the teen years great
significance both as a brief interlude before adulthood and as a crucial
time of decision. After 1960, however, entry into full adulthood began to
be delayed as a rapidly growing proportion of young people enrolled in
college and postponed entry into adult careers until their late twenties or
early thirties. As a result, the freedom and lack of adulthood responsibili-
ties that characterized the teen years have been extended for another dec-
ade. Yet the popular conception of the teenage years-as a moratorium
during which the young were free to explore before committing them-
selves to marriage or a career-and our cultural expectations of teen-
agers-as angst-ridden, rebellious, and reckless risk-takers-has remained
unchanged. Society has continued to segregate teens in an institution-the
high school-which is supposed to cater to their psychological, physiolog-
ical, emotional, and intellectual needs, but which, in practice, many find
juvenilizing and lacking in intellectual stimulation. As the stage of youth
became increasingly prolonged, and adulthood more distant, the high
school and the culture that surrounded it seemed more and more outdated
in its strictures, athletic culture, regimentation, and lack of opportunity
for teens to demonstrate their growing competency and maturity.
chapter thirteen
Mobilizing Children for World War II
O N SUNDAY MORNING, December 7, 1941, six-year-old

Dorinda Makanaonalani was eating a breakfast of bananas and papayas
when she heard the sound of low-flying planes, followed almost immedi-
ately by loud explosions. Her family lived on a sliver of land that jutted
into Hawai'i's Pearl Harbor. As her father bolted from the kitchen table
into the front yard, Dorinda ran after him and saw planes bearing the or-
ange-red emblem of the Rising Sun flying over her house. The planes flew
so low that she could see the goggles that covered the pilots' eyes. She
watched as incendiary bullets hit her house, setting her kitchen on fire.
"Everywhere we looked," she later recalled, "there was smoke and fire
... It seemed as if the water was on fire from the burning oil." To escape
the line of fire, Dorinda's father drove his family into the sugarcane fields
above the harbor, where they hid among the tall cane stalks. 1
Morris Broussard was eight years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl
Harbor, five minutes from his Oahu home. His father saw the planes first.
Assuming that this was a military exercise, Morris and his twin brothers
went outside to watch the maneuvers and wave to the pilots, who were
flying no higher than the telephone poles. Police ordered the boys home,
where they watched soldiers install a 50-caliber machine gun and a bank
of sandbags in their front yard. Morris's mother, a nurse, left for the hos-
pital, where she remained for three days. When classes resumed at his
school, the third-grader had to wear a gas mask strapped around his
shoulders. 2
December 7, 1941, was as much a watershed in the lives of young
Mobilizing Children for World War II 255
Americans as it was for their elders. Whether they lived in Hawai'i or on

the mainland, children's lives were transformed. World War II disrupted
families, sending sixteen million fathers, sons, and brothers into the mili-
tary. It also set families in motion, pulling them off farms, out of small
towns, and packing them into large urban areas. It drew millions of mar-
ried women into the paid workforce, reduced school attendance, en-
hanced young people's freedom and work responsibilities, and greatly
intensified adult concerns about juvenile delinquency and premarital sexu-
ality. Above all, it politicized the lives of the young; it altered the rhymes
they repeated, the cartoons and movies they watched, and the songs they
heard, and instilled an intense nationalism that persisted into the postwar
years.
Half a century later, children vividly recalled the moment they learned
about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Fourteen-year-old David Davis remem-
bered an unseasonably warm December day in Hamburg, New York. Af-
ter jogging in preparation for spring sports, he entered his house to find
his mother and father huddled around the radio. Parents' reactions ranged
from despair to rage. Some cried; others cursed. Most were simply scared,
afraid that the national security that they had always taken for granted
was now put in question and that their homes and nation had suddenly
become vulnerable. It was a moment their children would long re-
member.3
Although young people were unable to grasp fully the significance of
the attack on Pearl Harbor and the ensuing war, their lives were shaped
and altered by it. Children shared adults' anxiety about fathers and broth-
ers overseas and experienced pain and grief when the family learned they
would not be coming home. Prolonged separation from husbands, fa-
thers, and brothers produced profound shifts in family roles. The wide-
spread employment of teenagers during the war to fill in for men on the
fighting front drastically altered their perception of themselves and their
place in the family. For many young people, World War II was the forma-
tive experience of their lives. A shared sense of danger and privation in-
stilled a strong sense of patriotism. At the same time, wartime conditions
imposed severe emotional and psychological stresses, and the effects could
still be seen decades later. 4
In 1943 Deborah Gorham, age six, was beset by severe fears after her
father, an American pilot, enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. She
remembered seeing The Canterville Ghost, a movie about a comic ghost
who could walk through walls. For months she was terrified that a ghost
would slip through her home's brick walls and attack her. Worried about
Deborah's psychological well-being, her mother described these recurrent
256 Huck,s Raft
anxiety attacks in a letter to her husband. "That child loves you too much
for her own good," he mother said. "She gets up at two or three in the
morning and comes in fully awake to ask how you are, when you are
coming home, are you in danger. " 5
Jonathan Yardley remembered air-raid drills in which grammar school
children were escorted home, through suburban woods and back roads,
by high school students. "On one unforgettable summer morning," he
later wrote, "from the rocks on Marblehead Neck, we watched through
binoculars an attack by Navy planes (out of Salem Willows) on a German
submarine, which had been trapped on the surface while attacking a Hali-
fax-bound convoy." Others remembered being herded out of classrooms
and into school corridors to wait out an air-raid drill sitting on the floor
and singing songs. James Roosevelt, the president's son, had his two-year-
old boy shout "booooom" whenever he heard an explosion at a nearby
naval base. That way, the father wrote, "the child thinks he is creating the
explosion, and is quite delighted every time he hears one. " 6
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, a San Francisco psychiatrist
claimed, "acted as a source of sudden and unexpected danger" for the na-
tion's children. The public response to the attack intensified children's
anxiety. New York and Washington fingerprinted children and gave them
I.D. tags. Blackouts and air-raid drills contributed to a sense of insecurity
and vulnerability. As newspapers and radio told of bombs and battles in
Europe, few families did not personally know someone serving overseas.
In nearly one family out of five, a father or a brother served in the military
during the war. Although it was not until 1944 that Life magazine pub-
lished a photograph of a dead American G.I., children could not be
shielded from wartime realities. There were no grief counselors during
World War II; children were left to deal with their anxieties largely on
their own. 7
World War II left an indelible mark on the nation's families. Whereas
the number of marriages and births declined during World War I, the
number accelerated during World War II, continuing a trend that began in
the late 1930s. Between 1940 and 1946, three million more Americans
married than could have been expected if marriage rates had remained at
prewar levels. The rush to the altar was accompanied by a baby boom.
For two decades preceding the war, the birthrate, like the marriage rate,
had declined. But in 1943 the birthrate reached its highest levels in twenty
years. During the 1930s America's population increased by only three mil-
lion people; during the war it grew by 6.5 million. The postwar baby
boom actually began with this wartime surge in births. 8
The war also stirred an unprecedented tide of family migration. Sixteen
million men and women left home for military service, and another 15.3
million civilians moved from town to town to work in defense industries
or to follow uniformed husbands and fathers from one military base to
another. Laura Briggs, the daughter of a Jerome, Idaho, farmer, was
eleven years old when her father decided to sell everything, including the
linoleum on the farmhouse floor, pack the family's black 1941 Chevy, and
move to Long Beach, California, to work in a defense plant. He was con-
vinced that there was "big money" to be made manufacturing armaments.
And so there was. Families not only moved frequently during the war
years, but they moved to radically different environments. There was
rapid growth in coastal cities in the West and South, the centers of the na-
tion's armaments industries and debarkation points for the armed forces.
At the same time the Northeast and the Great Plains lost population.
Boston lost 150,000 inhabitants, Pittsburgh 200,000, and the New York
City area 800,000. The most dramatic losses were in the Dakotas, Ken-
tucky, Minnesota, and Tennessee as hundreds of thousands of families
moved to California, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, and Washington State. 9
Wartime migration created severe problems of adjustment. Housing
was in short supply, educational and health care facilities were overbur-
dened, and childcare facilities were sorely inadequate. Housing presented
the most immediate problem, with 98 percent of all cities reporting a
shortage of single-family homes and 90 percent an insufficient number of
apartments. Migrating families crowded into squalid trailer camps,
shantytowns, and "foxhole houses"-excavated basements covered with
tarpaper roofs. A million and a half families shared apartments with rela-
tives, friends, or strangers. The housing shortage was nationwide in scope.
In Leeville, Louisiana, young mothers paid $50 a month to live in con-
verted chicken coops and barns. Finding an apartment that would accept
children was particularly difficult. Barbara DeNike was forced to place
her children temporarily in a Catholic orphanage while she looked for an-
other place to live. Exclaimed one apartment hunter: "[Landlords] got all
these rules: no children, no dogs, no cats ... Why I know one family that
lived in a hotel room for two months-couldn't rent a thing-and had to
board their kids out." Congestion and overcrowding were the order of the
day. "It is not unusual," one observer noted, "to find children of all ages,
including adolescents, either occupying the bedroom of the parents or
sleeping together where no provision can be made for various sexes or age
groups." 10
For African-American families housing problems were especially acute.
Some 700,000 African Americans moved from the rural South seeking
jobs in defense industries. Restricted housing covenants kept black fami-
258 Huck's Raft
lies "virtual prisoners" in racial ghettos, the New York Times reported. In
Baltimore, families were crowded ten persons to an apartment. The hous-
ing shortage was the fuse that set off violent racial conflagrations. The
worst race riot erupted in Detroit in 1942, after black families sought to
enter a housing project set aside for them and a white mob, seeking the
housing for itself, resisted. Violence sparked by this incident left forty peo-
ple dead. Other racial violence provoked by the scarcity of adequate hous-
ing struck Mobile, Alabama; Beaumont, Texas; and Harlem. 11
Growing up in wartime involved disruptions and stress, but also early
opportunities to contribute to the family and assert one's independence. In
a letter to General Douglas MacArthur, Joan Dooley, a twelve-year-old
Girl Scout in Wichita, Kansas, wrote that she was doing her "bit by tak-
ing care of small children so that the parents may work in war factories."
She and her friends ran "errands for people" and bought a war stamp
every time they had a quarter. Nancy Jacobson, also twelve, had to take
the place of two brothers serving in the navy. "I was taught to milk
cows," she recalled. "I also learned how to drive a team of horses ... Dad
bought a John Deere tractor, and I learned to handle that." By planting a
Victory garden, raising chickens, cutting back on nonessential items, and
finding substitutes for goods in short supply, children assisted their fami-
lies in making do during the war. 12
Children, regardless of age, were expected to contribute to the nation's
defense. A booklet published in 1943, called Your Children in Wartime,
told girls and boys: "you are enlisted for the duration of the war as citizen
soldiers. This is a total war, nobody is left out, and that counts you in, of
course." Wartime children considered themselves valuable contributors to
the nation's defense. They collected scrap metal, rubber, tin cans, and
bundles of old newspapers. They sold War Bonds and Victory Stamps and
distributed government pamphlets about civil defense, price controls, and
rationing. Girls knitted socks, mittens, scarves, and sweaters. Many
young people experienced pride in their involvement in the war effort:
"From scrap drives to ration books to War Bonds, opportunities for us to
become personally involved in the nation's struggle were everywhere; indi-
vidually and collectively, they encouraged us in the conviction that we
could be useful-that the scrap metal we rounded up in our little red wag-
ons soon enough would be used to make bombers or tanks that would
hasten the nation toward its inevitable victory." 13
It was teenagers whose lives were transformed most drastically by the
war. The war created a huge demand for labor, which was met by women,
racial minorities, and adolescents. In increasing numbers, teenage boys
and girls joined the labor force and insisted on adult rights. Four times as
many fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds were working in 1945 as in 1941.

The ready availability of jobs gave many young people unprecedented
amounts of spending money and the autonomy that came with an inde-
pendent income.
While children in increasing numbers joined the labor force, fewer went
to school. In 1942 alone, more than 2,000 schools failed to open, partly
because of a teacher and classroom shortage, but also because young peo-
ple were turning away from education. In Arkansas, 10,000 children, and
in Mobile, Alabama, 3,000 children, were without schools. In the Detroit
area the school day for most children was cut to three hours. While the
number of teenagers who worked rose by 1.9 million, the number attend-
ing school fell by 1.25 million. 14
To permit children and teenagers to fulfill the labor needs of a nation at
war, child labor statutes were relaxed. Various states permitted fourteen-
and fifteen-year-olds to work at night or at such tasks as peeling shrimp or
packaging fresh fruits and vegetables. In Delaware children as young as
fourteen could work until midnight delivering milk. Florida permitted
fourteen-year-olds to work during school hours and allowed twelve-year-
olds to take afterschool jobs. In some states no age restrictions were
placed on work in agriculture. Manpower was at a premium, and young
people were a valuable resource. 15
Inevitably wartime exigencies and demands on families led to a relax-
ation of social restraints on the young. One serviceman's wife voiced a
common concern, that the war made it much more difficult to discipline
children. Her husband was overseas, and "the kids don't seem to mind as
much as they did when he was home." Reports of teenage vice filled the
newspapers. In New York City in 1943 a seventeen-year-old was con-
victed of running a prostitution ring comprised of thirty girls ages twelve
to fifteen. At big-city bus stations, teenage "knacky-whacky" or "V" girls
flirted with soldiers. Frequent movement from one community to another,
the prolonged absence of fathers, the assumption of increased responsibil-
ities, and a weakening of parental discipline unsettled the lives of the
young. These factors contributed to a sharp rise in wartime rates of pre-
marital pregnancy, illegitimacy, and venereal disease. 16
During the war years, popular magazines featured graphic depictions of
the wartime plight of youth. The Saturday Evening Post described nine
young children chained to trailers in a southern California trailer camp
while their parents labored, as well as four children locked in their
mother's automobile while she worked the graveyard shift. There were
widespread reports of youth violence, such as the ruthless murder of a
New York City schoolteacher by zoot-suited teenagers in 1942 and the
260 Huck,s Raft
more than 500 gangs in the city, fighting with brass knuckles, blackjacks,
broken bottles, ice picks, and guns made out of four-inch pieces of pipe.
Most disturbing of all were reports of abusive child labor, including the
story of an eleven-year-old girl suffering a heart attack while performing
farm labor, a fifteen-year-old boy dying from burns suffered while clean-
ing a food vat, and a sixteen-year-old boy losing an arm after catching it
in a centrifugal dryer. 17
Such events do not give a typical picture of life for the young during
World War II, yet they were common enough to alarm the public.
Children lived in a society shaken and disrupted by war. Many were
growing up in homes without fathers and with working mothers. Fre-
quent migration subjected children to extreme social and psychological
dislocation. School attendance and child labor laws had been relaxed, and
wartime excitement and stress were widespread. It is not surprising that
most observers believed that the war had intensified the challenge of rear-
ing responsible and well-adjusted young people.
Leading authorities on child psychology feared that the war desensi-
tized children to violence, undermined their respect for authority, and led
to parental neglect. Although it is uncertain whether juvenile delinquency
or parental neglect were greater problems in the United States in the
1940s than in the 1930s, there is a mass of evidence indicating that social
workers, psychologists, and public leaders were deeply troubled by the
war's impact on the young. Of particular concern was the influx of moth-
ers into the labor force and its deleterious effect on children. Public atti-
tudes toward married women working were characterized by deep ambiv-
alence. On the one hand, women were repeatedly told by the federal
government that victory could not be achieved without their entry into
the labor force. On the other, the federal government declared: "Now, as
in peacetime, a mother's primary duty is to her home and children." De-
spite official pronouncements discouraging mothers from working, eco-
nomic necessity led nearly 1.5 million mothers of children under ten to en-
ter the labor force during the war. The overwhelming majority were
members of families with incomes below the national average, who said
that their primary motive for working was financial. Guidance counsel-
ors, child psychologists, and physicians feared that working mothers gave
their offspring inadequate attention, and linked an array of social and
psychological problems to maternal neglect, including truancy, sleeping
and eating disorders, thumb-sucking, bedwetting, and "slower mental de-
velopment, social ineptness, weakened initiative, and ... [an inability] to
form satisfactory relationships. " 18
Working mothers were able to make only haphazard arrangements for
childcare. Although most left their children in the care of grandparents or

neighbors, some children inevitably had to fend for themselves. Newspa-
per reports called them "8-hour orphans" or "latch-key" children, and
experts predicted harmful social consequences from such abandonment.
But public childcare facilities were woefully inadequate. At the beginning
of the war the Federal War Manpower Commission took the position that
mothers with young children should not seek work until childless women
had been employed. In 1942, under the Lanham Act, the federal govern-
ment allowed public works funds to be used for childcare in war-
disrupted areas and made all mothers eligible regardless of income. By the
end of 1943 the federal government had financed approximately 2,000
centers, serving 58,682 children. At its peak, in mid-1944, after the fed-
eral program began to accept children under the age of two, it served
about 110,000 children. Federally financed extended-school programs
provided afterschool care for between 100,000 and 300,000 children. 19
Despite the pressing need for childcare, wartime nurseries remained
underutilized, because many mothers opposed institutionalized care. Nu-
merous wartime childcare centers were overcrowded, ill equipped, and
poorly located. One wartime nursery near Baltimore was initially housed
in a pair of trailers. After the trailers were found to violate public health
standards, the children were moved into a room in an administration
building, where they shared a single bathroom with the building's employ-
ees. Many centers were located in churches and private residences, often
lacking outdoor space for sports and play. The high fees that war nurser-
ies charged further limited the use of public childcare. Daily fees typically
ranged from fifty to seventy-five cents, or nearly a quarter of a day's
wages, discouraging many poorer parents from making use of the centers.
Most families stayed with informal solutions to problems of childcare.
One grandmother called World War II the "grandmother's war," because
"the father goes off to war ... mother goes to the factory to go to work,
which is a very patriotic, important thing to do; the kids stay with grand-
mother. " 20
Compared with the efforts made by our wartime allies, the U.S. govern-
ment did little to assist families to cope with wartime stresses. The United
States lagged far behind Britain, where the government constructed cen-
tral kitchens, public nurseries, and rural retreats for working mothers and
their children, and required employers to give working mothers an after-
noon off each week to conduct family shopping. Nevertheless, there were
some genuine advances during the war, especially in the areas of infant
mortality and child nutrition. Contributing to the improvements were
wartime prosperity, migration to urban areas with better health care sys-
262 Huck~s Raft
terns, and the Emergency Maternity and Infant Care program, which pro-
vided free maternity care for the wives of military personnel and health
care for their infants during their first year of life. By mid-1944 the EMIC
program provided assistance to one in every six or seven births. 21
Public anxiety over women's ability to cope with the family in the ab-
sence of a father focused not only on maternal neglect but on its mirror
image, maternal oversolicitousness. Americans were shocked by the num-
ber of men-over five million-who were rejected for military service on
the basis of physical or psychological deficiencies. Three million men were
classified as emotionally unstable, and authorities blamed this outcome on
overprotective mothers who had shielded their sons from life's realities for
too long. Dr. Edward A. Strecker, a psychiatric consultant to the Army
and Navy, accused "America's traditional sweet, doting, self-sacrificing
mom" of having "failed in the elementary mother function of weaning
offspring emotionally as well as physically." Philip Wylie, author of the
1942 bestseller A Generation of Vipers, attributed boys' psychological
and emotional immaturity to a dominant, overly protective mother and a
passive or absent father. Solely responsible for their children's care, moth-
ers and their "smotherlove" were increasingly regarded as the roots of
psychological dysfunction. 22
The specter of Nazism intensified concern about the war's impact on
parenting. Many experts believed that Nazism was a product of Ger-
many's patriarchal and hierarchical family structure. Some mental health
experts argued that German fathers had implanted in their children "the
authoritarian attitude, the belittling of women, and the cult of aggressive
masculinity" that furnished fertile soil for the growth of National Social-
ism. Others blamed German mothers for creating an "authoritarian per-
sonality" by placing too much emphasis on obedience and exercising
overly strict discipline during early childhood. If analysts agreed that re-
pressive discipline had led to a totalitarian state, there was also a consen-
sus that America's "democratic" family posed problems of its own. Lack-
ing clearly defined roles or status hierarchy, the formlessness of the
American family meant that many homes were riven by intense emotional
tensions deriving from weak fathers, domineering mothers, and bickering
children. The results of an upbringing in such an unstructured domestic
environment were reflected in high rates of psychological maladjustment
and immaturity-the symptoms ranging from extreme passivity and intro-
version to intense hostility and competitiveness. And, more often than
not, when psychologists, social workers, and family counselors assessed
blame, they tended to point an accusing finger not at unsettled wartime
conditions but at individual mothers. In the end, mothers, separated from
spouses and buffeted by wartime stresses, were viewed as the cause of

their children's problems. 23 _
In response to the weakening of families, schools took on greater re-
sponsibility for maintaining the health, well-being, and patriotism of chil-
dren. Each morning children were expected to salute the flag as a symbol
of their patriotism. At the time, sixteen states had laws requiring students
to salute the flag. For some children, this ritual conflicted with their reli-
gious faith. Jehovah's Witnesses believed that saluting the flag violated the
biblical prohibition against worshipping "graven images." Some children
of Jehovah's Witnesses stood silently while their classmates recited the
Pledge of Allegiance. Others recited an alternative pledge: "I respect the
flag of the United States and acknowledge it as a symbol of freedom and
justice to all. I pledge allegiance and obedience to all the laws of the
United States that are consistent with God's law, as set forth in the Bible."
But some refused to salute the flag, and their refusal sometimes resulted in
legal action against their parents. In one instance a judge in Port Angeles,
Washington, removed three children who were Jehovah's Witnesses from
their parents' custody because they refused to salute the flag. In 1940 the
Supreme Court ruled by eight to one that children could be compelled to
salute the flag regardless of their religious convictions.
Three years later, after the United States had entered the war, the Su-
preme Court reversed itself in a six-to-three decision. West Virginia re-
quired students to salute the flag with a stiff-armed salute, which organi-
zations such as the Parent-Teachers Association, the Boy Scouts and Girl
Scouts, and the Red Cross considered "too much like Hitler's." Students
who refused to salute the flag, for whatever reason, were expelled, and
their parents were liable to be jailed and fined. In the case of West Virginia
State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Court ruled that children could
not be punished for refusing to salute the flag. Justice Robert H. Jackson
wrote that no Americans could be forced to demonstrate their allegiance
to "what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other mat-
ters of opinion." This was true for children as well as adults. In his opin-
ion, issued on Flag Day in 1942, Justice Jackson stated that compulsion
was not a legitimate way to foster love of country in children, and contra-
dicted our self-image as a nation fighting for democratic values. In an im-
portant precedent for the principle of children's rights, the right of chil-
dren to exercise their religious freedom outweighed any benefits that came
from forcing children to recite words contrary to their religious beliefs. 24
During the war schools acquired heightened ideological significance as
instruments for building a more democratic society. As one writer stated
in the School Review, "To construct a common American culture and to
264 Huck~s Raft
lessen hatred and group prejudice in America, we have to rely chiefly on

the schools." Schools embraced a number of rituals to foster patriotism
and unity. Each school day typically began with the Pledge of Allegiance.
Many schools staged patriotic pageants and plays; organized collection
drives for waste paper, scrap metal, and other useful items; planted Vic-
tory Gardens in schoolyards; and instilled democratic principles. Some of
the most lasting lessons did not come out of textbooks. One child recalled
the principal and a man in uniform coming into a classroom and escorting
his teacher out of the room to inform her of her husband's death in
combat. 25
Young people's education in patriotism was not confined to the class-
room. The mass media also played a crucial role in teaching children why
the country was fighting. Wartime comic books, cartoons, and movies
were much more than mere entertainment; they served an educational and
ideological function. Many comics were filled with subhuman depictions
of the Japanese, and carried titles like The Terror of the Slimy Japs, The
Slant Eye of Satan, and Funeral for Yellow Dogs. But it would be a mis-
take to conclude that comic books simply reinforced prejudice. Many
worked to liberalize attitudes toward women and racial and ethnic minor-
ities, part of the broader effort to portray World War II as a "people's
war," in which diverse groups were pulling together in a common cause.
Combat films such as Air Force, Wake Island, and Destination Tokyo fo-
cused on a small group that served as a microcosm of the American melt-
ing pot. Objective, Burma!, for example, included a Hennessy, a Mig-
gleori, and a Neguesco. The characters' names demonstrated that this was
a democratic war, which drew upon every segment of society. 26
Like the comics, cartoons, movies, and radio shows enjoyed by children
sent the message that World War II was a total war, involving the home
front as well as the battlefront. Cartoons were intended to evoke boos for
the enemy and catcalls along with laughter. Even Donald Duck and
Mickey Mouse went to war, with Donald exhorting audiences to shout
"Heil!" in the Fuhrer's face in A Nightmare in Nutziland. Highly propa-
gandistic, cartoons had titles like Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. Many cele-
brated home-front sacrifice. As Donald Duck learns in one cartoon,
"Your country needs taxes to beat the Axis!" Cartoons, like comic books,
contained many racial stereotypes. Adolf Hitler was drawn as a goose-
stepping duck, a pig, or a devil, and Emperor Hirohito and Mussolini as
monkeys. Many popular radio programs and movies aimed at a younger
audience featured spies and saboteurs or villains who threatened the
mainland United States, and called for the forces of the good and patriotic
to defeat them. 27
Comic violence was the mainstay of cartoons and comic books, but vio-
lence also penetrated children's play and the mass media. A picture essay
in Life magazine in March 1942 showed children in Long Island wearing
tin helmets and hiding under the dining room table as they played a game
called "air raid shelter." During the war years, war games dominated chil-
dren's play. Unlike today's simulated, impersonal video games, play dur-
ing the war years involved the active imitation of events overseas, with
children engaging in commando raids and bombing raids across back-
yards. During the war the photographs and newsreels that young people
saw grew increasingly graphic. The young saw wounded and dead sol-
diers in unprecedented numbers. Their need to act out the tragic
woundings and deaths they saw depicted and to survive their simulated
war games was great. It is not surprising that few were willing to play the
enemy. 28
It was during World War II that a distinctive teen culture began to dom-
inate the public's attention. December 30, 1942, saw the birth of the
screaming teenage "bobby-soxer." That day, New York's Paramount The-
ater featured a standard wartime program combining a patriotic movie-
Star-Spangled Rhythm, with Bing Crosby-followed by a live stage show.
The lead performers were Benny Goodman and his band, pianist Jess
Stacyck, and the BG Sextet. As an "extra added attraction," a scrawny
singer from Hoboken, New Jersey, named Frank Sinatra also appeared.
When Sinatra began to sing, young women in the audience went into a
frenzy of shrieking, squealing, and swooning. "What the hell was that?"
Goodman asked. The newspapers called it "Sinatratrauma" and "Sinatra-
mania." Sinatra's press agent, George Evans, had paid a number of young
women $5 to scream when the singer appeared on stage. But the reaction
was far more emotional than anything the agent could have promoted.
The audience shrieked and cried and rushed the stage. Some fainted.
When Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount in October 1944, there-
sponse was even greater. On Columbus Day, a school holiday, an esti-
mated 30,000 teenage fans lined up along 43d Street to see the singer.
Time magazine declared: "Not since the days of Rudolph Valentino has
American womanhood made such unabashed love to an entertainer. " 29
The twenty-seven-year-old Sinatra was America's first teen heartthrob.
With his oversized bow tie, his baby blue eyes, and his slender, 130-pound
physique, he seemed like someone who needed to be loved. "It was the
war years, and there was a great loneliness," Sinatra later explained. "I
was the boy on every corner, the boy who'd gone off to war." But the au-
dience's reaction signaled much more: a revolution in American popular
culture. Teenagers had emerged as a force driving popular culture and
266 Huck~s Raft

Teenagers stand next to a jukebox in Richwood, West Virginia, in 1942. Courtesy of the
defining popular tastes, and teenage fans had become a new cultural and
commerci~l category. Young girls from ten to twenty were willing to wait
hours to buy tickets to see their heartthrob and records to hear him. The
number of Sinatra fans would soon be in the millions, a force to contend
with. 30
In adjusting to wartime conditions, American youth developed a more
autonomous sense of identity. Subject to public demands and criticisms,
American adolescents began to assert themselves and create distinctive
teenage subcultures with their own garb, hairstyles, dances, language, and
values. Teenage boys, particularly in poorer communities, showed their
disdain for social conventions by donning zoot suits, modeled on the garb
worn by Depression-era gangsters. Zoot suits featured loosely cut coats
with wide padded shoulders and pants flaring below the waist but tapered
at the ankles. Combined with a wide-brimmed hat, a skin-tight T-shirt,
and a ducktail haircut, such a uniform upset many adults, with its aggres-
sive flamboyance and ostentation in time of war. Kleen Teens-their mid-
dle-class counterparts-developed a style of their own. Middle-class boys
swung yo-yos, participated in bull sessions, congregated around juke-

boxes in public places, and sported penny loafers and blue jeans. Bobby-
soxers held slumber parties, read new magazines like Mademoiselle and
Seventeen that catered to their tastes, swooned and shrieked over Sinatra,
and learned the Iindy hop. 31
Before the war, adolescents were referred to as "youngsters" and were
expected to share the outlooks and assumptions of their parents as well as
to subordinate their desires to them. Whether in response to the threats of
the adult world's war or the stress of family disruption, adolescents took
on a new and distinctive social identity, independent of their parents'.
Wartime jobs for teenagers enabled them to buy their own magazines,
purchase records, attend movies, and wear clothing targeted exclusively at
a teenage market. Young people adopted their own dance styles, like the
jitterbug, and generated their own customs, status symbols, and fads.
More and more, their recreation took place outside the home, away from
the family. Much more than in the past, the peer group and the products
of popular culture began to rival parents as influences on their behavior
and aspirations. 32
Parents grew more conscious than ever before that teenagers had "been
liberated from adult control." With four out of five high school boys serv-
ing in the army after graduation, teen life seemed like a brief interlude be-
fore adult responsibilities intruded. Across the country recreation centers,
sponsored by companies like Coca-Cola and Royal Crown Cola, sprang
up. By the end of the war, more than 3,000 Boogie Barns and Jive Hives
contained jukeboxes, dance floors, and Ping-Pong tables. Teenagers
flocked to these places in droves as havens from family, war, and the
future. 33
As teenagers assumed their own identity and tastes, they were identified
as a lucrative commercial market. "Teena"-the prototypical teenage
girl-"has money of her own to spend ... and what her allowance and
pin-money earnings won't buy, her parents can be counted on to supply.
For our girl Teena won't take no for an answer." With these words, an ap-
peal by Seventeen magazine to advertisers, teenagers emerged as a market
category. Two people were critical to the creation of this distinct market.
One was a grandmother. Helen Valentine, the promotions manager of
Mademoiselle~ founded Seventeen magazine after noticing that there was
no magazine to promote teen fashions. Seventeen's first issue in September
1944 sold 400,000 copies in two days. Within a year it had a circulation
of a million and soon carried more advertising than any other magazine.
To attract advertisers, Seventeen conducted its "Life with Teena" market
268 Huck~s Raft
survey. It pointed out that teenage girls not only had a substantial discre-
tionary income, but that they wanted to fit in, to "look, act and be just
like the girl next door ... For Teena and her teenmates come in bunches
... Sell one and the chances are you'll sell them all." The other was Eu-
gene Gilbert, a nineteen-year-old shoe salesman who in 1945 came up
with the idea that "stores and manufacturers were losing a lot of money
because they were blind" to teenagers' "tastes and habits." He founded
Gil-Bert Teenage Services, a consulting firm, to provide systematic market
research on teenagers and to advise businesses how to sell goods to teens.
Within a year he had 300 "poll takers" providing information about
teens' interests and wants. With clients including Maybelline cosmetics,
Quaker Oats, and United Airlines, Time magazine called him "the Bobby-
Soxers' Gallup," referring to opinion pollster George Gallup. "Our salient
discovery," he wrote, "is that within the past decade teenagers have be-
come a separate and distinct group in our society." Gilbert convinced
businesses that teens were impulsive buyers preoccupied with the here and
now and that his youthful poll takers could persuade teens to try their
products and make them fashionable. 34
During the war teens turned away from performers who appealed to
adults-like the Glenn Miller orchestra-to performers of their own,
showing their taste for novelty over familiarity and for style over senti-
ment. And teen culture began to exert a powerful impact on adults them-
selves. As the writer Diana West has noted, the discovery of the distinct
teen market during World War II marked "the advent of a brand-new,
heretofore unseen, emphasis on-indeed, domination of-the teen experi-
ence in mainstream popular culture. " 35
The middle-class teen culture that emerged during the war was a main-
stream phenomenon. Unlike the zoot-suit-clad black hipster (like
Malcolm Little, who would later become Malcolm X) or Latino pachuco,
Kleen Teens, wearing bobbysox or penny loafers, were regarded by adults
with a mixture of condescension and bemusement. The division of teens
between insiders and outsiders reflected much broader splits within war-
time culture. Popular culture remembers World War II as a period of na-
tional unity, when ethnic and racial divisions were set aside in the struggle
to defeat the Axis powers. But the war years were a period of intense
stress that found expression in ethnic and racial conflict. In 1943 alone,
242 race riots took place in forty-seven cities. Ethnic tension penetrated
into children's culture. Antisemitism peaked during the war, and many
Jewish children, like ten-year-old Philip Roth, remembered gangs on the
Jersey shore hollering "Kikes! Dirty Jews!" Some children's rhymes were
anything but amusing. One went:
Red, white and blue,

Your father is a Jew,
Your mother is Japanese,
And so are you!
The internment of Japanese Americans was the most extreme example of

wartime prejudice. 36
Tsuguo Ikeda kept a diary when he was seventeen years old. In some
ways it was quite ordinary. It recorded the latest songs he had heard, his
attempts to find a date for a dance, and his mom's complaints when he
came home late. But his life was anything but typical. He and his family
were interned in the Minidoka Relocation Camp in southeastern Idaho,
"a vast stretch of sage brush stubble and shifting, swirling sands-a
dreary, forbidding, flat expense of wilderness." Alongside his description
of everyday life, his diary recorded his loneliness, the hard work he was
assigned (toiling in a sugarbeet field), and his anxiety about whether he
and his family would ever get out of the camp. 37
No group of children was more deeply affected by the war than those
who were Japanese Americans. Ten weeks after the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order
9066, which authorized the secretary of war to designate areas "from
which any or all persons may be excluded." Under this order, more than
120,000 Japanese Americans-two-thirds of them U.S. citizens-were re-
moved from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona
and herded into ten desolate relocation camps, ringed by barbed wire and
guard towers, with search lights and machine guns. Any individual who
had one Japanese great-grandparent was liable to internment. The victims
of racial prejudice, war hysteria, and economic jealousies, Japanese Amer-
icans suffered a gross violation of their civil liberties. In a poem, one child,
Itsuko Taniguchi, described the dislocation she felt on the day that her
family was evacuated from their home:
Leaving our friends
And my tree that bends
Away to the land
With lots of sand. 38
For Japanese Americans, internment meant severe economic hardship,

physical dislocation, and a sharp reordering of family roles. Some families
were given as little as forty-eight hours to dispose of their homes, busi-
nesses, farms, and personal property, which were sold for a fraction of
their worth. The internees were allowed to take only what they could
carry, so families were forced to leave pets behind. Children with serious
A young boy stands near a sol-

dier during the evacuation of
Japanese families from Bain-
bridge Island, Washington, in
1942. Courtesy of the Library
of Congress.
disabilities were barred from the camps. Mary Tsukamoto's son, Toyoki,
who was blind and mentally retarded, was taken away by a social worker
and died within a month. Japanese Americans remained in the camps for
an average of 900 days. 39
The camps' barracks were built of tarpaper over pine boards. When the
pine dried, the floorboards separated, allowing dust to blow through. The
buildings were uninsulated, and wintertime temperatures sometimes fell
to 30 degrees below zero. The "apartments" consisted of a single drafty
room, averaging sixteen by twenty feet, shared by an entire family. Nine
members of Marge Tanwaki's extended family lived in one room in the
Amache Relocation Center in southeastern Colorado. Furnishings were
limited to cots, blankets, and a lightbulb. One young Japanese American
described conditions in his family's camp: "The apartments, as the Army
calls them, are stables ... mud is everywhere ... We have absolutely no
fresh meat, vegetables, or butter. Mealtime queues extend for blocks;
standing in a rainswept line, feet in the mud, for scant portions of canned
wieners and boiled potatoes, hash ... or beans ... and stale bread." The
internees slept on cotton sacks stuffed with hay and fashioned furniture
out of discarded crates. They used communal latrines, washed clothes by
hand, and ate meals in a mess hall. Phones were forbidden, and there were
no stores. Food poisoning, measles, and pneumonia were rampant. 40
Life in the camps was highly regimented. Kinya Noguchi, who was in-
terned as a child in the TuleLake camp in northern California along with

18,788 other evacuees, recalled the routine. At seven in the morning a si-
ren blast announced breakfast. Families rushed "to the wash basin to beat
the other groups" and then rushed to the mess hall. Work began at eight
for adults, and school started at half past eight or nine for children. At
Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, which held 8,000 in-
ternees, a siren announced roll call at half past six each evening. Children
had to race to the barracks, where inspectors made sure that each family
member was present. Said one young girl, "when the siren rings I get so
scared that I sometimes scream. " 41
The internees' biggest complaints were the lack of privacy and of
proper schools. Toilets, showers, and dining facilities were communal,
precluding family privacy. Dining ceased to be a private family ritual, and
strict parental control over children loosened. Children attended make-
shift schools, lacking books, blackboards, and desks; many students had
to sit on the floor. At one camp, physics was taught in a laundry room be-
cause it was the only available space with running water. Family separa-
tion was common. After Isao Fujimoto's sister caught measles in the Heart
Mountain internment camp near Cody, Wyoming, she was placed in quar-
antine. While his mother cared for her, the other children, ages ten
months to eight years, had to fend for themselves. Internment inverted
traditional roles and relationships in Japanese-American families. Men
and women, regardless of age, worked at interchangeable jobs paying $12
to $19 a month. In the camps, influence shifted away from the older gen-
eration, the Issei, who had been born abroad, to the younger generation,
the Nisei, who had been born in the United States. A disproportionate
share of those who were released early from the camps were from the
younger generation. 42
Ethnic tensions during the war were not confined to Japanese Ameri-
cans. In Los Angeles, tensions sparked by an incident known as Sleepy La-
goon flared around Mexican-American youth. An eastside Los Angeles
reservoir, Sleepy Lagoon was also a swimming hole and recreation center
for Mexican Americans, who were forbidden to swim at the city's segre-
gated public pools. In 1942 it became a synonym for injustice and racial
hatred. On August 1, 1942, a party attended by Mexican-American youth
at Sleepy Lagoon turned violent. Fighting broke out, and a young man,
Jose Diaz, was beaten to death. 43
The early 1940s in Los Angeles was the era of the pachuco, Latino
youth who favored the long coats, wide pants, and watch chains of the
zoot suit. Pachucos embraced a style that was bold and defiant, adopting
padded-shouldered suits, wide-brimmed hats, triple-soled shoes, duck-
272 Huck!ls Raft
tailed hairstyles, and a distinctive lingo-Calo-drawn from gangsters

and jazz musicians. Their female counterparts-pachuquitas-also chal-
lenged the norms of middle-class respectability. They wore short tight
skirts, sheer blouses, dark red lipstick, and black mascara. This repre-
sented one of the first times that youths-African American as well as La-
tino-explicitly and self-consciously used style as a form of rebellion.
They wanted to be noticed, and so they were. 44
The Los Angeles press did a series of articles on pachuco gangs. As pub-
lic outrage grew, sheriff's officials conducted a sweep through the city's
barrios, arresting more than 600 young men in the Sleepy Lagoon case. A
grand jury indicted 24 for murder, making the court proceedings one of
the largest mass trials in American history. The defendants were referred
to in the press as "The Sleepy Lagooners" and then simply as "goons."
Only two of the defendants had attorneys, and openly biased testimony
was admitted into the trial record. One sheriff's department expert
testified that "total disregard for human life has always been universal
throughout the Americas among the Indian population. And this Mexican
element feels ... a desire ... to kill, or at least draw blood." Twelve de-
fendants were found guilty of conspiring to murder Diaz; five others were
convicted of assault. Two years passed before an appeals court overturned
all the convictions and severely reprimanded the presiding judge for dis-
playing prejudice toward the defendants. 45
At the end of the Sleepy Lagoon trial, a public campaign against Mexi-
can-American youth intensified. Over a two-week period in May and June
1943, police stood by while several thousand servicemen and civilians
beat up young Mexican Americans, stripping them of their draped jackets
and pegged pants. Mexican, Filipino, and African-American boys as
young as twelve or thirteen were "pushed into the streets, and beaten with
sadistic frenzy." The riots ended only after senior military officials de-
clared Los Angeles off-limits to military personnel. The Los Angeles City
Council followed by banning zoot suits in the city. For younger Mexican
Americans, the Sleepy Lagoon trial and the Zoot Suit riots became sym-
bols of injustice and ethnic hatred. Those events marked the starting point
of the modern Mexican-American struggle for equal justice. 46
The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, and the war in the Pacific,
on August 14. The United States had emerged victorious, but the war's
end produced severe pangs of readjustment. For Deborah Gorham, her fa-
ther's return from war in December 1944 was anything but happy. "Ire-
member the acute anticipation and joy I felt, and then the let-down, when
he was abrupt and unfriendly to me, and appeared far more interested in
my year-old sister, whom he had never seen before." She had "remem-
bered a flawless prewar Dad." But her father had "returned a deeply trou-
bled, angry man. And he remembered an exuberant 5 year-old not a shy,
gangly 7 year-old." Deborah was not alone in her dismay. Many wartime
children found readjustment painful. One adult recalled her father's re-
turn as highly disruptive. She and her mother "were a tight, tough unit."
"In some way," she continued, "I resented my father's return to the fam-
ily. Everything changed." Estrangement and problems with alcohol were
not infrequent as families tried to readjust after the war. Fathers thought
that their children had grown spoiled in their absence, while children con-
sidered their fathers excessively strict, "nervous," or "intolerant. " 47
For the most part, families had to deal with problems of postwar read-
justment without government assistance. World War II greatly expanded
federal involvement in children's health and well-being, but with the war's
end, government initiatives like the Emergency Maternity and Infant Care
Act, which had provided health services for hundreds of thousands of mil-
itary families, and the Lanham Act, which had funded childcare for a half-
million children, were terminated. For many families, the tensions pro-
duced by separation and war proved unmanageable, and the strains were
reflected in a startling upsurge in the nation's divorce rate. Between 1940
and 1944 the divorce rate rose from 16 per 100 marriages to 27 per 100.
By 1950 a million G.l.'s had been divorced. 48
The impact of the war upon children was memorialized in fiction. Two
great novels dealing with childhood appeared during World War II: Wil-
liam Saroyan's The Human Comedy and Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in
Brooklyn. Superficially the stories could not be more different: one fo-
cused on the experience of boys, the other on a girl; one was set during
World War II, the other before World War I. Yet they treated a common
theme: children coming to grips with death, hunger, and human hatred.
In 1942, when the outcome of the war was most uncertain, Saroyan
wrote a screenplay for MGM that he subsequently reworked into a novel.
Deeply sentimental, it tells the story of wartime life in a small California
town through the experiences of a widowed mother, her daughter, Bess,
and her three sons: Marcus, a G.I. who goes off to a war from which he
won't return; fourteen-year-old Homer; and four-year-old Ulysses. It is a
coming-of-age story, but unlike many that followed, The Human Comedy
is not about sexual maturation or initiation, but about psychological and
emotional growth. It follows the younger brothers as they gradually es-
cape the fantasy world of childhood and become aware of the imperfec-
tions, sorrows, and tragedies of the adult world.
Homer has to grow up quickly after his older brother leaves home. In
order to help his family financially, he takes a job delivering telegrams to
2 74 Huck's Raft
the families of sons who have died in combat. Ulysses, his intensely curi-
ous younger brother, who personifies wide-eyed childhood curiosity and
innocence, undergoes a personal odyssey of his own that culminates in his
discovery of death. Highly discursive in style, The Human Comedy
touches on many of the disruptive elements of home-front life, including
the father's absence, family separation, the widespread employment of
teenagers, ethnic and racial conflict, and the weakening of parental super-
vision and controls over youthful sexuality. Saroyan's great insight was
that the war forced young people to mature rapidly and confront the
world's sadnesses even as they sought to obey the novel's injunction: "Be
happy. Be happy."
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn sold 300,000 copies in the first six weeks af-
ter it was published in 1943. Set in Brooklyn's Williamsburg slums be-
tween 1902 and 1919, it tells the story of an earnest fourteen-year-old,
Francie Nolan; her streetwise preteen brother, Neeley; her resourceful
mother, Katie; and her loving father, Johnny, who is drinking himself to
death and whose inability to hold a steady job has condemned the family
to a life of poverty. Like The Human Comedy, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
is a highly sentimental coming-of-age story, and, like Saroyan's novel, it
describes children growing up quickly as they confront the world's cruel-
ties. Family need forces Francie to leave school to get a job, to nurture her
family, to confront a would-be rapist, and to continue to grow tall and
straight like the tree in her backyard. Francie's resilience wins out and pre-
vents her from being permanently scarred by her environment.
The war left an indelible impression on the lives and beliefs of the chil-
dren who lived through it. Far from fading over time, the war's impact
persisted into adulthood. The experience led many young Americans to
see themselves as members of a common generation, different from those
who preceded or succeeded them. They remembered the war as an elevat-
ing time-demanding and stressful, but also inspiring-a period of priva-
tion and sacrifice, but also of high ideals and purpose, when the United
States and all Americans stood proud. For many young people, participa-
tion in the war effort instilled a sense of self-worth, autonomy, and initia-
tive that they carried with them in the years ahead. But perhaps the war's
most important legacy was the one that Saroyan described in The Human
Comedy. Young people had grown aware of life's sorrows. For many
young Americans, the war exacted a high toll. At least 183,000 children
lost fathers, and many more lost siblings, relatives, or neighbors. Wartime
separations and losses led many Americans to place a heavy emphasis on
family life in the postwar years. 49
chapter fourteen
In Pursuit of the Perfect Childhood
FoR AMERICANS of a certain age, the answer to the question

"What time is it?" will always be the same: "It's Howdy Doody time."
Baby boomers share many references from their childhood, from
afterschool TV shows like Howdy Doody and The Mickey Mouse Club to
toys like Mr. Potato Head and Slinkeys. Half a century later, memories of
postwar childhood still make many baby boomers sigh. But nostalgia for
the 1950s is highly seductive; it inevitably sanitizes the past and projects
us into a world that never existed. 1
It is easy to understand why many middle-class baby boomers look
back fondly on their postwar childhood. The postwar era was a period of
rapidly rising real incomes, when the after-inflation weekly earnings of
factory workers increased 50 percent, and millions of Americans moved
from urban apartments to suburban ranch-style houses. But the era's
greatest appeal is that it seems a much more innocent and child-friendly
time: a time of open spaces, of brand-new neighborhoods, Good Humor
ice cream trucks, 25-cent movies, and amusement parks, long since re-
placed by shopping malls and strip shopping centers. Consumer culture
seemed more innocent then, with shiny silver cap guns embossed with the
name of the Lone Ranger, "cigarettes" made of chocolate, and cereal pre-
miums that included bracelets and plastic tanks that fired plastic shells.
Even the child-oriented convenience foods evoke nostalgia-Sugar
Frosted Flakes (introduced in 1951), Sugar Smacks (in 1953), Tater Tots
(in 1958), and Jiffy Pop, the stovetop popcorn (also in 1958). For aging
baby boomers, the postwar period stan:ds out as the golden age of Ameri-
276 Huck's Raft
can childhood. It serves as the yardstick against which all subsequent

changes in childhood are measured.
Yet it is a mistake to look at the postwar era through rose-colored
glasses. In fact nearly a third of postwar children grew up near or below
the poverty line. The years between World War II and the turbulence of
the 1960s are often regarded as a sterile period of quiescence and confor-
mity, but beneath the warmth of the era were intense currents of anxiety.
Sociologists like Kingsley Davis and psychologists like Theodore Lidz
blamed the growing isolation of the nuclear family and the smothering in-
tensity of the mother-child bond for a host of ills in children, including
schizophrenia and sex-role confusion. 2
To understand postwar childhood, it is essential to recognize that the
period's family patterns-a high birthrate, a stable divorce rate, and a low
number of mothers in the workforce-were a historical aberration, out of
line with long-term historical trends. The era's child-centered character
represented a reaction against Depression hardships, wartime upheavals,
and Cold War insecurities. The postwar era also represented a period of
far-reaching social transformations whose significance would become ap-
parent during the 1960s. It was during the 1950s that teen culture as-
sumed its modern form and that the civil rights movement's activist as-
sault on school segregation got underway.
On January 19, 1953, forty-four million Americans watched Lucy
Ricardo give birth to Little Ricky, in one of the most widely viewed
broadcasts in television history. That year nearly four million American
children were born, more than in any previous year. Between 1946 and
1964 American women bore more than seventy-five million infants, com-
pared with barely fifty million in the preceding nineteen years. At its peak,
the birthrate averaged 3.6 babies per woman, nearly double the rate in the
1930s. 3
After fifteen years of economic privation and war, the surge in birth-
rates came as no surprise. Between 1940 and 1950 the sharpest increases
in fertility occurred among women over thirty-five, who had postponed
marriage and childbearing during the Depression and war years. But un-
like in Britain, France, and Germany, where the boom quickly subsided,
the American rate continued to climb. Not until1965 did the annual rate
drop below four million, a mark not reached again until 1989. Contrib-
uting to the ongoing boom were an increase in the proportion of women
marrying, a decline in the number of childless and one-child marriages,
and a sharp drop in the age of first marriage. For parents whose own
childhoods were scarred by war and insecurity, the impulse to marry, bear
children, and provide them with a protected childhood was intense.
In Pursuit of the Perfect Childhood 277
Childlessness became a sign of maladjustment and parenthood a symbol

of maturity and success. "Children," said one single woman in 1955,
"give life a new meaning, a new focal point, a new frame of reference, a
new perspective." Childless couples became objects of pity. 4
Parents who had had to mature quickly during the Depression and war
didn't want their children to be similarly deprived of childhood pleasures.
Middle-class mothers served as full-time camp counselors, leisure coordi-
nators, and chauffeurs. The sociologist William H. Whyte described post-
war America as a filiarchy, a society dominated by the young. "It is the
children who set the basic design," he wrote in 1956; "their friendships
are translated into the mother's friendships, and these, in turn, to the
family's. " 5
The sheer size of the baby boom forced the economy to regear itself to
feed, clothe, educate, and house the rising generation. Nearly every major
U.S. metropolitan area saw its outlying areas spawn versions of
Levittown, the planned community with 17,000 homes built in a Long Is-
land, New York, potato field beginning in 1947. Of thirteen million
homes constructed in the decade after World War II, eleven million were
erected in new suburban developments. Two-thirds of Levittown men said
they had moved to the suburbs to spend more time with their children,
and 70 percent of these men said they had fulfilled this objective. Nation-
wide, 80 percent of adults said they had moved to the suburbs "for the
kids. " 6
The growth of the suburbs greatly contributed to the image of the
1950s as a child-centered decade. Within the booming suburbs, there
were two sharply defined age groups: adults of childbearing age and
youngsters under the age of fifteen. Suburbia was a world of families and
young children, with few old people and surprisingly few adolescents.
Usually living some distance from relatives, suburban families were more
isolated, intense, and inward-turning than their urban counterparts. 7
In an increasingly commercialized, child-centered environment, parents
and grandparents spent more money on children than ever before. Toy
sales soared from $84 million in 1940 to $1.25 billion two decades later.
For very young children, there were new games like Candyland (intro-
duced in 1949) and Yahtzee (1956). For somewhat older children, there
were Mr. Potato Head (1952), a package of noses, ears, and mustaches
that kids could stick onto real vegetables; and Silly Putty (1950), a combi-
nation of boric acid and silicone oil, a gooey compound that bounced on
the floor and copied images from comic books and newspapers onto
sheets of paper. Many postwar toys sought to socialize boys and girls into
proper gender roles. During the Cold War years, toy soldiers and mock
278 Huck's Raft
weapons were particularly popular among boys. Girls' dolls evolved from
baby dolls to nurture to fashion-model dolls, emphasizing hair styling and
wardrobes. 8
Toymakers quickly discovered that the baby-boom market was highly
susceptible to fads. Because they watched the same television programs,
children everywhere were quickly exposed to the same faddish products.
During the Davy Crockett craze of 1955, ten million coonskin hats were
sold. Three years later, Arthur Melin and Richard Knerr heard that Aus-
tralian children used a bamboo ring for exercise. They fashioned a ring of
their own and called it a Hula-Hoop. Within four months they sold
twenty-five million. The most popular toy of the postwar era was Barbie,
the first mass-marketed adult-looking doll. 9
Contributing to the child-centered mood of the 1950s was anxiety over
the scourge of childhood: polio. Terror gripped baby boomers' parents
every summer as epidemics of polio left thousands of children in braces,
wheelchairs, or iron lungs. Whenever an epidemic struck, movie theaters
were abandoned, swimming pools deserted, and summer camps dis-
banded. Before the early 1950s, polio was a relatively rare viral disease,
although in 1916, 6,000 children died of it. After World War II the num-
ber of cases skyrocketed, reaching 60,000 in 1952. The culprit, ironically,
was modern sanitation. Earlier, poor sanitary conditions exposed children
to the disease during infancy, when paralysis was rare. But improved hy-
giene meant that children were exposed to the disease in later years, when
they were most vulnerable to paralysis. In 1952 Jonas Salk of the Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh developed the first polio vaccine, the product of years of
research by the March of Dimes, the charity founded by Franklin Roose-
velt in 1937. A "killed-virus" vaccine, it sought to prompt the body's im-
mune system to destroy a live polio virus by first exposing it to a "killed"
one. In 1954, 1.8 million American schoolchildren participated as test
subjects in the largest field trial in history. Anxious parents eagerly volun-
teered their children, and many protested when their health district was
excluded from the test. The successful field trial led to vaccine production
by six drug companies. A mistake by one of the companies, which led 204
children and adults to contract polio, resulting in 11 deaths, nearly de-
stroyed confidence in the Salk vaccine. Yet over the next decade, vaccines
cut the number of cases of polio from 135 cases per million to 26. 10
The triumph over polio instilled a lasting faith in the power of medical
research to eradicate children's diseases. No group benefited more from
medical advances during and after World War II than children. Sulfa
drugs, penicillin, insulin, immunization against whooping cough and
diphtheria, new treatments against tetanus, and fluoride against tooth de-
cay helped to alleviate many traditional scourges of childhood. 11
As threats of childhood disease diminished, public attention to
childrearing mounted, as did anxiety that faulty childrearing could pro-
duce enduring problems. Childrearing authorities of the postwar era
called for more relaxed methods, informing parents that a "child should
be understood rather than managed." In 1956 Newsweek magazine re-
ported: "The new Freudians charged that the old-fashioned, strait jacket
type of upbringing was turning out neurotics. Discipline of this nature,
they said, tended to 'scar the child's psyche."' The most famous child-
rearing expert was white-bearded Benjamin Spock, six feet, four inches
tall, who became a father figure to many parents and their children during
the 1950s, and who preached a softer, more compassionate approach to
bringing up baby. 12
In 1946 Pocket Books had published Dr. Spack's 25-cent paperback,
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. "Trust yourself," the
book began. "You know more than you think you do." In the first six
months it sold 750,000 copies. For anxious parents, this book was filled
with practical and reassuring advice. "Spitting and vomiting are com-
mon," begins one section. It is "natural for a baby around one to take a
bite out of his parent's cheek." Unlike Calvinists, who considered children
the fruit of original sin, or behaviorists, who told mothers to "never hug
and kiss" their children, Dr. Spock urged parents to trust their instincts,
talk to and play with their infants, and shower them with love. Instead of
serving as guards imposing rigid feeding schedules, parents should recog-
nize that their child was essentially good at heart. "He isn't a schemer. He
needs love," he wrote. "Your baby is born to be a reasonable, friendly hu-
man being."
Spock succeeded in translating Sigmund Freud's ideas about children's
psychic development into nonthreatening language that any parent could
understand. To deprive a baby of a bottle or a breast too early, or to insist
that a child follow a rigid feeding schedule, Spock explained, "robs him of
some of his positive feelings for life." He warned parents about the dan-
gers of overpressuring children about toilet training: "If his mother is try-
ing to make him feel naughty about soiling himself with the movement, he
may come to dread all kinds of dirtiness . . . If this worrisomeness is
deeply implanted at an early age, it's apt to turn him into a fussy finicky
person-the kind who's afraid to enjoy himself or try anything new, the
kind who is unhappy unless everything is just so." Dr. Spack's greatest tal-
ent was to make Freudian concepts-such as the latency period, Oedipal
280 Huck's Raft
conflict, castration anxiety, and penis envy-seem like common sense. A

"boy of 37i will declare that he is going to marry his mother when he
grows up ... The little girl is about to feel the same way about her fa-
ther," he explained in straightforward language. Similarly, "if a boy
around the age of 3 sees a girl undressed, it may strike him as queer that
she hasn't got a penis like his." He went on to explain that if the child
doesn't get a "satisfactory answer right away, he may jump to the conclu-
sion that some accident has happened to her" and fear that the same thing
"might happen to me, too!" He described bedwetting, reliance on a bot-
tle, thumb-sucking, and a fuzzy blanket as regressive substitutes for a
mother during a time of stress.
Despite Spack's admonition to mothers to trust their instincts, maternal
anxiety over childrearing intensified during the postwar era. Many moth-
ers found Dr. Spock's view that childrearing was easy and that babies' dis-
positions were naturally pleasant extremely frustrating. Nor did many ac-
cept his vision of managing babies without strict discipline. Dr. Spack's
insistence that babies' crying was simply a way to express their needs
made many mothers feel all the more frustrated when they were unable to
satisfy those needs. 13
Postwar childrearing was viewed as the key to producing not simply a
healthy, happy child, but also psychologically well-adjusted adults and a
harmonious democratic society. As one expert put it, "The poorly ad-
justed child tends to become the ill-adjusted partner in marriage. The par-
ent who is maladjusted in marriage finds it difficult or impossible to be a
good parent." In an influential 1947 book titled Modern Women: The
Lost Sex, Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundburg argued that "the
spawning ground for most neurosis in Western civilization is the home.
The basis for it is laid in childhood." 14
Raising sociable, secure, and adaptable children, who were "more co-
operative, more consensus-oriented, more group conscious," became a
virtual obsession in postwar childrearing literature. "The disturbed, hos-
tile, and rebellious child," warned one expert, "is a danger to himself and
to the community, and a poor risk as a future citizen." A Washington Post
editorial underlined the ideological significance attached to proper
childrearing:
The free child finds himself greatly outnumbered by the hordes of the regi-
mented. As he grows up he will find himself one of the relatively small bri-
gade that must uphold mental enlightenment and human freedom against
ruthless primitive masses seeking the slavery of the spirit. To do this, he must
be given "the strength of ten" through his emotional stability, maturity, self-
discipline, and creativen~ss. 15
Although the childrearing techniques of the postwar era are commonly

labeled "permissive," childrearing was not nearly as indulgent as later
commentators assumed. For one thing, no generation in American history
was less likely to be breast-fed. Whereas nearly two-thirds of infants dis-
charged from the hospital had been breast-fed in 1946, this figure fell to
37 percent in 1956 and just 27 percent in 1966. Of the mothers who did
breast-feed, the duration was generally short, with only 3 percent nursing
for as long as seven months. Nor were parents especially permissive in
terms of infantile sexuality or toilet training. The overwhelming majority
of parents regarded masturbation as undesirable and attempted to stop it,
while nearly half of all children began toilet training before they were nine
months old. Concluded a team of sociologists studying one postwar sub-
urb: "Despite the prevalent view that too early and too severe toilet train-
ing may be traumatic for the child, many a ... mother, given the setting of
her immaculate home, is virtually compelled to focus attention upon this
training." 16
Childrearing practices heavily emphasized gender distinctions. In arti-
cles like "Raise Your Girl to be a Wife" and "How to Raise Better Hus-
bands," childrearing experts urged parents to respond promptly to signs
of "sissiness" in boys and masculine behavior in girls. Sissylike behavior
not only led to harassment from other boys, but might "make him an in-
decisive and ineffectual person, and at worst may even lead to homosexu-
ality or impotence," while tomboyish behavior might lead girls to "give
up their femininity." Most parents reinforced gender norms. As one study
concluded: "The boy or girl whose performance ... [shoveling walks,
washing the car, dusting furniture, fixing light cords, and making beds]
does not follow the traditional pattern can still expect censure in many
homes." 17
In an age of conformity, postwar mothers were not overly ambitious
about academic progress for their children. Rather than wanting their
children to be outstanding, they wanted their children to be normal and
average-congenial and well adjusted. In an age when fitting in was the
desired goal, parents were happy to have their children be like the others
rather than conspicuous. 18
Anxiety over psychologically unbalanced mothering soared after World
War II, permeating popular culture. Advertisements for the movie Rebel
without a Cause underscored this concern. The boy came from a good
family, but was sullen, surly, and tortured. "What makes him tick ... like
a bomb?" advertisements asked. The answer: a weak-willed, apron-
wearing father and an overbearing mother. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho,
based on Robert Bloch's 1959 novel about a deranged mama's boy, simi-
282 Huck~s Raft
larly emphasized the dangers of bad mothering. It drew on the real-life

story of Ed Gein of Plainfield, Wisconsin, whose mother-fixation purport-
edly transformed him into a sexually repressed murderer of women. Pop-
ular culture warned mothers that repressiveness or improperly handled
sexual development could induce nymphomania, frigidity, and homosexu-
ality in their children. 19
A basic premise of the psychoanalytically oriented childrearing advice
of the postwar era was that a mother's relationship with her children was
the key to their psychological and emotional development. To this there
was a corollary: any mistake in mothering could scar a child permanently.
Rigorous toilet training could foster an authoritarian personality. Harsh
scoldings, rigid scheduling, and overly involved mothers could have dele-
terious psychological consequences. The "furtive guilt and anxiety laid up
in early childhood" by overprotective mothers, who tied their children to
their apron strings, induced promiscuity, masturbation, homosexuality,
and frigidity. Even excessive concerns for safety could warp a child psy-
chologically. It was "much better that they suffer for a month of inconve-
nience of a broken limb than that they suffer for life from undeveloped
physical powers and immature personalities. " 20
The Cold War emphasis on conformity, sociability, patriotism, and reli-
giosity colored postwar middle-class childhood. Although the decade of
the 1950s is considered especially family oriented, the most important de-
velopment was the growing influence of extrafamilial institutions in so-
cialization. Schools, churches, television, and the commercial marketplace
fostered separate worlds of childhood and youth in which certain cultural
references and experiences were shared by peer groups, and from which
parents, and even older siblings, were excluded. 21
Middle-class parents turned to a wide range of extrafamilial institutions
to ensure that their children grew up well adjusted and sociable. The post-
war era was the golden age of scouting, with enrollment in the Cub Scouts
soaring from 766,635 in 1949 to 2.5 million a decade later, and the Girl
Scouts and Brownies growing from 1.8 million to four million. Atten-
dance at summer camps also rocketed upward, as a way both to promote
social skills and to defuse the intensity of the highly privatized, inward-
turning middle-class family. The economic prosperity of the postwar era
smoothed the path to separate summer vacations for children. Sunday
school participation also rose as a postwar religious revival brought a
sharp increase in membership in mainstream religious denominations.
F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover warned that "out of 8,000 delinquent chil-
dren, only 42 attended Sunday school regularly." 22
In the context of the Cold War~ there was an intense concern with in-
stilling toughness and competitiveness in boys. Ron Kovic's autobiogra-

phy, Born on the Fourth of July, described how his upbringing in subur-
ban Massapequa, Long Island, led him to despise softness and sensitivity.
The eldest son of an A&P manager and his sternly devout Catholic wife,
Ron was brought up to believe in certain platitudes about patriotism,
family, anticommunism, and manliness. Hollywood's glamorous but unre-
alistic war movies filled him with visions of glory and heroism in battle,
which he mimicked in mock battles with his childhood friends. In later
life, after he had graduated from the Boy Scouts and high school athletics
to the Marines, he felt betrayed by the John Wayne movies he had
watched as a boy, when he returned from Vietnam in a wheelchair, para-
lyzed from the chest down.
During the Cold War there was a symbolic connection between the
struggle with the Soviet Union and the battles boys acted out at recess and
in backyards. The television shows boys watched reinforced a simplistic
view of life as a struggle between good and evil. Of the top twenty-five
prime-time shows in the 1959-60 season, eleven were about cowboys. In
an era marked by anxiety over masculinity and intense hostility toward
homosexuality, boy culture emphasized toughness and aggression, which
found expression in competitive athletics and the cult of the automobile.
Boys wanted to win on the sports field and be big and bold on the road. 23
The middle-class girl culture of the 1950s has often been criticized as
the inverse of boy culture: passive and obsessed with physical appearance.
In fact many of the role models that middle-class girls embraced during
the decade were assertive and self-confident, and one can see the roots of
mid-1960s feminism planted in the increasingly autonomous and self-
assured girl culture of the 1950s. Shirley Owens, Addie Harris, Beverly
Lee, and Doris Coley were just sixteen and seventeen years old when they
formed a singing group, The Poquellos, at New Jersey's Passaic High
School in 1958. A teacher who overheard them vocalizing in the school's
gym persuaded them to enter the school's talent contest. The song they
wrote for the occasion contained these lyrics:
Well I kissed him on a Thursday (oooooo)

And he didn't come Friday (oooooo)
When he showed up Saturday (oooooo)
I said "Bye bye baby"
Rather than a fantasy of endless love, this was a song with undertones of
female toughness, shrewdness, and independence. A classmate introduced
them to her mother, Florence Greenberg, who owned a small recording
company and convinced the group to change their name to the Shirelles.
284 Huck~s Raft
Perhaps the most popular of the girl groups of the late 1950s and early
1960s, the Shirelles sang of selfless devotion in songs like "Soldier Boy,"
but also suggested a more skeptical outlook in songs such as "Will You
Still Love Me Tomorrow?" 24
Contemporary critics, struck by the vagueness of girls' occupational
plans and their general lack of interest in jobs that required commitment,
subjected postwar girl culture to withering criticism. Sociologist Jessie
Bernard said that the numerous magazines aimed at teenage girls reveal
"the major positive-fun and popularity-and negative-overweight or
underweight and adolescent acne-values of its readers." Many girls, it
was widely believed, held unrealistic attitudes toward sex, colored by
heavily romanticized notions of true love. In the early 1950s, eighty love
comics appeared each month, and the song lyrics most popular among
girls emphasized wishing, dreaming, and longing for love. Worst of all,
many girls considered intellectualism and popularity mutually exclusive.
As one girl recalled years later, "When I was in eighth grade I lived in
trepidation lest I be cited as class bookworm. " 25
In contrast to postwar boy culture, which stressed physical competi-
tion, construction, and rough-and-tumble play, girl culture seemingly cen-
tered on love, doll play, relationships, hairdressing, and grooming. It
tended to be an indoor culture, unlike boys' outdoor culture. But this sex-
segregated culture was also a female-centered culture. Life magazine in
1948 described a new fad that would quickly become a basic aspect of
girls' social lives: the slumber party, at which girls would gather to talk
about all the things that mattered most to them through the night. Even
comic books were sharply sex segregated. While boys read war comics
and horror comics like Tales from the Crypt~ girls read romance comics
and comics about Wonder Woman and Polly Pigtails. Older girls, too, had
their own magazines. Modeled on adult true love and women's maga-
zines, these periodicals regularly included confessional letters and advice
about sex, reputation, proper behavior, and dating, as well as features
about teen idols. 26
The postwar girl culture, however, was not merely a matter of sex-role
stereotyping. Girls used doll playing for much more than training in the
emotional and practical skills of mothering: it was also a way of placing
female experience at the center, rather than on the periphery, of life. While
superficially girls' play was more passive than boys', it also contained a
wealth of imaginative action and fantasy. It was more individualistic,
spontaneous, and freer of structure or rules than boys' play, and instilled a
conviction in many girls that they were fully equal to, if not superior to,
boys. Increasingly critical of male-chauvinist attitudes and conduct, many

girls dreaded becoming like their own mothers, whose lives they associ-
ated with subordination to their husbands, drudgery, and isolation. As
one wrote, "the emptiness of her life appalls me; her helplessness and de-
pendence on my father frightens me. " 27
By the late 1950s magazines, movies, music, and television produced a
female culture that cultivated a highly self-conscious sense of girls' impor-
tance. Girls learned that they were members of a new, privileged genera-
tion whose destiny was more open and exciting than that of their moth-
ers'. On television, Lucille Ball, Audrey Meadows, Imogene Coca, and
Gracie Allen played women who refused to stay in their assigned place. By
the early 1960s they were succeeded by perky tomboyish teens and pre-
teens on such shows as Gidget and The Patty Duke Show. 28
Popular music disseminated diverse and contradictory messages about
girlhood. The late 1950s saw the rise of the Girl Group. Along with songs
about selfless devotion, masochistic self-sacrifice, and fantasies of true
love (such as "He's So Fine," "I Will Follow Him," and "Johnny Angel"),
they also sang about male manipulation and fecklessness (such as "Sweet
Talking Guy"). With their spike heels, thick eyeliner, and beehive hairdos,
groups like the Ronettes did not conform to conventional middle-class im-
ages of femininity and offered glimpses of a life outside the world of do-
mesticity. With their warnings about two-timing boys who refused to treat
girls right, these defiant singers offered protofeminist messages about fe-
male independence and assertiveness. Meanwhile, the new kinds of
dances that appeared following Chubby Checker's 1960 hit "The Twist"
no longer required a girl to follow a boy's lead. Instead, her dancing
moves-her shimmies and thrusts-were at the center of these dances. 29
During the late 1940s the proportion of teenagers in the American pop-
ulation reached an all-time low. Nevertheless, this cohort created the
script of modern teenage life. While the word teenager had first appeared
during World War II, it was the postwar period that elaborated distinct
teenage language, styles, and music. Unlike the term adolescence, the
word teenager implied a distinct culture rather than a state of hormonal
transition. The teen culture of the 1950s conjures up a host of nostalgic
images of letterman jackets, juke joints, malt shops, drive-ins, sock hops,
double dates, and "parking" at secluded spots. But this teen world was a
product of specific demographic, economic, and institutional develop-
ments: nearly universal high school attendance, suburbanization, early en-
trance into adulthood, and a degree of affluence that allowed teens to be-
come an autonomous market segment. The growth of high school
286 Huck!ls Raft
attendance meant that most teens, for the first time, shared a common ex-
perience and could create an autonomous culture, free from adult over-
sight.30
High school life was strongly shaped by the fact that most young people
could expect to achieve the markers of adulthood-marriage, entry into
an adult job, and establishment of an independent home-by their early
twenties. Early entry into adulthood gave high school experiences an in-
tensity that has since disappeared. Since most teens could expect to be
married by their early twenties, dating took on special significance and be-
came a major source of public anxiety. In 1955 Picture Week magazine
ran the headline: "Petting: No. 1 Problem." People Weekly asked: "When
Is Going Steady Immoral?" 31
At a time when abortion was illegal and unsafe and few teens had ac-
cess to reliable forms of birth control-and when girls who got pregnant
were often forced out of school and had their children's birth records
stamped "Illegitimate"-sexuality was a particular source of anxiety.
Teen sexuality was governed by a double standard. Boys were expected to
initiate and girls to decide what was appropriate. Girls had to negotiate
how to remain popular while preserving their reputation. "The boy is ex-
pected to ask for as much as possible," reported anthropologist Margaret
Mead; "the girl to yield as little as possible." The dating system made sex
adversarial. As one boy put it, "When a boy takes a girl out and spends
$1.20 on her (like I did the other night) he expects a little petting in return
(which I didn't get)." Meanwhile, girls were told that if they lost their vir-
ginity, they also lost their value to boys. "Few boys want to get stuck with
a tramp," one dating book announced. 32
Girls received a great deal of advice about how to handle sex. In a col-
umn titled "What to Tell Your Teen-Age Daughter about Sex," Cosmo-
politan offered mothers detailed guidance. When your daughter says, "All
the boys say there is nothing to do after a party but pet," reply: "Trivial
sex experience may dull your capacity for truly great love ... The more
you pet, the more your body clamors for closer union." Question: "Boys
say they don't want their wives to be virgins anymore." Answer: "The sex
act is often painful at first and not pleasurable at all ... Therefore if you
have intercourse at an early age you may be frightened and disgusted by
it-and never marry." The Ladies' Home Journal described "The Perfect
Good-Night Kiss": "Ten seconds-not too hard, not too long." 33
At a time when the average age of marriage for women was twenty, go-
ing steady mimicked and served as preparation for marriage. A boy would
give his steady a class ring, a letter sweater, or an I.D. bracelet as a symbol
of commitment. Adults described going steady as "stupid, silly, juvenile,
nonsensical, time-wasting ... [and] dangerous," but it provided security

to teenagers and served as a testing ground for their future intimate rela-
tionships. 34
While teens socialized at school, they also learned. The baby boom
placed intense pressure on schools. In 1952, 50,000 new classrooms were
built, and average daily attendance rose by two million. To meet the de-
mand, school systems started double sessions and set up 78,000 makeshift
classrooms in churches and vacant stores. Teachers had as many as forty-
five students in a class. Parents, who joined parent-teacher groups in re-
cord numbers (PTA membership doubled to eight million), demanded new
school construction. But it took a 184-pound Soviet satellite to precipitate
a radical reconsideration of the nature and extent of American education.
No more than a primitive radio beacon transmitting meaningless beeps,
Sputnik prompted "a sense of foreboding" in the nation's capital. Rear
Admiral Rawson Bennett called Sputnik a "hunk of iron almost anybody
could launch"-but most observers disagreed. Life magazine compared
the Soviet success to the first shots at Lexington and Concord. 35
Sputnik inspired such words as beatnik, coined in 1958, as well as the
later peacenik and refusenik. But the starlike symbol of national shame
more importantly inspired science fairs and language labs and provoked
nationwide soul-searching about the state of public education. The direc-
tor of the American Institute of Physics, Elmer Hutchisson, proclaimed
that the American way of life was "doomed to rapid extinction" if the na-
tion's youth weren't properly taught the importance of science. President
Dwight Eisenhower and Congress responded by allocating the first $1 bil-
lion in direct federal aid to public education to recruit and train teachers
and raise the standards of science, mathematics, and foreign-language
instruction. 36
The post-Sputnik effort to raise academic standards represented a reac-
tion against educational innovations of the preceding decade. To meet the
needs of students who did not plan to go to college, high schools in the
1940s offered an increasing number of practical courses to provide prepa-
ration for future vocations. "Life-adjustment" courses, including instruc-
tion in health, marriage, and family life, were supposed to promote stu-
dents' social and emotional development. This emphasis on practical
preparation for the workplace and adult responsibilities had received a
ringing endorsement in a 1944 publication by the National Educational
Association. Rejecting the idea of a uniform curriculum emphasizing core
academic subjects, the report insisted that "there is no aristocracy of 'sub-
jects."' "Mathematics and mechanics, art and agriculture, history and
homemaking are all peers," the report insisted. A guiding premise of the
288 Huck!ls Raft

A student at a high school in Jacksonville, Florida, demonstrates his

science fair project in 1959, two years after the Soviet Union launched
Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Courtesy of the Florida Photo-
graphic Collection, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee.
so-called life-adjustment movement, spelled out in the 1945 Prosser Reso-

lution (named for Charles A. Prosser, a leading proponent of vocational
education), was that only about 20 percent of American high school stu-
dents were college material. Another 20 percent should be prepared for
the skilled trades, while the remaining 60 percent should receive a more
general education to prepare them for everyday life and work. 37
Even before Sputnik's launch, however, critics of "progressive" educa-
tion had condemned the shift in focus away from academics. In his
influential 1953 book, Educational Wasteland, the historian Arthur
Bestor argued that educational frills had supplanted academics, with the
result that students had to be taught in college what they should have
learned in high school. Sociologist James S. Coleman maintained that an
anti-intellectual student culture flourished in the nation's high schools,
disparaging serious learning, while the philosopher Hannah Arendt
warned in 1958 that academic standards "of the average American school
lag ... far behind the average standards in ... Europe." Popular culture
echoed such criticisms. A former New York City teacher, Evan Hunter,
fictionalized his experiences in a 1953 book, Blackboard Jungle, which
was made into a landmark film starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier.
The first film to feature a rock-and-roll song, Blackboard Jungle also in-
troduced the term daddy-a and popularized the image of urban toughs
wearing black leather jackets and T-shirts with rolled-up sleeves, and
painted an unsettling portrait of urban vocational schools, filled with
alienated students and apathetic teachers. 38
Sputnik intensified the finger-pointing as the country came to the
shocked realization that it was no longer the world's leader in science and
mathematics. In a multipart series on the "Crisis in Education," Life mag-
azine compared an American eleventh-grader from a leading public
school with a tenth-grader in the Soviet Union. While Chicago's Stephen
Lapekas was reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, Moscow's
Alexei Kutzkov had studied English as a foreign language and completed
works by Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. For the American, Life
noted that "getting educated seldom seems too serious," but for the Rus-
sian, high grades were "literally more important than anything else in his
life." Life concluded that "U.S. high school students are ... ignorant of
things [elementary] school students would have known a generation ago."
Admiral Hyman Rickover echoed this sentiment when he wrote in 1959:
"In the American comprehensive school the pupil finds a display of
courses resembling the variegated dishes in a cafeteria .... No wonder he
often gorges himself on sweets instead of taking solid meat that must be
chewed. " 39
The panicked response to Sputnik resulted in a number of ill-thought-
through attempts at miracle cures. The entire Hagerstown, Maryland,
school system was wired for closed-circuit television. A four-engine air-
craft circled over a six-state area, beaming prepackaged lessons to hun-
dreds of midwestern schools. But the crisis also had positive effects. To
arouse student learning, educators increasingly embraced active participa-
tory learning, including collaborative and individual projects and field
trips, and introduced subject-area specialists in science and mathematics
into many schools. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 provided
grants for summer institutes to train teachers in math, science, and foreign
290 Huck's Raft
languages. The National Science Foundation invested more than $100

million in innovative curricula such as the "New Math."
One of the most consequential responses to Sputnik was a report writ-
ten by James B. Conant, Harvard's former president. Titled The American
High School Today, it sold an astonishing 170,000 copies in five months
after its publication in 1959. Conant rejected the European idea of segre-
gating university-bound students in separate institutions for the academi-
cally gifted. Instead he called for "comprehensive" high schools that
would include academic, business courses, and vocational training, and
the elimination of small high schools with fewer than 100 graduating se-
niors. He argued that these schools would promote interaction across
class lines and increase the quality and range of available courses of study.
As a result of the Conant report, more than 100,000 small high schools
closed, and the size of the average high school increased 300 percent, with
many urban high schools ballooning to over 3,000 students.
To address the anonymity of very large schools and promote a demo-
cratic spirit, Conant called for homerooms where vocational and aca-
demic students would mix. Democracy was also to be enhanced through
student government and extracurricular activities. Conant viewed the
comprehensive school in the United States as "a great engine of democ-
racy," and a unifying and integrating force in a highly diverse society. But
Conant was also convinced that only about 15 to 20 percent of students
were capable of mastering a college-prep curriculum and that educators
needed to resist "unreasonable parental pressure" to place unqualified
students in academic classes. He called for a broad array of elective
courses to meet the needs of students who were not going to college, in-
cluding general education, vocational, and commercial programs. Ability
testing, tracking, and a differentiated curriculum lay at the heart of
Conant's recommendations. 40
Conant, a proponent of college admissions testing, played a critical role
in the creation of the Educational Testing Service in 1947, which replaced
college entrance essay examinations with a standardized multiple-choice
test of verbal and mathematical skills. As president of Harvard, Conant
wanted to attract students on the basis of merit and ability rather than
wealth and social standing. Henry Chauncey, an assistant dean at Har-
vard, convinced him that machine-graded testing offered a way to meas-
ure applicants' academic aptitude. A few liberal educators, including
W. Allison Davis and Robert J. Havighurst, argued that the Scholastic Ap-
titude Test measured social and economic advantage rather than mental
ability, but their complaints went unheard. By 1967, when the University
of California began to require applicants to take the Scholastic Aptitude
Test (SAT), the college entrance examination had become a rite of passage
for college-bound juniors and seniors. 41
Another reform that grew out of Conant's efforts was the replacement
of junior high schools with middle schools. The junior high school, a
product of the 1920s, sought to separate preadolescents from younger
children and high school students. In practice, Conant argued, junior high
school students mimicked the worst features of high school students, espe-
cially their obsessions with sports and socializing, while teachers were
dissatisfied that they were not teaching in a high school. Educators re-
sponded by creating the middle school for students in the fifth through the
eighth grades. Unlike the junior high, the middle school was supposed to
be more child focused, with flexible scheduling, collaborative teams of
teachers, and emphasis on intramural athletics. By 1965 there were about
500 middle schools. 42
In succeeding years the limitations of the reforms that grew out of
Conant's recommendations became increasingly clear. Large high schools
proved to be too big and impersonal and fostered alienation and anomie.
Tracking, ability grouping, and aptitude testing, which were supposed to
broaden opportunity, favored students from upper-middle-class back-
grounds and hardened ethnic and social divisions within schools. Mean-
while middle schools turned out to differ little from the junior high
schools they replaced. Far from transforming schools into truly demo-
cratic institutions, these reforms instilled resentment among students over
the paternalism, regimentation, and inflexibility of the modern public
school.
Nostalgia may paint the 1950s as a more placid time, but it was an era
of anxiety. "Let's Face It," read the cover of Newsweek in 1956, "Our
Teenagers Are out of Control." Many youths, the magazine reported,
"got their fun" by "torturing helpless old men and horsewhipping girls
they waylaid in public parks." Newspaper readers learned about twenty-
five Washington, D.C., girls, ages thirteen to seventeen, who formed a
shoplifting club; and a seven- and nine-year-old from Arkansas who
robbed a filling station. The chief of child research at the National Insti-
tute of Mental Health warned parents that "no one can tell if a child will
turn out to be a delinquent five years later. Some children," he explained,
"prepare for delinquency pleasantly and quietly." Haunted by the specter
of Hitler youth, many postwar experts feared that the United States was
breeding its own homegrown fascists. Robert Lindner, whose nonfiction
book Rebel without a Cause furnished the title of the most famous 1950s
youth film, claimed that "almost every symptom that delineates the psy-
chopath clinically is to be found increasingly in the contemporary adoles-
292 Huck's Raft
cent." Respondents to a Gallup poll asking why "teenagers are getting out
of hand" placed the blame squarely on poor parenting: parents were "not
strict enough," did not "provide a proper home life," had "too many out-
side interests," were "too indulgent," and gave their children "too much
money"; and mothers worked when they were "needed at home." Other
observers blamed overcrowded schools, broken homes, the decline of reli-
gion, and a lack of proper adult role models. 43
Comic books, which sold 100 million copies a month, were a particular
source of alarm. Two Oklahoma fifth-graders who stole an airplane
claimed that they had learned how to fly from comic books. Four boys ac-
cused of forming a theft ring said they had been inspired by comic books.
When an eight-year-old in Pawnee, Illinois, hanged himself, authorities at-
tributed his deed to ideas he had picked up in comic books. A single issue
of one comic contained ten guillotinings, seven stabbings, six shootings, a
drowning, and one fatal shove from a ladder. Comics had come a long
way from the original Superman, Wonder Woman, and Archie. 44
Los Angeles responded by passing an ordinance prohibiting the sale of
comic books dealing with murder, burglary, kidnapping, arson, or assault
with deadly weapons. In Decatur, Illinois, and in Spencer, West Virginia,
students and teachers built bonfires of comic books, while the Boy Scouts
launched a project to confiscate comic books on the grounds that they
spread polio bacteria. A congressional subcommittee headed by Senator
Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.) investigated links between comic books and ju-
venile delinquency. By 1954, thirteen states passed legislation regulating
the production and sale of comic books. 45
In that same year psychiatrist Frederic Wertham published a book titled
The Seduction of the Innocent, blaming juvenile delinquency on comic
books. A liberal who objected to the racist (mainly anti-Asian) stereotypes
that pervaded comic books, Wertham considered Superman a fascist vigi-
lante and argued that "a generation is being desensitized by these literal
horror images." Claiming that comic books were filled with homoerotic
imagery, he accused comic-book publishers of making "violence, sadism,
and crime attractive" and exploiting children's fears of physical inade-
quacy. He insisted that "comic book reading was a distinct factor of every
single delinquent or disturbed child" he ever studied. To avoid govern-
ment legislation, the comic-book industry formed the Comic Magazines
Association of America and required a stamp of approval on every comic
book, ensuring that the contents were "wholesome, entertaining, and edu-
cational." Specific injunctions in the self-censorship code stated: "We
must not chop limbs off characters. The same goes for putting people's
eyes out. " 46
The 1950s was a period of outward optimism but inward anxiety and
fear. Apart from comic books, another source of concern was "suicide on
wheels," drag racing. In 1949 Life magazine's cover reported a new
youth-related crisis: "The Hot-Rod Problem." Illustrated with pictures
"of teen-age death and disaster," it described "chicken races," in which
racers drove without holding the steering wheel. It also detailed other teen
games, such as "rotation," in which passengers and driver exchanged po-
sitions without slowing below sixty, and lying down in the street, daring
drivers to run them over. The scariest ploy, "Pedestrian Polo," involved
slamming a moving car's door into a pedestrian. "Just brush 'em, don't hit
'em," was the slogan. 47
We may recall the 1950s as a time of unlocked doors and stable nuclear
families, but the decade of Ozzie and Harriet was also a period of intense
anxiety over juvenile delinquency and gangs. Senator Robert C. Hen-
drickson sounded the alarm in 1954. "Not even the Communist conspir-
acy," he declared, "could devise a more effective way to demoralize, dis-
rupt, confuse and destroy our future citizens than apathy on the part of
adult Americans to the scourge known as juvenile delinquency." Between
1948 and 1954 the number of youths appearing before juvenile courts in-
creased 58 percent, with sex offenses up 37 percent. In just three years-
1948 to 1951-auto theft jumped 61 percent; breaking and entering,
15 percent; and robbery, 25 percent. Yale psychologist Irving Sarnoff
termed this wave of juvenile crime "a running sore on the full belly of the
American way of life. " 48
Whether juvenile delinquency was actually increasing remains unclear,
but there is no question that heightened attention was paid to juvenile
crime and that teen arrests were climbing, reflecting increased law en-
forcement and broadened definitions of criminal behavior. The panic over
juvenile delinquency reflected fears about changes in young people's lives
as well as rapid change in the broader society. In speech and appearance,
teens seemed increasingly alien as a growing number of middle-class teens
adopted values, fashions, and speech associated with the lower and work-
ing classes. Juvenile delinquency became an umbrella term referring to ev-
erything from duck-tail haircuts to murder; but it was gangs that aroused
the most heated concern. The term was applied broadly, to street-corner
loungers, neighborhood clubs, and packs of roving teens; but in the popu-
lar imagination, the word conjured up images of a world of switchblades,
zip guns, and schoolyard rumbles, where groups of working-class youth,
bearing names like "Vampires," "Dragons," and "Egyptian Kings," de-
fended turf and avenged real and imagined slights. 49
For more than a century and a half, lower- and working-class teens had
294 Huck's Raft
turned to gangs as a way to assert their manliness and to police ethnic

boundaries. In 1807 the trustees of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion
Church in lower Manhattan pleaded with the New York City Council to
do something about gangs of white, working-class youths who harassed
their worshippers on Sundays. Gang membership was a normal part of
growing up for early twentieth-century urban boys. A Jewish teacher in
New York recalled his experience as a gang member: "When I was a
youngster ... a common sight was a street battle between the Jewish and
Irish boys ... One day the Irish boys would raid 'our' territory, turning
over pushcarts, breaking store windows and beating up every Jew in sight.
Another day saw 'our' side retaliating on Irish home grounds." 50
The number of gangs in big cities like New York exploded from the
mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. Gang conflicts became more racially
charged and violent as ice picks, knives, and homemade guns replaced
sticks, stones, and bottles. Movies like Blackboard Jungle blamed gangs
on wartime upheavals. "They were six years old in the last war," the
script said. "Father in the army. Mother in a defense plant. No home life.
No church life. No place to go. They form street gangs ... Gang leaders
take the place of parents." In fact gangs served tangible functions, provid-
ing lower-class and working-class adolescents with a sense of identity, ca-
maraderie, and a sense of manliness unavailable in school or the job mar-
ket. However, too often, conflict between gangs erupted into hostile and
destructive warfare that led to loss of life. 51
In New York City the adolescent homicide rate doubled after World
War II as postwar slum clearance and migration from the rural South and
Puerto Rico ignited battles over playgrounds, parks, and neighborhoods.
For many working-class youths, who were alienated from school and
their own families and were qualified for only the most menial jobs as
manufacturing employment declined, gang membership offered a way to
win prestige, power, and adulation from girls. Claude Brown, whose own
family moved to New York in the mid-1940s, described the impulses that
drove his friends into gangs: "The children of these disillusioned colored
pioneers inherited the total lot of their parents-the disappointments, the
anger. To add to their misery, they had little hope of deliverance. For
where does one run to when he's already in the promised land?" 52
During the late 1950s, government and private social service agencies
launched a panoply of programs to reduce the allure of gangs. The most
influential, Mobilization for Youth, which provided job training and job
placement services, served as a prototype for President Lyndon Johnson's
War on Poverty. Proponents of youth programs argued that delinquency
stemmed from "the lack of congruence between the aspirations of youth
and opportunities open to them." In 1961 the federal government began

to provide grants to programs to control delinquency under the Juvenile
Delinquency and Youth Control Act. 53
The troubling image of the leather-jacketed gang member was only one
of a pastiche of postwar media stereotypes of young people. Images of
boys ran from Timmy, the highly responsible adopted orphan caretaker of
Lassie, to the cute but naughty Beaver Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver., the
mischievous Dennis the Menace, and the moody and alienated James
Dean and Sal Mineo. Media images of girls ranged from Lucy van Pelt,
the neurotic Peanuts girl introduced in 1950, to Rhoda, the eight-year-old
liar, cheat, arsonist, and murderer in the 1956 film The Bad Seed; the pert
and perky Sandra Dee; and the adorable "kittens" and "princesses" on
television situation comedies. The 1950s marked the first time that all the
mass media specifically targeted youth as a distinct audience. In addition
to a flourishing industry of children's books, the movies, the music indus-
try, and the new medium of television directed their attention toward
the young. But the new focus on the young, especially on teens, evoked
anxiety among many middle-class adults, who struggled to control the
multiplicity of media messages being transmitted. They were particularly
fearful that their children were adopting the form and substance of work-
ing-class alienation in their music, dress, slang, and attitudes. 54
During the 1950s children's books achieved a popularity unmatched
since the late nineteenth century. In the 1930s studies revealed that hun-
dreds of thousands of American children were unable to read effectively.
To address this problem, Arthur Gates, a professor at Columbia Univer-
sity's Teachers College, and William S. Gray, dean of the University of
Chicago College of Education, developed _the "whole word" model for
teaching reading, in which children learned to recognize entire words and
their meanings at a glance. Gates and Gray insisted that this approach
was superior to phonics, in which young people learn to recognize indi-
vidual letters and pronounce their sounds. Gray wrote a series of readers
for the educational publisher Scott Foresman using the whole-word
method, featuring the characters Dick and Jane and their dog, Spot. Used
in 85 percent of U.S. schools at the height of their popularity in the early
1950s, the Dick and Jane readers did raise students' literacy, but not
enough to satisfy critics. 55
When Rudolf Flesch's 1955 volume Why Johnny Can~t Read was reis-
sued after Sputnik's launch, it became an instant bestseller. Flesch, an au-
thority on literacy, advocated teaching reading by the sounds of letters, or
phonics, rather than by whole words. His book claimed that the refusal to
use proven phonics methods "is gradually destroying democracy in this
296 Huck"'s Raft
country; it returns to the upper middle class the privileges that public edu-
cation was supposed to distribute evenly." Concerns over reading and
math skills soared as pressure was put on educators and schools. 56
William Spaulding, director of Houghton Mifflin's Educational Divi-
sion, thought he knew "why Johnny can't read." It was because books
like Fun with Dick and fane failed to interest children. He wanted a
"whole word" book appropriate for six- and seven-year-olds that children
would find amusing, using no more than 225 words. Dr. Seuss, whose real
name was Theodore Seuss Geisel, took up the challenge. He looked at the
list of words and decided that the first two words on the list that rhymed
would be the basis for the book's title. "I found 'cat' and then I found
'hat,"' he later recalled. "That's genius, you see!" The Cat in the Hat be-
came the bestselling children's book of the second half of the twentieth
century. Later, when publisher Bennett Cerf challenged him to write a
book limited to fifty words, Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham.
Of the ten bestselling children's books of the twentieth century, Dr.
Seuss wrote four: The Cat in the Hat, published in 1957; Green Eggs and
Ham and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, which appeared in
1960; and Hop on Pop, published in 1963. The books' appeal lay in what
Dr. Seuss called the "logical insanity" of the child's world. His whimsical
books, with their emphasis on repetition and rhyme and stress on non-
sense, fantasy, and mischief, captivated children. In contrast to Dick and
Jane, who always behaved properly, Dr. Seuss's characters misbehaved
and refused to obey rules. His books substituted wordplay and humor for
a traditional narrative, but they also dealt with serious themes. How the
Grinch Stole Christmas (1957) criticized the commercialization of Christ-
mas; Horton Hears a Who! (1954) condemned narrow-mindedness; and
Yertle the Turtle (1958) disapproved of selfish ambition. Dr. Seuss's suc-
cess revealed the huge market for picture books for young children.
Alongside the lighthearted toddler-oriented writings of Dr. Seuss, a new
kind of teen's magazine appeared. Mad, founded in 1952, served as the
opening wedge in a children's culture stressing resistance and subversion.
In 1961 an ex-brigadier general denounced Mad as "the most insidious
Communist propaganda in the United States today." Mad parodied maga-
zines (Bitter Homes and Gardens), movies (Seven Itchy Years), television
(The Ed Suvillan Show), and comic books (Superduperman and Bat Boy
and Rubin). Mad was filled with sarcasm, parody, and scathing irrever-
ence; Mad's movie spoofs, Cold War satires ("Spy vs. Spy"), and fold-ins
were informed by an anarchist sensibility. Mad skewered television, ad-
vertising, middle-class consumerism, politics, and adult hypocrisy. The
magazine's cover boy was the goofy-faced, freckled, gap-toothed, bat-
eared, carrot-headed Alfred E. Neuman, whose loopy motto was "What,

Me Worry?" In a decade that reeked of blandness (such as Patty Paige
singing "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?") and piety (Nor-
man Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking), Mad offered an al-
ternative perspective. But for all of its attacks on authority figures and
other sacred cows, the magazine generally avoided the most explosive is-
sue of the era, civil rights. 57
The postwar era was the classic period for the treatment of adolescence
in fiction. There was Frankie Adams in Carson McCullers' classic 1946
novel, A Member of the Wedding, which chronicles the coming-of-age of
a young southern girl, who feels invisible and unheard and is struggling to
understand her emerging feelings of womanhood. There was John
Grimes, in James Baldwin's 1953 novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a
fourteen-year-old African-American youth who must confront his reli-
gious doubts, sexual confusions, and recognition that he can never realize
his dream of being at home in a white world. Then there was Holden
Caulfield, the embodiment of the sullen, self-absorbed adolescent, angst-
ridden and alienated. Sensitive, troubled, and confused, he was the
prototypical prematurely cynical teenager, as portrayed by the brooding
Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley. Sixteen years old, he rails
against the phoniness of the adult world. His casual talk and brooding but
nonchalant style touches a nerve. Asked by a former teacher about his fu-
ture, he replies: "'Oh, I feel some concern for my future, all right. Sure I
do.' I thought about it for a minute. 'But not too much, I guess."' Trau-
matized by his younger brother's death from leukemia, he trusts no one
except his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe. Lacking any desire to grow up, he
contrasts the superficiality and hypocrisy of adults with the innocence and
honesty of childhood. 58
During the postwar era the adolescent became the archetypal figure for
the moral and sexual confusions of the age. Unlike earlier writers, like
Booth Tarkington, who had treated adolescents with bemused condescen-
sion, postwar writers took the problems of adolescence much more seri-
ously. Instead of focusing on puppy love or adolescent self-consciousness,
postwar writers focused on weightier subjects, such as adolescents' sexual
initiation or juvenile delinquency (Amboy Dukes) or a girl's sadistic plea-.
sure in her sexual power over men (East of Eden). Lesbianism (The Way-
ward Ones), homosexuality (Compulsion), and rape (Entry E) become
important subjects in the novels of adolescence. Increasingly authors
dwelt on the notion that initiation into maturity involved a loss of inno-
cence, through sexual experience or a death of a person or animal for
which the youngster might or might not be responsible. Rather than sym-
298 Huck!Js Raft
bolizing immature innocence, adolescents stood out as symbols of self-

conscious introspection, estrangement, and confusion. 59
Of all the forces for change in postwar children's lives, television wor-
ried adults most. Newspapers and magazines were filled with frightening
stories of children mimicking acts that they had seen on television: a
seven-year-old who added ground glass to his family's stew; a thirteen-
year-old who stabbed her mother with a kitchen knife; a sixteen-year-old
babysitter who strangled a sleeping child to death. In 1945 only 5,000
American households had televisions; in 1960 seven of every eight fami-
lies had a TV set. Critics likened TV to a narcotic that induced lethargy in
children and to a Pied Piper that led young people away from their
parents. Many feared that television induced a premature sophistication
in the young, cut into their reading and study time, and made dinnertime
less of a family occasion by encouraging families to eat with the televi-
sion on. 60
In 1961 the first influential book-length study appeared. Television in
the Lives of Our Children reported that by sixth grade children spent al-
most as much time watching television as they did in school and that they
watched the same programs as adults. The study speculated that television
contributed to premature aging by encouraging children to grow up too
fast and produced a passive, passionless generation, children who "have
no sense of values, no feeling of wonder, no sustained interest." The sex-
ism of children's television, however, went virtually unnoticed. Female
characters were grossly underrepresented, especially in children's car-
toons, and they were confined largely to family roles. 61
Television broadcasting produced a shared children's culture unprece-
dented in history, one that stretched across all social classes and regions.
For millions of baby boomers, Nancy Claster, affectionately known as
Miss Nancy on Romper Room" was their first teacher. Assisted by her
helpers Mr. Doobee and Mr. Don'tbee, she introduced preschoolers to
their ABC's, arithmetic, and manners, and taught them health lessons,
songs, and games. "Do-Bee a milk drinker," young viewers were told.
"Don't-Bee a nasty tongue." Captain Kangaroo" which debuted in 1955,
amused toddlers with Mr. Greenjeans, Grandfather Clock, and the puppet
friends Mr. Moose and Bunny Rabbit. The captain also interspersed jazz
and classical music with puppetry. Family sitcoms such as The Adventures
of Ozzie and Harriet" Father Knows Best" and Leave It to Beaver showed
children what middle-class families were supposed to be like. They were
part of a concerted effort to combat the deepening disengagement of fa-
thers from family life. Not an accurate portrait of postwar fatherhood,
Ward Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver represented a fantasy of a caring

father in a modern family. 62
Meanwhile the film industry, suffering a drastic drop in attendance as a
result of television, antitrust decisions that stripped the studios of their
theaters, and the imposition of tariffs and import restrictions by foreign
countries, pursued the youth market with vigor. In cinematic portrayals of
teenagers, amused condescension gradually gave way to anxiety and be-
wilderment. The "Kleen Teens" of the 1930s and 1940s were supplanted
by sensitive, directionless teens and leather-jacketed rebels, protesting the
sterility of American life.
Many teens viewed these movies while sitting in the privacy of their
cars at drive-ins. Originally envisioned as places where whole families
could watch a movie in the comfort of their own car and not have to
worry about babysitters or disturbing other moviegoers, drive-ins quickly
became a teen haven. In 1950 there were fewer than 500 drive-ins in the
country, but by 1957 there were ten times as many, and by 1959 there
were as many drive-ins as traditional theaters. The family car became a
means of escape for the teenaged son and daughter and the drive-in their
alternate living room. 63
Troubled adolescents became a focus of many of the most influential
films of the 1950s. Family melodramas of the decade abounded with
Oedipal problems and sibling rivalry. They pictured adult culture as blind
to the problems of youth and portrayed teenagers as searching for genuine
family love, warmth, and security. Those who chose delinquency did so
because of despair over the seeming rejection of their parents. At least
sixty movies portrayed youth as alienated or depraved, wearing a leather
jacket, a T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves, jeans, and a dangling cigarette,
and had titles like Date Bait ("Too young to know. Too wild to care. Too
eager to say I will!"); Live Fast~ Die Young ("The sin-steeped story of to-
day's beat generation"); High School Hellcats ("What must a good girl
say to 'belong'?"); On the Loose ("School-girl by day, thrill-seeker by
night"); and The Violators ("Too young to know better ... Too hard to
care"). The most famous, Rebel without a Cause, was advertised with the
catchphrase "He's got a chip on both his shoulders!" Rebel without a
Cause incorporated all the teen flick stereotypes: a pack taunting and bait-
ing a loner, ostracized kids bonding with one another, and parents unable
to say or do anything right. Derided as exploitation films, "teenpics" met-
aphorically addressed adolescent anxieties. Pictures in which a couple
necking in a parked car was interrupted by the creature from the Black
Lagoon offered not only an opportunity for hugging in fright, but also a
300 Huck's Raft
message about the dangers of unrestrained sexuality. Adolescents whose

bodies were changing could appreciate the feelings of the teenage were-
wolf, the incredible shrinking man, and the fifty-foot woman. 64
The end of the 1950s saw a sharp reaction against the teen genre, with
its emphasis on reckless, rebellious, and troubled teens. Signaled by the
box-office success of clean-cut teen idol Pat Boone in 1957 in Bernardine
and April Love_, the shift in tone was unmistakable when Disney's The
Shaggy Dog became 1959's second most popular film. The rise of seven-
teen-year-old Sandra Dee to stardom in Tammy and the Bachelor and
Gidget underscored the movement away from the classic 1950s teenpic. A
1959 poll named Sandra Dee as "the Number One Star of Tomorrow." 65
The 1950s are routinely denigrated as a decade of chrome and confor-
mity, of gray-flannel organization men and cultural stodginess, in which
the most heated front-page controversies concerned issues like "going
steady." Photographs of the period-showing boys with military-style
crew cuts and girls in pageboys or ponytails wearing pearls-reinforce
this image of an orderly and stable era. Yet change was bubbling beneath
the surface, and the twentieth century's midpoint bristled with develop-
ments that changed American society irretrievably. Youth culture and the
civil rights movement would come to full flower in the 1960s, but their
emergence was already evident in the 1950s.
In the spring of 1954, when the nation's top record was Perry Como's
"Wanted" and the top album was the soundtrack from The Glenn Miller
Story_, a new musical style was germinating. Bill Haley and the Comets cut
"Rock around the Clock," Elvis Presley held his first recording session at
Sun Records, and Alan Freed became a disc jockey at WINS in New York.
Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and the Platters were beginning
to break the radio color barrier. Rock and roll provided a vehicle through
which urban, rural, and suburban youths declared their independence
from parental standards and expressed their desire for pleasure. When the
first rock-and-roll concert took place at Cleveland Arena on March 21,
1952, some 30,000 teens packed a building that could seat only 10,000,
while 15,000 others waited outside. Rock and roll spoke to the alienation
and boredom of teenagers in newly built suburbs. The new music exuded
sexuality; indeed, rock and roll was a slang term in certain black commu-
nities referring to sexual intercourse. 66
Musically, rock and roll was a style of popular music marked by guitar-
based instrumentation, blues-based composition, electronic amplification,
high volume, and danceability. In contrast to jazz, which depended upon
brass instruments, rock and roll emphasized the electric guitar and drums.
During the 1950s it became the soundtrack of the lives of those between
twelve and twenty-one. Much of the new youth music of the 1950s self-
consciously celebrated the teenage years. Groups like Frankie Lyman and
the Teenagers embraced the word teenagers, and many songs, like Mark
Dinning's "Teen Angel" and Dion and the Belmonts' "Teenager in Love,"
had the word teen in their title. 67
What made this new music possible was the movement of southerners,
black and white, to the cities of the Upper South and the North during
and after the war. This movement brought diverse musical traditions to-
gether and forged a new sound out of the propulsive beat of rhythm and
blues and the twang of country and western. As radio's comedy and vari-
ety programming shifted to TV, network radio went into a steep decline,
and radio stations began to play more youth-oriented music than in the
past. A doubling of the number of radio stations between 1945 and 1950
encouraged an emphasis on music, especially the Top 40 format (n'amed
for the forty record slots in jukeboxes), transforming disc jockeys into ce-
lebrities. Meanwhile technological innovations, such as the introduction
of the light, durable, and inexpensive 45-rpm record by RCA Victor in
1948, made it easy for teens to create their own music collections, while
the invention of the transistor in 1947 led to the development of portable
transistor radios and an explosion in the number of car radios, from six
million in 1946 to forty million in 1959. Television helped transform teen
culture into a national culture. In 1957 Dick Clark persuaded ABC to in-
clude American Bandstand in its network lineup. Running Monday to Fri-
day from three to half-past four Eastern Time, the show not only spot-
lighted new forms of dancing; it also showcased many African-American
recording artists and remained one of television's only integrated pro-
grams until the mid-1960s. Television's most popular dance show, it
brought rock and roll and the latest fashions in dance and dress to mil-
lions of teenagers. 68
But rock and roll generated extraordinary anger. F.B.I. director J. Edgar
Hoover called it "a corrupting impulse," and in Hartford, Connecticut,
Dr. Francis J. Braceland described rock and roll as "a communicable dis-
ease, with music appealing to adolescent insecurity and driving teenagers
to do outlandish things." Between 1955 and 1958 there were numerous
crusades to ban rock and roll from the airwaves. Meanwhile, executives
with the major record companies sought to smooth the jagged edges of
rock and roll. Sexually explicit songs were "covered"-rewritten and
rerecorded by white performers. The major record companies publicized a
series of "kleen" teen idols, beginning with Tommy Sands in 1957. 69
Within five years the first phase in the history of rock and roll was over:
Elvis Presley was inducted into the army, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens
302 Huck~s Raft
died in a plane crash, and Chuck Berry was jailed on charges of transport-
ing a minor across interstate lines for immoral purposes. Meanwhile Alan
Freed was fired in the midst of a payola scandal, Little Richard's religious
conversion led him to stop performing, and Jerry Lee Lewis was in dis-
grace following his marriage to a thirteen-year-old cousin. Despite these
shocks, youth music was not completely absorbed into mainstream cul-
ture. By the end of the decade a new phase in the history of rock and roll
had begun, with the rise of the Girl Groups, the Motown sound, and
surfer music. 70
More than half a century after its advent, rock and roll remains the dis-
tinctive and dominant form of youthful musical expression. Its persistence
is not an accident. Rock and roll emerged as a solution to the psychologi-
cal and emotional frustrations of the teenager. Prolonged schooling, de-
layed marriage, and postponed entry into adult careers made rock culture
increasingly appealing as a visceral form of cultural rebellion. It offered
an expressive outlet for all the pent-up energy, sexuality, and individual-
ism that teens experienced. Indeed, now that the category of youth ex-
tends far beyond the teenage years, encompassing both children as young
as eight and young adults into their late twenties and early thirties, the ap-
peal of rock and roll has broadened even as its forms have fragmented. 71
Predominant in the emergence of rock and roll, African Americans re-
mained largely invisible in mainstream popular culture. The African
American writer Michelle Wallace, who was born in 1950, saw few im-
ages of blacks on television and the movies or in comic books and popular
magazines: "I ... grew up watching a television on which I rarely saw a
black face, reading Archie and Veronica comics, Oz and Nancy Drew sto-
ries and Seventeen magazine, in which 'race' was unmentionable." No
longer, however, could the country's racial problem be repressed. For
many young African Americans, it was a death in the Mississippi Delta
that energized their commitment to the civil rights struggle. 72
His friends called him "Bobo." Emmett Till had suffered from polio
and was left with a slight speech impediment. He was just fourteen years
old in the summer of 1955, when he and seven relatives and family friends
went to visit kinfolk in Money, Mississippi. A Delta town of about 200,
Money was located alongside the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad,
which had carried African Americans, like Till's own family, from the
South to Chicago. His mother thought he would be safer in Money than
in Chicago. Before he boarded his southbound train, she reminded him of
Mississippi's racial etiquette: that he should say, "Yes, sir," "No, sir," not
look whites straight in the eye, and not talk to them unless spoken to. De-
spite her warnings, Till found himself in the wrong place at the wrong
')
time. A white woman store clerk in Money claimed, at various times, that
the youth had called her "baby," whistled at her, or spit out his bubble
gum in her direction. Around two in the morning on Sunday, August 28,
the woman's husband and brother came to Till's great-uncle's unpainted
cottonfield cabin and dragged the fourteen-year-old out of bed. Three
days after he was abducted, his neck was found tied to a seventy-five-
pound cotton gin fan dumped in the Tallahatchie River fifteen miles up-
river from Money. His face was unrecognizable: an eye was gouged out,
an ear torn off, and his skull bashed in. Emmitt Till's mother insisted that
the body be brought to Chicago for burial and ordered an open-casket
funeral so that the public could see what had been done to her son. 73
Federal authorities showed no interest in intervening in or even investi-
gating the case. At the trial in 1957, Till's great-uncle, Moses Wright, cou-
rageously identified the abductors in open court. But barely an hour after
they began deliberating, the jurors returned their not-guilty verdicts. The
brutality of the murder of a child aroused African Americans in a way
that no previous act of violence had. Coming months after the Supreme
Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, declaring segre-
gation in public schools unconstitutional, the murder set the stage for the
signal Montgomery bus boycott three months later. 74
In Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody, who was fifteen years
old at the time, described the killing's impact on her life. "Before Emmett
Till's murder," she wrote, "I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the
Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me-the fear of being
killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears." The eld-
est of nine Mississippi children, she went on:
I was fifteen years old when I began to hate people. I hated the white men
who murdered Emmett Till and I hated all the other whites who were respon-
sible for the countless murders . . .
But I also hated Negroes. I hated them for not standing up and doing
something about the murders. In fact, I think I had a stronger resentment to-
ward Negroes for letting the whites kill them than toward the whites. 75
Emmett Till's murder underscored blacks' vulnerability, victimization, and

powerlessness, which could no longer be tolerated by younger African
Americans.
African-American children would stand at the forefront of the civil
rights struggle of the 1950s, when school desegregation and integration of
public transportation became major battlefields. In 1849 Massachusetts'
Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the city of Boston had done nothing im-
proper when it required five-year-old Sarah Roberts to walk past white el-
304 Huck"'s Raft
ementary schools and attend an all-black segregated school. It rejected the

argument made by the abolitionist and U.S. Senator Charles Sumner and
African-American attorney Robert Morris that segregated schooling
"brand[s] a whole race with the stigma of inferiority and degradation." In
1950, 101 years after the Roberts case, Oliver Brown, a railroad worker,
filed suit against the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas. His daughter,
eight-year-old Linda, was a third-grader at all-black Monroe Elementary
School. To reach her school she had to walk half a mile through a railroad
switchyard to catch a bus, even though an all-white elementary school
was only seven blocks away. Topeka's white lawyers argued that Monroe
Elementary School was architecturally identical with Topeka's white
schools and that the black schools had more teachers with master's de-
grees. Brown's attorney argued that even if the facilities were equal, the
very fact of racial discrimination was detrimental to African-American
children. At the time that Mr. Brown sued the Topeka school board, simi-
lar cases were filed in Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washing-
ton, D.C. In all but the Delaware case, lower courts had ruled that segre-
gation in public schools was permissible as long as the separate facilities
were equal. The Supreme Court consolidated the cases. 76
Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund used sociolog-
ical evidence to show that segregation harmed black children's self-
esteem. During the 1940s the psychologist Kenneth Clark had studied ra-
cial preferences among a group of black children and discovered that
most black children ascribed positive characteristics to white dolls and
negative characteristics to darker dolls. "It was clear," he concluded,
"that American racism imposed a tremendous burden of deep feelings
of inferiority in the early stages of personality development in black
children." 77
On May 17, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court handed down its deci-
sion. It ruled that segregated schools were inherently unequal. The court
stressed that the badge of inferiority stamped on minority children by seg-
regation hindered their full development no matter how equal the facili-
ties. The isolation of African-American children "generates a feeling of in-
feriority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts
and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone," wrote Chief Justice Earl
Warren. "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of
'separate but equal' has no place." To win a nine-to-nothing vote on the
case, and the moral authority that a unanimous decision would carry,
Chief Justice Warren agreed in a 1955 decision that schools be desegre-
gated with "all deliberate speed." This contradictory expression called for
gradual desegregation. At the time, seventeen states had segregated school
systems, and 99 percent of black students in the South attended all-black

schools.
Young people played a critical role in desegregating schools and trans-
portation facilities. Nine months before Rosa Parks, a forty-two-year-old
black seamstress, refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Ala-
bama, bus to a white passenger, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin had
been dragged off a bus and arrested for the same thing. Around four in
the afternoon on Friday, March 2, 1955, the eleventh-grader boarded a
city bus across the street from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and took
a seat near the emergency exit, toward the middle of the bus. In Mont-
gomery, the ten seats in the front of the bus were reserved for whites, and
the ten in the rear were designated for blacks. The sixteen seats in the
middle could go to black riders unless white passengers wanted them.
Blacks and whites could not sit in the same row. When more white pas-
sengers boarded the bus, the driver told Claudette to move to the rear. A
black high schooler shouted: "The only thing she's got to do is stay black
and die." Claudette recalled her feelings at the time: "If it had been for an
old lady, I would have got up, but it wasn't. I was sitting on the last seat
that they said you could sit in. I didn't get up, because I didn't feel like I
was breaking the law." 78
Sitting next to her was a pregnant African-American woman, who said
"that she had paid her fare and that she didn't feel like standing." A po-
lice officer boarded the bus and turned to the black men sitting behind the
pregnant woman and said, "If any of you are not gentlemen enough to
give a lady a seat, you should be put in jail yourself." One man stood and
gave her his seat. When Claudette refused to move, the officer pulled her
off the bus and charged her with assault and battery as well as violating
the city and state segregation laws. At her trial, Claudette was found
guilty and released on indefinite probation in her guardian's care.
Although she was the first person arrested for protesting segregation on
Montgomery's buses, her name has remained obscure. Montgomery's
black leaders were looking for a symbol around which to organize
antisegregation protests and decided that Claudette was not appropriate.
She had grown up in King Hill, Montgomery's poorest section, an area of
railyards, stockyards, junkyards, and unpaved streets, in a house without
indoor plumbing. Raised by a great-aunt who worked as a maid and a
great-uncle who mowed lawns, Claudette had a rebellious streak. Her
teachers had threatened to expel her from school for wearing her hair in
plaits. The summer after her arrest, Claudette became pregnant, and E. D.
Nixon, the black businessman who drafted the plan to protest segregated
buses, feared that her pregnancy might discredit the cause. Nevertheless, it
306 Huck's Raft
was a child who had led the way in challenging segregated transportation
and provided the example for adults to follow.
The first major confrontation between states' rights and the Supreme
Court's school desegregation decision took place in Little Rock, Arkansas,
in 1957. Seventy-five black students applied to attend Little Rock's Cen-
tral High School, and eighteen were chosen. By Labor Day, only nine were
still willing to serve as foot soldiers in freedom's march. Little Rock
seemed an unlikely place for a civil rights confrontation. Its largest news-
papers were generally supportive of desegregation, and the city had al-
ready desegregated its public library and bus system. Arkansas's governor,
Orval Faubus, owed his reelection in 1956 to black voters. But respond-
ing to polls showing that 85 percent of the state's residents opposed
school integration, the governor directed the Arkansas National Guard to
bar the nine teenagers from enrolling in all-white Central High. Built at a
cost of $1.5 million, the school was, at the time of its construction in
1927, the largest and most expensive high school in the United States. In
contrast, Horace Mann, the city's black high school, had been built for
$300,000 and had no athletic fields.
For three weeks the National Guard, under orders from the governor,
prevented the nine students from entering the school. President Eisen-
hower privately pressed Faubus to comply with the court order. When he
refused to budge, the president federalized the Arkansas National Guard
and sent in 1,000 paratroopers from the Army's 101st Airborne Division
to escort the students into the school.
Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine black students, encountered an angry
white mob hurling racial epithets. "Someone ought to lynch her! Anybody
got any rope?" "Go back to your own kind!" she was told, followed by
the chant "Two, four, six, eight-we don't want to integrate." Why did
she persist? "Part of it was pure stubbornness," she explained, and part a
sacrifice for her community. When fifteen-year-old Terrance Roberts was
confronted by a boy carrying a baseball bat, he tried to hold his head up
high and look the other boy in the eyes. "He came up and he half raised
the bat and he said, 'Nigger, if you weren't so skinny ... ' ... I thought to
myself then, 'I'm probably over the worst of it. " 79
The Little Rock nine were placed in separate homerooms and were
forced to use separate restrooms and drinking fountains. Prohibited from
participating in any of the school's clubs or teams, the nine were ostra-
cized and physically harassed, shoved against lockers, tripped down stair-
ways, and taunted by their classmates. One was struck in the head by a
lock. Not all the African..:American students were able to turn the other
cheek. Minniejean Brown was expelled for dumping a bowl of chili on a
classmate's head when he persisted in calling her racist names as she tried
to eat lunch. The remaining students were greeted the next day by a sign
that said, "One down, eight more to go." 80
"Most of the white students didn't bother us," Elizabeth Eckford re-
called; "they just pretended we didn't exist. But there was this small group
of white students that bothered us every day. They would call us names,
trip us in the hallways, and push us down the steps, without fear of being
reprimanded by the teachers or the principal." She went on: "We couldn't
fight back ... It was up to us to make integration a success, and if you
think about it that way, then you realize that when you believe in some-
thing, even if you're afraid, you'll find a way to accomplish your goals. " 81
Only one of the Little Rock nine graduated from Central High. Ernest
Green received his diploma in dead silence. In the fall of 1958 Governor
Faubus shut down the public high schools to prevent further integration,
and the schools did not reopen for a year. The lessons of Little Rock
were clear: integration would not come easily, and it would be African-
American children-like six-year-old Ruby Bridges-who had to stand on

Delois Huntley integrates Alexander Graham Junior High School in Charlotte, North
Carolina, in September 1957. Courtesy of the Public Library of Charlotte and
Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.
308 Huck"'s Raft
the front lines. In 1960 Ruby integrated William Frantz School in New
Orleans by herself. Day after day, white adults shouted epithets as federal
marshals escorted her to school. In the midst of the screaming mob, Ruby
knelt down and prayed for her attackers. Because almost all white parents
had withdrawn their children, the school was largely empty except for a
single teacher, who taught Ruby in an otherwise vacant classroom. Six
years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, just
forty-nine southern school districts had desegregated, and only one per-
cent of black schoolchildren in the eleven states of the old Confederacy at-
tended public school with white classmates. Only the activism of the next
decade would alter these bleak facts. 82
For many Americans the 1950s represent the ideal of a child-centered
society, a time when children could count on a full-time mother and didn't
have to worry about divorce. In the face of nostalgia, we need to recall
that the stereotypical1950s childhood was confined to a minority of chil-
dren, and that it was a product of a constellation of circumstances un-
likely ever to return. In a reaction to Depression hardships, wartime
stress, and Cold War anxieties, middle-class parents placed more empha-
sis on marriage, parenthood, and childhood than ever before. Rapidly ris-
ing adult male incomes combined with low inflation, low housing prices,
and relatively low economic aspirations to allow middle-class and many
working-class families to subsist on one income and to have a full-time
mother for young children.
Yet the seeds of social change were already germinating. Early mar-
riages during the 1950s contributed to a surge of divorces beginning in the
mid-1960s. Ever-rising notions of a middle-class standard of living com-
bined with women's growing expectations of self-fulfillment to propel
many mothers into the paid labor force. Above all, youth was becoming a
group more distinct from children and adults. A large proportion of teens
developed a separate existence, relatively free from the demands of adult-
hood and more independent of parental supervision. For longer and
longer periods of their lives, young people were spending their time in the
company of other young people within specialized youth-oriented institu-
tions. New occupations sprouted up to serve this new and growing mar-
ket, including disk jockeys, adolescent psychologists, and orthodontists.
As the youth market grew, it became the target of marketers. With the av-
erage adolescent in the mid-1950s spending $555 annually "for goods
and services, not including the necessities normally supplied by their fami-
lies," manufacturers of record albums, cosmetics, and training bras aimed
at the young consumer. Even young children were being defined and tar-
geted by their interests and needs. They had their own television shows,
like The Wonderful World of Disney, and their own heroes, like the
coonskin-hatted Davy Crockett. The effect of the consumer culture was to
peel young people away from their families into a world of peers.
Many adults, convinced that the youth culture posed a serious threat to
traditional values, sought to break down the barriers it erected between
parents and their offspring. Look magazine in 1957 hired a research com-
pany to define words commonly used by teenagers, such as blast, bread,
and raunchy. San Antonio high schools banned tight jeans and duck-tail
haircuts on the grounds that undisciplined dress encouraged undisciplined
behavior. The city of Houston prohibited young people under eighteen
from owning a car unless it was used exclusively for transportation to and
from work. But these efforts to hold back the tides of change proved fu-
tile. During the next decade the youth culture flourished as never before. 83
chapter fifteen
Youthquake
H E R PARENTS tried to shield her from the humiliation of Bir-

mingham, Alabama's, segregation laws. When the family shopped at a lo-
cal department store, Carolyn McKinstry's mother told her that she didn't
need to try on the clothes. "This is fine," she said. "This'll fit." Nor was
she allowed to ride on the city's segregated bus system. A special bus
drove the family's six children to school, "because they didn't want us to
have bad feelings about ourselves on the city buses." But it proved impos-
sible to screen out the realities of segregation. Carolyn's textbooks, passed
down from white schools, were filled with obscenities "that seemed writ-
ten to us." She knew that her father, who waited on tables at the Birming-
ham Country Club, was not allowed to enter the club as a visitor. 1
Her parents didn't want her to take part in civil rights protests, but she
became involved anyway. At the 16th Street Baptist Church, she heard the
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say words to which she could relate:
"We want the right to sit down in a restaurant and eat a hot dog after we
shop ... We want the right to use the water fountain because all water is
water, and it's God's water." At church she took classes in nonviolent pro-
test, and on May 2, 1963, fourteen-year-old Carolyn was one of nearly
1,000 schoolchildren who marched through Birmingham's streets to end
segregation at downtown businesses. Six hundred young people were ar-
rested that day. The next day she and 400 other students marched down-
town, only to be met by police wielding firehoses and water cannons.
Later she recalled the hoses' power: "It felt like the side of my face was
being slapped really hard. It h.urt so bad I tried to hold on to a building so
Youthquake 311
it wouldn't push me down the sidewalk, and it just flattened me against

the building." The hair on the right side of her head was ripped away. 2
She was in church on Youth Day in September 1963. At 10:25 A.M.,
fifteen sticks of dynamite, set by segregationists, exploded next to the
church's stone staircase. The bombing killed eleven-year-old Addie Mae
Collins and fourteen-year-old Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and
Cynthia Wesley, and injured twenty-three others. A day planned to cele-
brate the church's young people instead became a day to mourn them.
The brutality of racism manifest in the deaths of these children would mo-
bilize the civil rights struggle as never before.
Carolyn McKinstry was one of many young people who stood on the
front lines of the social upheavals of the 1960s. Young people were at the
cutting edge of social and cultural change, whether this involved racially
integrating schools, protesting against the Vietnam war, or participating
in the burgeoning youth culture. Their protests and actions transformed
not only their sense of self, but the very character of American culture.
In the spring of 1960, students around the world were making their
voices heard on political issues. Thousands of South Korean students,
many still in high school, staged massive demonstrations against sus-
pected rigged elections in the hope of toppling the authoritarian govern-
ment of Syngman Rhee. In Japan masses of students protested their gov-
ernment's support for a U.S.-Japanese defense treaty that they feared
would lead to Japan's remilitarization. In Britain student groups demon-
strated against racial oppression in South Africa and their country's nu-
clear policies. 3
In the United States student political activity in 1960 was at a higher
pitch than at any time since the 1930s. For many, John F. Kennedy's elec-
tion as president, with the youngest president succeeding the oldest,
signified a new spirit of youth at the very top of the nation. In San Fran-
cisco 200 college students were clubbed, firehosed, and dragged down
the steps of San Francisco's City Hall when they protested a House Un-
American Activities Committee hearing. At the 1960 White House Con-
ference on Children and Youth, 1,400 youth delegates organized dem-
onstrations against racial discrimination. Yet nothing could match the
electrifying effect of the sit-in movement that began in Greensboro, North
Carolina, on February 1, 1960, when four well-dressed black college
freshmen walked into a dime store and sat down at the whites-only lunch
counter. Within weeks 70,000 young people were participating in the sit-
in movement that swept across the segregated South, teaching adults a les-
son in the power of nonviolent direct action. 4
During the 1950s young people were tarred with the epithet "fat, dumb
312 Huck's Raft
and happy." But by early 1961 journalists detected a new mood. "Youth
everywhere is exploding into action," reported Look magazine in a spe-
cial issue on "The Explosive Generation." "Apathy has given way to ac-
tion." A survey of high school principals reported that students were
more serious about education, harder working, and more intellectually
curious. A poll of high school students also suggested a shift. An over-
whelming majority said that "someone who does not believe in our pres-
ent form of government should be allowed to make a speech," and only
13 percent admitted to "any bad feelings" about members of other races.
A majority agreed with the social critic Paul Goodman that the main trou-
ble with growing up today was finding productive and meaningful goals
in a mass consumer society. This, said Look magazine, was a generation
that feared not change, but stagnation. Said one student: "What I fear
about most is the most terrible of all curses, found in the book of Isaiah:
'Make the heart of this people fat, make their ears heavy, and shut their
eyes.' " 5
The term the sixties instantly evokes images of bell-bottom jeans, san-
dals, and clenched fists; of countercultural experimentation, underground
newspapers, and militant protest. It is a decade synonymous with campus
unrest, urban rioting, psychedelic art, hallucinogenic drugs, and political
assassination. Although the word revolution strikes many as hyperbolic,
the 1960s is a period in which the word seems apt. The young lived
through turbulent times, including a sexual revolution, a cultural revolu-
tion, a student revolution, and a rights revolution. For the 1960s genera-
tion, a new and promising world was unfolding. 6
During the 1960s widely held presuppositions about authority, family
life, gender, race relations, sexuality, and proper behavior were contested.
At first many of the emerging values and behavior patterns were widely
rejected, even by a majority of the young. But in the 1970s they were rap-
idly embraced. At the start of the 1960s a "cult of security" seemed firmly
entrenched in family life. Half of all women married between the ages of
sixteen and nineteen and then bore three or four children in rapid succes-
sion. Almost all of these women remained outside the paid workforce un-
til their children reached school age. Meanwhile their husbands, generally
a year or two older than their wives, entered the adult workforce at an
early age. Securing a wife, children, and job were primary goals for the
male breadwinner. During the decade, however, this desire for early mar-
riage, family, and employment broke down. Prolonged schooling, delayed
marriage, and postponed entry into a full-time adult career in an affluent
economy created a period of youth extending far beyond adolescence.
College attendance soared, and as it did, the age of marriage climbed
Youthquake 313
sharply. The doubling of the divorce rate between 1960 and 1970 indi-
cated a new willingness to risk the security of marriage and family for
greater individual fulfillment. At the same time, the number of men and
women living together outside of marriage-or what used to be called
"living in sin"-increased sixfold. When the winds of change in family life
subsided, men and women married six years later than their 1960 coun-
terparts, and men entered the adult workforce half a decade or even a dec-
ade later. Over half of married women with children under five were in
the labor force, and a growing proportion of adolescents began sexual re-
lations in their mid-teens. A sea change had taken place in behavior and
attitudes. 7
An activist generation was coming of age. During the 1960s youth
loomed larger than any other social group in making public their needs
and desires. As a result of depressed birthrates during the 1930s and the
postwar baby boom, the number of teenagers exploded. Unlike their par-
ents, whose values and expectations had been shaped by the Depression
and World War II, young people grew up in a period of unprecedented
prosperity, security, and ease, when the gross national product expanded
at an average rate of 3.9 percent a year and real income doubled. Their
parents' concern for their well-being became translated into their own
search for personal fulfillment. 8
Several times in the course of American history, generations have been
the country's most salient social division. The Revolutionary generation
dominated national politics through the presidency of Andrew Jackson.
Generational consciousness was intense among the disillusioned youth of
the Lost Generation of the 1920s and the World War II generation. Al-
most from birth, the baby-boom children constituted a cohesive genera-
tion. During the 1960s they were envisioned as intensely idealistic andre-
bellious; in later years they were caricatured as uniquely self-absorbed,
materialistic, and narcissistic.
It is easy to dismiss talk of generations as overly simplistic. After all, the
same period that gave rise to the radical Students for a Democratic Society
also produced the conservative Young Americans for Freedom. Although
the 1960s generation is usually associated with the baby boom, many of
the figures most closely linked with the youth culture of the decade were
born before the postwar boom. Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Tom
Hayden were not baby boomers. Nor were H. Rap Brown, Stokely
Carmichael, Janis Joplin, or Angela Davis. The formative influence on
their lives had been the democratic idealism of the New Deal and World
War II. But their activism found a ready following among many baby
boomers. No previous generation in American history developed the baby
314 Huck~s Raft

A teenage girl smokes marijuana in Leakey, Texas, in 1973. Courtesy of the National
Archives, Washington, D.C.
boomers' intense generational self-consciousness. Nor had any previous

generation felt such an intense sense of responsibility for promoting social
and moral change. Purveyors of consumer products had targeted the
young as a conspicuous market who had followed a common path of con-
sumption through childhood, sharing the same fads, television shows,
music, and many of the same experiences in school. It was ultimately,
however, the events of the tumultuous 1960s that defined them as mem-
bers of a common generation: all were shaped, to one degree or another,
by the struggle for civil rights, the counterculture, the rebirth of feminism,
and the Vietnam war. More than a common frame of reference, these
events forced young people to confront choices about dress, hairstyle,
drug use, sex, the military draft, and the politics of the war. The most
significant issues involved a questioning of authority in schools and the
family. 9
By 1960 a new genre of books, with titles like Parents on the Run and
Suburbia's Coddled Kids, criticized permissive childrearing, defiant chil-
dren, and parents who let their offspring bully them. An issue of
Newsweek titled "Are We Trapped in a Child-Centered World?" depicted
a child manipulating mother and father dolls. After a decade of sentimen-
tality and anxiety about children, a rash of articles in popular magazines,
Youthquake 315
such as "Is the Younger Generation Soft and Spoiled?" and "Child Mon-
archy in America?," harshly criticized the young. When 251 teenagers and
young adults were caught smoking marijuana in wealthy suburban
Westchester County, New York, in the fall of 1960, parents were shocked.
The causes, according to the New York Times, were peer pressure,
defiance of conformist parents, and an effort to escape the emotional pov-
erty that existed amid material plenty. 10
Meanwhile maverick social critics advanced the argument that growing
up in America was becoming more problematic, and that the most sensi-
tive young people were growing deeply alienated from their society. In
1959 Edgar Z. Friedenberg published The Vanishing Adolescent, which
argued that the period of growth and exploration known as adolescence
was disappearing from American life. Earlier in the century, adolescence
had been a vital period when a young person "learns who he is ... what
he really feels . . . [and] differentiates himself from his culture." But the
stifling postwar emphasis on conformity and material possessions had
made it more difficult for young people to find themselves. 11
The Vanishing Adolescent was one of a number of books that argued
that postwar society interfered with central developmental tasks. In 1960
the poet Paul Goodman published Growing Up Absurd, a provocative cri-
tique of how Americans had failed their children. The postwar young, he
claimed, were growing up in a world of contradictions. Middle-class soci-
ety valued independence but made the young dependent on adults to
fulfill their needs; it stressed achievement but gave the young few avenues
in which to achieve. Schools educated young people to be callow and stu-
pid and denied them meaningful opportunities to explore, experiment,
and express their deepest instincts. "It is hard," he wrote, "to grow up in
a society in which one's important problems are treated as nonexistent."
Goodman contended that the smothering love and hovering attention of
postwar parenting made it more difficult for the young to assert their in-
dependence or to establish a unique identity. 12
Jules Henry's 1963 study Culture against Man painted a nightmarish
picture of youth obsessed with popularity and consumption. "In contem-
porary America," he wrote, children were "trained to insatiable consump-
tion of impulsive choice and infinite variety." Family life, Henry believed,
was characterized by insensitivity and an ethos emphasizing competition.
He described an incident in which a mother vacuumed a rug for twenty
minutes while her daughter cried miserably. Finally, the mother told the
baby, "O.K., you're the winner." The mother's neglect stemmed from the
values of competition (in which giving in to the child's demand for atten-
tion represents a loss of control); materialism (a concern for cleanliness
316 Huck's Raft
takes precedence over the child's needs); individualism (placing the

mother's desires above the infant's); and toughness and independence (by
not spoiling the baby and leaving her to fend for herself). Henry's point
was that the overly intense child-centered postwar family produced chil-
dren who found it difficult to break the umbilical cord during adoles-
cence.13
Psychologist Kenneth Keniston's 1965 book The Uncommitted exam-
ined why many bright, affluent young people, who had all of American
society's material advantages and opportunities, despised their society. He
attributed youthful alienation to a family configuration in which the fa-
ther was emotionally withdrawn and the mother frustrated, unfulfilled,
and overly invested in her children; and an educational system that culti-
vated cognitive skills at the expense of feelings and moral sensitivities.
The result was that morally sensitive young people adopted an anti-
intellectual posture and rejected adulthood. "Adulthood," to them,
"means accepting an adult self-definition which entails limitation of
awareness, openness, and genuineness; it involves materialism, boring
work, being controlled by the demands of others." Encumbered by an ex-
cessive moral sensitivity, these youths found it impossible to identify with
their society's goals and aspirations. The books of Friedenberg, Goodman,
Henry, and Keniston identified a deep current of alienation and disaffec-
tion among the young, despite the attention and nurture they had received
as children. Soon that estrangement had a name: the generation gap. 14
At a time when Americans worried about gaps of all kinds, including
the missile gap and the "credibility" gap, the generation gap was the most
distressing. It signaled a growing sense of solidarity among young people
and a belief that their peers could understand their passions and ideals in
a way their parents could not. In 1967 Time magazine observed: "The
young have already staked out their own mini society, a congruent culture
that has both alarmed their elders and, stylistically at least, left an irresist-
ible impression on them." The generation gap was easily exaggerated and
romanticized. Social scientists, such as Joseph Adelson, Albert Banduras,
and Elizabeth Douvan, assured adults that the generation gap was an un-
founded myth. They reported that there was very little divergence of ideas
between teens and their parents on moral and social issues, and that most
young people turned to parents for advice. The biggest cultural division,
they argued, was not between young people and their parents, but among
youth themselves, especially between white middle-class and white work-
ing-class adolescents. Yet the generation gap was real nonetheless. It was
readily apparent in dress, style, music, and the "jive" language adopted
from the hipsters and beats of the 1950s. Blue jeans, overalls, work shirts,
Youthquake 317
tie-dyed T-shirts, and long hair symbolized the distance separating mid-
dle-class youth from the world of conventional adulthood. 15
Music became a defining symbol of generational difference. S. I.
Hayakawa, the semanticist and president of San Francisco State Univer-
sity during its most turbulent years, referred to a youthful rebellion
against songs that tended "toward wishful thinking, dreamy and ineffec-
tual nostalgia, unrealistic fantasy, self pity and sentimental cliches mas-
querading as emotion." Instead, folk music, with its concern for the
downtrodden and oppressed, struck a responsive chord, as did the
rhythms and beats of world music. With its protest themes, passion, and
vitality, the youth music of the 1960s created a shared sense of identity
and fostered a vision of a utopian world unlike that created by adults. 16
The social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s had demographic, eco-
nomic, institutional, and political roots. These included the postwar baby
boom, which reduced the median age by a decade, to less than twenty; un-
precedented postwar prosperity, which freed many young people from the
need to join the workforce at an early age; and the rapid expansion of
higher education, which increased the campus population from just two
million in 1946 to nearly eight million by 1970. At the same time the
great postwar migration of nearly four million African Americans from
the rural South to urban areas had yielded protests and struggles against
job and housing discrimination in northern cities, and the diminishing in-
tensity of the Cold War permitted a questioning of the direction of Ameri-
can foreign policy. Conditions were ripe for young idealists to participate
in creating a new and counter culture.
For black youth, the time of waiting was coming to an end. When
Franklin McCain was thirteen, the black Washingtonian considered kill-
ing himself. "I was brought up with a major myth," he later explained. "I
was told that if I worked hard, believed in the Constitution, the 10 Com-
mandments and the Bill of Rights, and got a good education, I would be
successful." And he knew it wasn't true. What did blacks like his father or
grandfather get? "No respect, no manhood, not even a modicum of de-
cency for obeying all the rules and doing the right stuff," he said. A col-
lege friend, Joseph McNeil, also knew about prejudice. When his dog was
hit by a car, he later remembered, a veterinarian refused to treat it because
"it was a black['s] dog." On February 1, 1960, McNeil, then seventeen,
and eighteen-year-old McCain and two friends-Ezell Blair Jr. and David
Richmond-sat down at an F. W. Woolworth's "whites only" lunch coun-
ter in Greensboro, North Carolina, to protest racial segregation. They
were refused service, but remained even after threats from the manager
and the local police. By sitting-in, they risked a six-year prison term and
318 Huck's Raft
expulsion from college, but the time had come to act. The Woolworth's
was chosen after some consideration. The store was part of a national
chain. The students weren't hoping for much sympathy from the Greens-
boro business community, but they thought shareholders in New York
might have something to say about the segregated lunch counters. None
anticipated that the protest would become a national phenomenon. 17
On the first day, when they didn't know whether they would be beaten,
arrested, or both, an older white woman walked up to them and said,
"Boys, I'm disappointed in you." She hesitated a second and added, "You
should have done this sooner." The four freshmen returned with more
friends the next day. By the fifth day, more than 200 supporters entered
the store. During the protests, white toughs burned black protesters'
clothing with cigarettes and dumped soda and coffee on their heads, not
to mention mouthing obscenities and threats. Six months later, however,
Woolworth's and other Greensboro stores desegregated their counters.
"From my perspective, it was a down payment on manhood," said Joseph
McNeil, who later became a brigadier general. The spark struck by the
four students in Greensboro ignited student-led protests across the
nation. 18
Critics of 1960s radicalism adopted crude forms of psychologizing to
explain the decade's rebelliousness. Vice President Spiro Agnew and the
Reverend Norman Vincent Peale blamed permissive childrearing, arguing
that it had produced a generation of "demanding little tyrants," who had
grown up to be "unkempt, irresponsible, destructive, anarchical, drug-
oriented" hedonists. Student protests and drug use, they claimed, were lit-
tle more than Oedipal rebellions or puberty rites in which coddled youth
sought to assert adulthood and autonomy. In fact the primary sources of
unrest were not psychological but political. Youth activists were appalled
by racial inequities, impersonal and unresponsive educational bureaucra-
cies, irrelevant school curricula, and a foreign policy perceived as im-
moral. For many young African Americans, the reason seemed self-
evident: they were stepchildren of the American dream. 19
Anne Moody's childhood home was anything but a haven in a heartless
world. A sharecropper's daughter, born in Wilkerson County, Mississippi,
in 1940, she grew up surrounded by violence and desperate poverty. Years
later she vividly recalled the hunger pangs she felt while living in a succes-
sion of shacks. Her upbringing was colored by violence-violence
inflicted on her neighbors and relatives and violence within her own fam-
ily, including beatings inflicted by a cousin. Her mother fed her family on
leftovers from her domestic job or on beans and bread. Work came early
Youthquake 319
in a family with nine children. She had to clean houses for white families
to help her family afford food and clothing. 20
Her family was riven by tensions rooted in Mississippi's racial system.
Her father, unable to cope with the humiliations of a sharecropper's life,
abandoned his family. Her mother, exhausted and irritable, got angry
whenever her daughter talked about race. Her relatives, who internalized
the racist emphasis on skin color, were bitterly divided between those
with lighter and darker skin. From a young age, however, Moody was de-
termined not to accommodate herself to injustice. When she was fourteen,
she refused to enter a white woman's house, which she cleaned, through
the back door. Every day she came to the front door, until the woman re-
lented and let her in.
The themes Moody developed in Coming of Age in Mississippi, the
memoir of her youth, were echoed in other writings by young black par-
ticipants in the civil rights struggle. They, too, choked on memories of vio-
lence and humiliation and sought to direct their rage outward. Frustrated
by the passivity and submissiveness of their parents' generation, they
sought to confront the Jim Crow system with direct action. Like their
white counterparts, they shared in the educational and recreational possi-
bilities of the era as well as the rebellion. All shared an impulse to assert
their dignity. 21
Before the 1960s, influential studies of black children had revealed low
levels of self-esteem and racial pride. By the end of the decade, however,
attitudes among children had measurably shifted. When researchers repli-
cated studies in which black children were asked whether a white or a
black doll was "nice" or "pretty," 70 percent of black second- and third-
graders chose the black doll, and 79 percent said that the white doll
"looks bad." Young blacks were also significantly less likely than their
parents to say that skin color would be a factor in the choice of a spouse.
A growing number felt that blacks had a special spiritual quality-
"soul"-setting them apart from whites. A new pride-filled generation of
African Americans was emerging, apparent in Afro hairstyles, the promo-
tion of the holiday of Kwanzaa, and a new emphasis on African history
and culture. 22
A large number of white radicals were ministers' children. Others were
"red diaper babies," the sons and daughters of members of the Old Left,
like Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary. A disproportionate number of
the early white radicals were of liberal Protestant and, especially, of Jew-
ish background. The central role of Jews in the early New Left, which re-
sembled their parents' role in the student organizations of the 1930s,
320 Huck~s Raft
reflected the socialist tradition that their families had carried from the
ghettoes of eastern Europe, a distrust of authority fed by historical memo-
ries of centuries of persecution, and an upbringing in which their parents
had been respectful of progressive ideas. 23
Many 1960s activists-including Students for a Democratic Society
leaders AI Haber, Tom Hayden, Paul Potter, and Rennie Davis; the femi-
nist Gloria Steinem; the future football union leader Ed Garvey; Represen-
tative Barney Frank; and editors Willie Morris and Ronnie Dugger-had
participated in the National Student Association, the nation's largest stu-
dent group. Growing out of a convention held at the University of Wis-
consin in the summer of 1947, NSA delegates had drafted a Student Bill
of Rights calling for stronger student government and expanded access to
higher education. From its founding, the organization had an activist
thrust, electing an African American, Ted Harris, as its president in 1948.
Three years later the organization condemned McCarthyism, and in 1959
it opened a civil rights office in Atlanta, which provided funds and logisti-
cal support for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) after its founding in 1960.24
While some critics claimed that young radicals were driven by self-
hatred, sexual inadequacies, narcissism, conflict with their fathers, alien-
ation or guilt over their middle-class origins, and envy of the sexual
potency of blacks, more careful studies showed that the early student ac-
tivists were generally close to their parents and no more neurotic than
nonprotesters. Far from rebelling against their parents, many were ful-
filling their parents' political aspirations. Reared in relatively permissive
and egalitarian families, however, the young radicals naively expected au-
thority figures other than their parents to be responsive to their concerns.
Facing few career or financial pressures, impatient, and often inspired by
religious idealism, they were prepared to risk violence or jail to bring
about the social change that their peaceful protests did not seem to
achieve. 25
Their deepening antipathy and anger toward American society-its in-
equitable treatment of racial minorities, its unequal distribution of power
and resources, and its interventionist foreign policy-was fueled by expe-
riences with insensitive school administrators and by a mounting belief
that fundamental reforms could not take place without threats of disrup-
tion. Above all, the Vietnam war and the military draft radicalized many
students. As the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer observed in 1969, the
war placed youth in a morally untenable position: "The poor and the
black were disproportionately subjected to the draft. The well-favored, as
long as they stayed in school, and even out of it, were freed from it. The
Youthquake 321
fortunate middle-class youth . . . undoubtedly felt guilty because those

with whom they wanted to be allied, whom they hoped to help, had to go
and fight in Vietnam. " 26
Racial injustice also animated student radicalism and ignited the most
far-reaching efforts in American history to address racial and economic
inequality. Much of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society focused on chil-
dren in poverty. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant sec-
retary of labor, touched off a storm of controversy with a report calling
"the breakup of the black family ... the single most important social fact
of the United States today." Twenty-five percent of black families were
single-parent and female-headed, and broken homes, he contended, bred
school failure, delinquency, and welfare dependency. Moynihan noted
that the black failure rate on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, which
measured the ability to perform at an eighth-grade level, was 56 percent,
four times the rate for whites. Meanwhile black children made up a third
of all the youths in juvenile institutions, and half of all African-Americans
received welfare benefits at some point during childhood, compared with
8 percent of white children. 27
The Moynihan report attributed worsening rates of illegitimacy, di-
vorce, and separation to the effects of slavery, discrimination in employ-
ment and education, and thirty-five years of Depression-level joblessness.
Three centuries of injustice had created a "tangle of pathology," produc-
ing matriarchal family patterns that led young men to overcompensate in
asserting their masculinity and made it more difficult to seize opportuni-
ties opened up by civil rights legislation. To address the poverty, jobless-
ness, and crime plaguing the African-American community, Moynihan
called for a concerted national effort to enhance the "stability and re-
sources of the Negro American family." The civil rights strategist Bayard
Rustin accused Moynihan of trying to impose middle-class norms upon
the urban poor, while the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. feared that
the report's bleak picture of black family life would be used to justify an
argument for "innate Negro weakness." But whatever its flaws, the re-
port's strength lay in its focus on the needs of the African-American fam-
ily. It declared that only by mobilizing social, economic, and political
forces could the country achieve true racial equality. 28
President Lyndon B. Johnson drew on the Moynihan report in his com-
mencement address at Howard University in 1965. The first stage in the
struggle for equal rights, the president said, involved securing legal rights.
"But freedom is not enough ... You do not take a person who, for years,
has been hobbled by chains and liberate him ... and then say, 'you are
free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have
322 Huck's Raft
been completely fair." The next task was to ensure "equality as a fact and
as a result." To break the cycle of poverty and disadvantage, the Johnson
administration proposed a variety of new government programs, includ-
ing job training, urban redevelopment, affirmative action in hiring and
contracting, and expanded medical and nutritional programs, including
prenatal and postnatal care. But the centerpiece of the War on Poverty in-
volved targeting educational resources at disadvantaged youngsters
through preschool, reading readiness, and other compensatory educa-
tional programs designed to give minority students a "head start" and to
counteract inequalities in social and economic conditions. 29
The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act marked the first
time that the federal government had provided ongoing funding for public
education and sought to advance educational equity. Instead of providing
aid to all school districts, the act allocated $1 billion a year to schools
with high concentrations of low-income students. It funded counseling
services, health and nutrition programs, and enrichment programs in
reading and mathematics. The act also provided the first federal grants
targeted at children with low English-language proficiency and those with
disabilities. In addition it allocated $150 million for a preschool program
for disadvantaged children, based on an experiment in Ypsilanti, Michi-
gan, that offered a holistic approach to child development, providing
health care, nutritious meals, socialization, and a chance to learn through
play. Launched in 1965, Head Start initially offered preschool children
from low-income families an eight-week summer program to meet their
emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs. Key pro-
gram goals were to foster disadvantaged children's physical well-being,
social skills, self-image, and school readiness. A defining feature of Head
Start was an emphasis on parental participation. Rather than being pas-
sive recipients of services, parents would be participants in developing
skills to nurture and teach their children. For the children who partici-
pated in the project, Head Start offered a sense of government concern
with social and racial justice.
Head Start met the needs of a small portion of disadvantaged children.
To assist larger numbers of children, policymakers and private founda-
tions looked to television. Middle-class preschoolers with affluent, edu-
cated parents already knew the alphabet and how to count when they got
to kindergarten, but poor, inner-city children did not. In 1967 Joan Ganz
Cooney, a documentary producer, chaired a study of children's television
habits. The study found that Saturday morning cartoons had an average
of twenty violent episodes an hour, and that preschool children watched
about thirty hours of TV each week. Cooney assumed the challenge of
Youthquake 323
creating a television show designed specifically to prepare poor children

for school. With $8 million in grants from foundations and the federal
government, Cooney's Children's Television Workshop developed a show
to teach preschool kids the alphabet and how to count to ten. Ironically,
the show took its direction from TV commercials: the segments-covering
everything from the letter W to natural disasters-were short and repeti-
tious, so that the lessons sunk in. The format included games, music, short
films, cartoons, and catchy jingles. 30
As a test, the first five programs were aired on a Philadelphia television
station, and 100 families were paid to ensure that their children watched
the show. The children's reactions were muted. The one thing that they
liked were two puppets, Bert and Ernie, much as previous generations had
adored Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd; Kukla, Fran, and Ollie;
and Howdy Doody. The producers decided to redesign the show,
showcasing the "Muppets," including Big Bird, Miss Piggy, and Kermit
the Frog. To attract an inner-city audience, the show, which first aired in
November 1969, was set on an urban street and featured a multiethnic
and racially diverse cast. During its first six months, half of the nation's
twelve million preschoolers watched the show. The program evoked in-
tense controversy; critics denounced its TV-commercial style pacing and
expressed concern that it would negatively affect children's expectations
of school. But children loved Sesame Street, and it became an integral part
of preschoolers' lives. It marked a radical expansion in the public commit-
ment to meeting the educational needs of disadvantaged children.
In addition to providing children in poverty with preschool experience
and educational television, children's advocates sought to help children
who were disadvantaged by an inability to speak English through bilin-
gual education. In New York City, where about 60 percent of the Puerto
Rican students dropped out, public schools awarded academic diplomas
to 331 Puerto Rican high school graduates in 1963-or about one percent
of the total Puerto Rican enrollment. Only 28 Puerto Rican graduates
went on to college. 31
In 1959, following the Cuban Revolution and a massive influx of Cu-
ban children into south Florida, Miami's public schools introduced the
first bilingual education programs. In 1968 the Great Society inaugurated
the first federally mandated programs for bilingual education. The Bilin-
gual Education Act of 1968 (Title VII) provided supplemental funding for
school districts that established programs to meet the needs of children
with limited English proficiency. Title VII funded seventy-six bilingual
programs its first year, serving students who spoke 14 different languages.
In 1974, in Lau v. Nichols_, the Supreme Court ruled that any school dis-
324 Huck~s Raft
trict with students who spoke a language other than English, not just
those that received Title VII funds, had to provide English-language in-
struction. Lawyers for Chinese-speaking students in San Francisco suc-
cessfully argued that the city's schools failed to provide English language
instruction to some 1,800 students who spoke no English. 32
For the first time, students with disabilities also received federal sup-
port. Among the most radical innovations of the era was the establish-
ment of a legal right to special education. Until the mid-1970s, most states
allowed school districts to refuse to enroll students they considered "ined-
ucable," while physically disabled students of normal intelligence were
routinely grouped with mentally retarded students. A 1949 Pennsylvania
law was typical: a school district could refuse to enroll or retain any stu-
dent who did not have a mental age of at least five years. Such children
were considered ineducable, "unable mentally or physically to profit from
school attendance." In Washington, D.C., eight-year old George Liddell
Jr., who was mentally retarded, was denied admission to an elementary
school because he would have required a special class. Sixteen-year-old
Michael Williams, who suffered from epilepsy, was expelled from a Wash-
ington school because of frequent absences due to health problems. Alto-
gether, an estimated 12,340 children with disabilities were excluded from
school in the nation's capital during the 1971-72 school year. 33
Not until1966 did the federal government provide grants to school dis-
tricts to provide services to students with disabilities. Two landmark 1971
court cases-Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children v. Com-
monwealth of Pennsylvania and Mills v. Board of Education-established
the principle that states had a constitutional duty to provide a free public
education to children with mental or behavioral disabilities. Yet despite
more than thirty federal court decisions upholding the principle that states
had to provide these children with an education appropriate to their
learning capacities, as late as 1975 almost a million children with disabili-
ties received no education at all, and only seventeen states provided an ed-
ucation to even half of the known physically or mentally disabled chil-
dren. In 1973 Congress enacted legislation prohibiting any recipient of
federal aid from discriminating in offering services to people with disabili-
ties, and empowering individuals to bring lawsuits to end discriminatory
practices. Two years later it passed the Education for All Handicapped
Children Act, which required that students with disabilities receive a free
public education appropriate to their unique needs. The law required that
students be educated in regular classrooms, whenever appropriate, and
mandated parental involvement in all decisions regarding students with
special needs.
Youthquake 325
A new sense of agency and entitlement arose among students during the
1960s. Unwilling to passively accept conditions as they were, students
transformed schools into arenas of cultural and political conflict. In Chi-
cago, public school enrollment increased by 146,000 during the 1950s, al-
most exclusively in African-American schools. To meet the demand, many
Chicago schools operated on double shifts. But by 1961 the only schools
with double shifts were located in black areas. African-American schools
also had more pupils per teacher and twice as many noncertified teachers.
In October 1963 and again in February 1964, black school children in
Chicago staged massive school boycotts to protest the gerrymandering of
school attendance boundaries and inequitable conditions in the black
schools. 34
At the same time that African-American students in Chicago, Detroit,
and many other cities protested inequities in public education, Latinos in
the Southwest staged "blowouts," spontaneous boycotts of school classes
on behalf of Brown Power. The first took place in March 1968, in
Eastside Los Angeles, when at least 1,000 students left classes. Student
demonstrators demanded remedies for soaring dropout rates, over-
crowded, dilapidated schools, incompetent teachers, and counselors who
steered Latino students into auto shop instead of college-track courses.
They were angry that Latino students-classified as white-were used to
integrate public schools, while non-Latino whites remained in their own
racially segregated schools They also wanted bilingual education, Mexi-
can-American principals, culturally relevant courses, and cafeteria food
prepared by mothers from the barrios. At the time, the average dropout
rate in Eastside high schools was 44 percent, three times higher than in
schools on the Westside or in the San Fernando Valley. In 1968 Latinos,
then predominantly Mexican Americans, accounted for 20 percent of the
enrollment but for fewer than 3 percent of teachers and 1 percent of ad-
ministrators. The initial walkout, which lasted several days, quickly
spread to fifteen high schools, where 20,000 students left their classes. 35
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act called for a sweeping survey of
"the lack of ... equal educational opportunities" due to race, religion, or
national origin. In the space of just three months James S. Coleman, a so-
cial scientist at Johns Hopkins, surveyed 600,000 students, 60,000 teach-
ers, and 4,000 schools-the largest social science project ever conducted.
Coleman concluded that the social and educational backgrounds of stu-
dents and teachers, not the quality of school facilities or class size, were
the key factors in children's academic success. Regardless of the quality of
teachers, facilities, or curricula, inner-city schools failed to overcome the
problems of a disadvantaged home environment. His report described
326 Huck's Raft

Teenage Mexican Ameri-

cans demonstrate on behalf
of Chicano power in Den-
ver, Colorado, in 1970.
Courtesy of the Denver
Public Library.
gains in educational motivation for disadvantaged children who mixed

with middle-income students in school, as well as higher scores on stan-
dardized tests, and found no educational harm to middle-income stu-
dents. The report concluded that integration was more effective than com-
pensatory programs for low-income students. The Coleman report was
invoked to support busing to achieve racial balance in public schools. It
was taken to mean that high expenditures on teachers, curricula, facilities,
or compensatory education had only a modest impact on student achieve-
ment. Floyd McKissick, the national director of the Congress on Racial
Equality (CORE), angrily denounced the report for implying: "Mix Ne-
groes with Negroes and you get stupidity. " 36
In 1968-fourteen years after the Brown v. Board of Education deci-
sion-federal courts began to order busing as a way to deal with de facto
segregation brought about by housing patterns. In April 1971, in the case
Youthquake 327
of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education!' the Supreme

Court upheld "bus transportation as a tool of school desegregation."
Busing proved to be extraordinarily divisive. Many white working-class
families viewed schools as centers of local pride and bitterly resisted intru-
sions on "their" schools. Meanwhile, because the privileged lived outside
central cities, the burden of busing fell upon the inner-city poor. In 1974,
by a five-to-four vote in Bradley v. Milliken!' the Supreme Court rejected a
school desegregation plan that would have involved busing across school
district boundaries. 37
The most ferocious conflict over busing occurred in Boston. Ruling that
the Boston School Committee had "intentionally brought about and
maintained a dual school system," Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered a
busing plan that initially involved eighty schools. The most controversial
element involved mixing students from Roxbury, a predominantly poor
black neighborhood, and South Boston, a poor Irish enclave. Most
schools integrated quietly, but protesters in South Boston screamed epi-
thets and hurled stones, eggs, and rotten tomatoes at school buses. Nine
black students were injured, and Theodore C. Landsmark, a black lawyer,
was struck by a white youth wielding a flagpole topped by the American
flag. During the second phase of integration, obscene taunts, racial ten-
sions, and fights were particularly pronounced in Charlestown, a predom-
inantly Irish neighborhood in the northern part of Boston. In 1973, before
Judge Garrity issued his order, Boston had 94,000 public school students,
57 percent of them white. By 1984 the total had fallen to 57,000 students,
only 27 percent white. In a study published in 1975, James S. Coleman
declared busing a failure because it had prompted a massive departure of
whites from public schools. For some children, especially in large and
mid-sized cities, court-ordered school busing meant that they attended
more diverse schools than in the past. But for millions of others, busing
spurred their parents to enroll their children in private schools or to move
to the suburbs, where they attended predominantly white public schools. 38
During the 1960s a platoon of books-including Nat Hentoff's Our
Children Are Dying and Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age-lam-
basted American public education as racist, mind deadening, and soul de-
stroying. Educational critic John Holt called children a "subject people."
"School for them is a kind of jail," he wrote. "Do they not, to some ex-
tent, escape and frustrate the relentless, insatiable pressure of their elders
by withdrawing the most intelligent and creative parts of their minds from
the scene?" Part of the broader critique of American society's inequalities,
the attack on education was prompted by glaring inequities in school
funding, rigid systems of tracking and ability grouping, and arbitrary dis-
328 Huck~s Raft
cipline policies. It carried far-reaching implications for children's school-

ing, including court-ordered changes in school funding mechanisms, insti-
tution of more elective courses, due-process protections for students
accused of violating school policies, and adoption of laws prohibiting dis-
crimination against female students. Meanwhile student radicals con-
ceived of youth as a new proletariat and a potentially revolutionary class,
who, alongside African Americans and other marginalized and disaffected
groups, would overturn the social order. According to John and Margaret
Rowntree in a 1968 pamphlet, youth was confined in school in order to
prevent adolescents from disrupting the labor market. Used exclusively in
part-time minimum-wage jobs, young people were alienated and increas-
ingly conscious of their exploitation. Such arguments reflected a new cyni-
cism and suspicion of authority. 39
Ferocious debates erupted about whether education was breaking free
of the rigidities of the 19 5Os to focus on the aspirations of children and to
encourage the development of free, balanced individuals with a fair place
in society, or whether the 1960s was a disastrous period of declining stan-
dards and weakening authority. In New York City a teacher named Elliot
Shapiro tried out a curriculum organized around the release of hostility.
Drawing on Frantz Fanon's notion that colonized people must vent their
hate against imperialists in order to recover their unique identities,
Shapiro had the students give talks, write compositions, and act out why
and how they hated their parents, their siblings, the police, the neighbor-
hood, the school, and the school's principal. 40
Others, like John Holt and Ivan Illich, advocated "unschooling"-
allowing children to learn through their interactions with the adult world
rather than through formal instruction. At A. S. Neill's experimental
school Summerhill, in the small town of Leiston, England, the forty stu-
dents were free to do whatever they pleased as long as they did not violate
the rights of others. "As it is practiced in other schools," Neill claimed,
education "invariably means cramming a child full of generally useless in-
formation, forcing him to forgo completely whatever spontaneity, inclina-
tion and creativity he might have." At Summerhill no effort was made to
train students to accept authority over their own judgments. 41
Of all the changes that took place in education in the 1960s, perhaps
the most lasting development involved the emergence of a concept of stu-
dent rights. Six weeks after the bodies of civil rights workers James
Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were discovered in
Philadelphia, Mississippi, students in the town's all-black Booker T.
Washington High School began to wear "freedom buttons" bearing the
words "One Man One Vote" and the, initials "SNCC." The school's prin-
Youthquake 329
cipal prohibited the buttons, claiming that they would "cause a commo-
tion" and "didn't have any bearing" on the children's education. When
fifty students disregarded his order, he suspended them. Forty-seven stu-
dents eventually backed down, but three went to court. When asked in
court why she wore the button, one student replied, because she wanted
people "to go to the courthouse and register to vote." "What people?"
her lawyer asked. "The colored people in our community." "Do they vote
in Philadelphia?" "No, sir," she replied. The federal district court refused
to allow the students to wear the buttons, but the Fifth Circuit Court dis-
agreed. The "freedom button," the judges held, communicated "a matter
of vital public concern." The case of Burnside v. Byars served as a crucial
precedent for a 1969 Supreme Court decision that upheld students' free-
expression rights in a case known as Tinker v. Des Moines. 42
In mid-December 1965 four children in the Tinker family in Des
Moines, Iowa, decided to protest the government's policies in Vietnam by
wearing black armbands, emblazoned with a peace symbol. A sixteen-
year-old friend, Christopher Eckhardt, joined their protest. The Tinkers'
father was a Methodist minister who was engaged in protests against the
war; Christopher's mother was an official in the Women's League for
Peace and Freedom. A few days before they began their protests, school
authorities announced that any student wearing an armband to school
would have to remove it or face suspension. The Tinker family filed suit,
charging that a suspension violated their First Amendment right to free-
dom of speech. A lower court ruled against the Tinker children, conclud-
ing that schools could prohibit the wearing of armbands because this
might disrupt the educational process. But in February 1969 the Supreme
Court ruled on the Tinkers' behalf, declaring: "In our system, undifferen-
tiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the
right to freedom of expression." Holding that freedom of expression does
not vanish at the school gate, the Court announced that "school offi-
cials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students
in school as well as out of school are 'persons' under our Constitution."
For the first time, the Court ruled that First Amendment rights applied to
students.
Tinker was part of a broader children's rights revolution. In 1964 Ger-
ald Gault, a fifteen-year-old in Globe, Arizona, was accused of making an
obscene telephone call to a neighbor. The judge found him guilty and or-
dered him placed in a reformatory until he turned twenty-one. Because he
was a juvenile, Gault's rights were severely limited. His parents were not
notified that he was under arrest, and he was not allowed to consult a
lawyer. Nor, when he appeared before the juvenile judge, was he given a
330 Huck~s Raft
chance to prove his innocence. No evidence was presented at his hearing,

no witnesses testified, and no record was made of the proceedings. Had he
been an adult, Gault would have been able to present a defense, and
would have faced a maximum punishment of a $50 fine or two months in
jail. In a landmark 1967 ruling in the case of in re Gault, the U.S. Su-
preme Court declared that juveniles charged with criminal offenses were
entitled to many of the procedural protections in juvenile courts that
adults enjoyed in criminal courts, including the right to have legal coun-
sel, to cross-examine witnesses, and to remain silent. "Neither the 14th
Amendment nor the Bill of Rights is for adults only," Justice Abe Fortas
wrote for the seven-to-two majority. "Under our Constitution, the condi-
tion of being a boy does not justify a kangaroo court."
The concept of children's rights was one of the most significant out-
growths of the liberation struggles of the 1960s. The idea itself was not
new. As early as 1905, the Progressive-era reformer Florence Kelley as-
serted a right to childhood. During the late 1940s a number of books in-
voking the term appeared, enumerating children's needs, such as a right to
an education, a right to play, and a right to be loved and cared for. These
early defenses of children's rights emphasized children's vulnerable status
and their need for a nurturing environment, and sought to encourage the
state to assume a broader role in intervening in families in cases of need.
Advocates of children's rights during the 1960s and 1970s had a more
radical goal in mind. They wanted to award minors many of the same le-
gal rights as adults, including the right to make certain medical or educa-
tional decisions on their own and a right to have their voice heard in deci-
sions over adoption, custody, divorce, termination of parental rights, or
child abuse. Traditionally children had been considered incompetent un-
der the law. Children's rights advocates favored a presumption of compe-
tence, especially for older children, in decisions about motherhood, abor-
tion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of venereal disease, sexuality,
or any decision that would significantly affect the child's future.
One battlefield in the contest over children's rights involved the treat-
ment of juvenile crime. Children's rights advocates looked skeptically at
the claim that the juvenile court system operated in children's best inter-
ests. Proponents of the juvenile court argued that a minor's interests were
best served by a system that removed the formalities and rules of evidence
required in adult crim~nal trials and emphasized treatment and rehabilita-
tion rather than punishment. Advocates of children's rights denounced
this argument as a myth. They noted that many of the cases that juvenile
courts heard-about 15 percent-involved status offenses, such as tru-
ancy or incorrigibility, which were not crimes if committed by adults.
Youthquake 331
Children's rights reformers stressed that juveniles were denied basic due-
process protections, even after the high court's decision in Gault. While
Gault gave minors the right to written notice of charges, the right to a
lawyer, the privilege against self-incrimination, and the right to cross-
examine witnesses, it denied them other rights, such as indictment by a
grand jury, release on bail, and a right to a public trial and a trial before a
jury.43
Another arena of legal conflict involved teenage sexuality. The most
controversial issue was whether minors could obtain contraceptives or
abortions without parental consent. In a 1977 case, Carey v. Population
Services International:~ the Supreme Court invalidated a New York law
prohibiting the sale of condoms to adolescents under sixteen, concluding
that the "right to privacy in connection with decisions affecting procre-
ation extends to minors as well as adults." The Court held that the state
interest in discouraging adolescents' sexual activity was not furthered by
withholding the means to protect themselves. As Justice John Paul Stevens
explained in a concurring opinion, to deny teenagers access to contracep-
tion in an effort to impress upon them the evils of underage sex was as ir-
rational as if "a State decided to dramatize its disapproval of motorcycles
by forbidding the use of safety helmets." The Constitution forbade this
kind of "government-mandated harm."
In subsequent cases courts struck down state laws requiring parental
notice or consent if their children sought contraceptives. In Planned Par-
enthood Association v. Matheson (D. Utah 1983), a federal district court
recognized that teenagers' "decisions whether to accomplish or prevent
conception are among the most private and sensitive," and concluded that
"the state may not impose a blanket parental notification requirement on
minors seeking to exercise their constitutionally protected right to decide
whether to bear or beget a child by using contraceptives." The two most
important sources of federal family planning funds in the nation-Title X
of the Public Health Service Act of 1970 and Medicaid (Title XIX of the
Social Security Act of 1965)-required the confidential provision of con- .
traceptive services to eligible recipients, regardless of their age or marital
status. By 1995 condom distribution programs were operating in at least
431 public schools.
In the majority opinion in the Tinker case, Associate Justice Abe Fortas
wrote that schools were special places, and that civil liberties had to be
balanced against "the need for affirming the comprehensive authority of
the states and of school officials, to prescribe and control conduct." In
subsequent cases the court sought to define this balance. In the 1975 case
of Goss v. Lopez:~ the Court granted students the right to due process
332 Huck~s Raft
when threatened with a suspension of more than ten days, and declared
that a punishment could not be more serious than the misconduct. But the
justices, fearful of disrupting principals' and teachers' authority, an-
nounced that schools needed only to provide informal hearings, not elab-
orate judicial proceedings. Students did not have a right, the Court ruled,
to a hearing for a minor punishment, such as a detention, or if they posed
a danger to other students or school property. In other cases the justices
held that school officials might search student lockers, but only when they
had grounds for believing that a specific locker contained dangerous or il-
legal items, and that they might impose random drug tests, but only on
students engaging in extracurricular activities. The Court allowed school
authorities to censor school newspapers only when they were sponsored
by the school itself. ·
Gender equity offered yet another front in the battle for children's
rights. In recent years, much of the attention on the issue of gender equity
has focused on athletics, but equal access to academic opportunity
prompted the initial concern. In the late 1960s, high schools typically seg-
regated vocational education classes by sex: girls took home economics,
boys took shop. Pregnant students were expelled from school and not
welcomed back after they gave birth. Those schools that did allow preg-
nant girls and teen mothers to remain in school forced them into special
programs that emphasized a nonacademic curriculum. The basic legal
tool for attaining gender equity was Title IX of the Educational Amend-
ments of 1972, which prohibited sex discrimination in any educational
program or activity. Athletics quickly became the most visible field of con-
tention. In 1971, 3. 7 million boys and just 294,015 girls participated in
\ high school sports. By 2000, boys' participation had risen to 3.9 million
and girls' to 2. 7 million, a nearly tenfold increase. Girls increasingly par-
ticipated in such sports as lacrosse, wrestling, soccer, rugby, and ice
hockey. 44
Federal regulations adopted in 1975 prohibited sex discrimination in
athletics, and policies adopted three years later required substantially
equal expenditures for male and female athletes and expansion of oppor-
tunities and participation for women. Even before those rules were
adopted, however, girls and young women had gone to court to seek
equal treatment, arguing that a denial of access to sports violated the
Fourteenth Amendment. In a series of 1973 cases, girls won the right to
compete against boys in noncontact sports, such as tennis, cross-country
skiing, and track, when no similar program for female students existed. In
a 1974 case a twelve-year-old Ohio girl sued for the right to play on a
high school football team. In Clinton v. Nagy a federal court found that
Youthquake 333
the school district had failed to show that girls were more prone to injury
than boys and that it violated the Constitution to deny a girl the right to
compete solely on the basis of her sex. 45
One other important area in the struggle for children's rights involved
erasing the "stain" of illegitimacy. As recently as the early 1960s, children
born outside of marriage were called "bastards'' and had the word "ille-
gitimate" stamped on their birth certificate. In 1968, in the landmark case
of Levy v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth
Amendment's guarantee of equal protection extended to the children of
unwed parents. After Louise Levy died in a charity hospital in New Or-
leans, her children, who had been born out of wedlock, attempted to sue
her doctor and the hospital for negligence and wrongful death. The Loui-
siana courts threw out the lawsuit, claiming that out-of-wedlock children
had no cause of action for a parent's wrongful death. The Supreme Court
reversed this decision. In subsequent rulings the high court declared that
states could not set an "unrealistically short time limitation" on a child's
right to sue a father for financial support; nor could they deny children
born outside of marriage a share of the inheritance. In addition, the jus-
tices held that states could not withhold welfare benefits from the children
of unwed parents. Once paternity was established, children had a right to
their parents' social security payments, health insurance, and child sup-
port. Despite these decisions, many legal distinctions still exist between
children born within and outside of marriage. Although most states re-
quire an unwed father to support his offspring financially, children of
married parents have broader rights to the level and duration of support.
In addition, children born outside of marriage do not have a clear right to
their father's name or his physical company. 46
A repeated complaint voiced during the massive student protests
against the Vietnam war was that if young people were old enough to be
drafted by, and possibly to die for, their government, they had a right to
have a voice in that government's affairs and to participate in the political
process. When it extended the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress in-
cluded a provision lowering the voting age to eighteen. In a 1970 decision
the Supreme Court ruled that although Congress had the power to reduce
the voting age in federal elections, it did not have the authority to alter the
age in state elections. To end the possibility that states might be required
to keep separate voter registration lists and hold separate elections, the
Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution, extending the vote to eigh-
teen- to twenty-year-olds, was ratified in 1971. Contrary to some predic-
tions, granting the vote to eighteen- to twenty-year-olds had little effect on
American politics. Young voters did not prove to be as cohesive or as mo-
334 Huck,s Raft
tivated as some hoped and others feared. Voters in their teens and early
twenties had a much lower rate of registration and voting than the mid-
dle-aged or the elderly, and little influence on the political agenda.
It became part of the conventional wisdom that the student radicalism
of the 1960s was largely a by-product of the military draft and that when
the draft was replaced by a lottery and later a volunteer army, student mil-
itancy quickly dissipated. There can be no doubt that ending military con-
scription, combined with a stagnating economy and a conservative back-
lash against student radicalism and the rights revolution, did produce a
decline in overt student activism. But eras of reform and social upheaval
do not conform to neat chronological divisions, and many of the most far-
reaching changes in values and behavior that we associate with the 1960s
actually took place in the 1970s, including increased use of drugs in sec-
ondary schools and a sharp drop in the age at which many adolescents be-
came sexually active. Major social issues such as minors' access to contra-
ception and abortion emerged as contentious social issues only during the
1970s. Most of the important reforms related to special education, bilin-
gual education, and equal rights for female students also took place in
that decade "when nothing happened." Studies of young people's opin-
ions indicate that during the 1960s most students, including most college
students, did not consider themselves radicals. In 1970 only 8.5 percent of
students identified themselves with the New Left. It was in the 1970s, not
the 1960s, that a broad cross-section of young people adopted more fa-
vorable attitudes toward drugs and freer sexual expression. 47
In the mid-1970s several trends converged to mark the start of a new
phase in childhood's history. One was demographic, as a rapid increase in
the divorce rate, unmarried parenthood, single-parent households, and
working mothers that had begun in the mid-1960s produced new
configurations of family life. A second trend was attitudinal, as a series of
public panics over children's well-being erupted-over teen pregnancy,
stranger abductions, child abuse, illicit drugs, juvenile crime, and flagging
academic performance-and intensified parental anxieties, harshened the
juvenile justice system, and provoked a sharp reaction against the chil-
dren's rights revolution. A key third trend was economic, as the wages of
noncollege graduates fell sharply in real terms, leading many young peo-
ple to postpone marriage and making it more essential for the young to
complete high school and enroll in college. These trends combined to pro-
duce a mounting concern that young people's well-being was declining
and that only drastic measures could help.
chapter sixteen
Parental Panics and the Reshaping

of Childhood
IN AUGUST 1983 a mother, later diagnosed as mentally ill, com-

plained to police that her two-year-old son had been molested at the
McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. To gather evidence,
the local police chief distributed a letter to about 200 parents of present
or past students, informing them that a school employee might have
forced the children to "engage in oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttocks
or chest area, and sodomy." He urged the parents to question their chil-
dren and to come forward if they had any information to offer. 1
This letter, combined with a local television report about possible links
between the preschool and a pornography ring in nearby Los Angeles,
touched off a panic. The police referred anxious parents to the Children's
Institute International, a private, nonprofit organization specializing in
the treatment and prevention of child abuse, where about 400 children
who had attended the preschool were interviewed. Initially most children
denied having been molested. But after they were shown puppets and told
that it was "all right to tell their yucky secrets," some 360 described inci-
dents of abuse. 2
The children said that their teachers had stuck silverware in their
anuses, butchered rabbits on a church altar, and murdered a horse with a
baseball bat. The children also described being flushed down toilets into
sewers where they had been sexually abused. On the basis of testimony
from eighteen children and from doctors about physical evidence of
abuse, Virginia McMartin, her son and daughter, and six other daycare
workers were indicted for sexually abusing children over a ten-year pe-
336 Huck~s Raft
riod. The McMartin Preschool charges resulted in the longest and costliest
criminal case in American history, involving two trials that lasted seven
years, cost at least $15 million, and concluded with no convictions. Ini-
tially these trials were seen as examples of ordinary citizens exposing hor-
rible abuses in their midst. Over time, however, the public grew convinced
that overzealous prosecutors and poorly trained social workers had
bribed and badgered the children until they said they had been abused.
The McMartin Preschool case was the most sensational of forty cases
involving charges of mass molestation in daycare centers. At least 100
daycare workers were convicted of abuse, but in virtually every case the
prosecution claims were eventually overturned. A 1994 federal investiga-
tion of more than 12,000 accusations of ritual abuse of children at
daycare centers did not find a single charge that could be physically sub-
stantiated. Why did seemingly far-fetched charges of animal mutilation,
infant sacrifice, and satanic ritual provoke a wave of criminal prosecu-
tions? In retrospect, one can see how terrified parents displaced their own
anxieties and guilt feelings about leaving children with strangers onto
daycare workers. Convinced that children would never lie about sexual
abuse, psychologists and social workers underestimated children's sug-
gestibility, their susceptibility to adult pressure, and their desire for adult
approval. A sensationalist media and opportunistic and ambitious politi-
cians and law enforcement officials stoked public anxiety into a frenzy.
The convergence of these and other factors created parental panic.
Since the 1970s the United States has experienced a series of widely
publicized panics over children's well-being. In addition to panics over
abuse at daycare centers, there was widespread alarm over stranger ab-
ductions of children, adult sexual predators preying on teenage girls, and
madmen inserting razor blades and poison into Halloween candies. The
result was to convince many parents that their children were in deep dan-
ger. For a quarter-century adults have used the language of crisis to dis-
cuss the young. In her 1996 book It Takes a Village, then First Lady Hil-
lary Rodham Clinton wrote: "Everywhere we look, children are under
assault: from violence and neglect, from the breakup of families, from the
temptations of alcohol, sex, and drug abuse, from greed, materialism and
spiritual emptiness. These problems are not new, but in our time they
have skyrocketed." In 1996 the bipartisan Council on Families in America
claimed that children were worse off "psychologically, socially, economi-
cally, and morally-than their parents were at the same age." A grossly
inflated and misplaced sense of crisis became widespread in the last quar-
ter of the twentieth century, reflecting genuine worries-for example, over
children's well-being in a hypersexualized society-and more generalized
Parental Panics and the Reshaping of Childhood 337
anxieties-over street crime, family instability, and shifts in women's

roles. 3
In the mid-1970s newspaper and magazine headlines began to trumpet
a series of crises involving the young. There was a widespread impression
that by most measures, young people were faring worse than in the past.
On closer examination, however, much of the evidence cited to prove that
children were in crisis proved to be exaggerated, misleading, or simply in-
correct. An early panic followed the 1976 announcement by the Alan
Guttmacher Institute, then a division of Planned Parenthood, that the
country was experiencing an "epidemic'' of teenage pregnancy. The report
that nearly a million teenagers became pregnant each year provoked
alarm that this epidemic would ruin the mother's life prospects and im-
pose a heavy financial burden on society as a whole, raising costs for wel-
fare, Medicaid, and food stamps. When looked at more closely, the phe-
nomenon of teen pregnancy was far more complicated than usually
portrayed. The overwhelming majority of teen births were among eigh-
teen- and nineteen-year-olds, not the thirteen-, fourteen-, or fifteen-year-
olds featured in the press. The teenage pregnancy rate had peaked in 1957
and was declining in the last quarter of the century. There were grounds
for public concern, especially because a growing proportion of teen births
was occurring out of wedlock. But the explanations commonly cited to
explain teenage childbearing-immorality, ignorance, or ineptness in the
use of contraceptives-were misleading. Teen pregnancy was connected to
limited opportunity, poverty, and low self-esteem, as well as an associa-
tion of childbearing with maturity and love. 4
Soon afterward a panic over stranger abductions of young children was
touched off by the mysterious disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz in
New York's SoHo district in 1979, and the murder of Adam Walsh, also
six, in Florida in 1981. Published reports claimed that half a million chil-
dren were kidnapped each year and as many as 50,000 were murdered an-
nually. Soon pictures of missing children appeared on billboards and milk
cartons, and the federal government established a National Center for
Missing and Exploited Children. A federal investigation subsequently re-
vealed that the actual number of children under twelve abducted by
strangers was between 500 and 600 a year and the number murdered by
strangers around 50. The overwhelming majority of missing children were
runaways or were in the hands of noncustodial parents. It turned out that
the gravest threat to children came not from strangers, but from family
members or neighbors. About 2,000 children a year were murdered by
their parents-400 times as many as were killed by strangers. 5
Another panic, over youth gangs, erupted in the early 1990s, sparked
338 Huck's Raft
by claims that gangs, armed with military-style assault weapons, were the
primary agents in a crack cocaine epidemic plaguing the nation's inner cit-
ies. It was certainly the case that in particular cities during the 1980s and
early 1990s, gangs accounted for a growing proportion of youth violence
and that some gang members were actively involved in drug trafficking. It
was also true that the easy availability of automatic and semiautomatic
weapons made gang violence more lethal than in the past. But the popular
image of youth gangs dominating the drug trade and spreading their ten-
tacles across the country was grossly exaggerated. For the most part, drug
trafficking was dominated by adults. 6
Also during the 1990s a panic arose over youthful superpredators who
killed without remorse. An incident in New York in 1989 and another in
Chicago in 1998 seemed to confirm the existence of "kids without a con-
science." In the New York case, five youths, between fourteen and sixteen
years old, were accused of attacking joggers and bicyclists in Central Park
and were convicted of beating a white female investment banker so badly
that she was not expected to survive, but did. In 2002 their convictions
were reversed after a prison inmate confessed to being the jogger's sole at-
tacker and DNA evidence proved that he had raped the woman. In the
Chicago incident, two boys, ages seven and eight, confessed to murdering
eleven-year-old Ryan Harris. Further investigation revealed semen on the
victim, and police eventually charged a thirty-year-old man with the
crime. In both cases, confessions from the accused juveniles had been ob-
tained by the police after prolonged interrogation. 7
During the last quarter of the twentieth century there was a tendency to
generalize about young people's well.-being on the basis of certain horrific
but isolated events. The literary term synecdoche-confusing a part for a
whole-is helpful in understanding how late twentieth-century Americans
constructed an image of youth in crisis, as shocking episodes reinforced
an impression that childhood was disintegrating. Two cases from the
1990s seemed symptomatic of moral decay. In 1993, in Lakewood, Cali-
fornia, near Los Angeles, a group of current and former high school stu-
dents, known as the "Spur Posse," gained notoriety when members were
arrested in connection with a "sex for points" competition. The winner
had had intercourse with sixty-six girls, some as young as ten. In 1997 a
New Jersey eighteen-year-old, attending her high school prom, gave birth
to a baby boy in a bathroom stall, left the newborn in a garbage can, and
treturned to the dance floor.
These incidents were easily integrated into a popular narrative of moral
decline, but in fact the lessons were more complex. The Spur Posse was
connected to the downward economic mobility among families previously
employed in southern California's defense industry. These circumstances

contributed to unstable family lives, frequent divorces, a lack of adult su-
pervision, and declining economic prospects for Lakewood youth. In the
case of the young New Jersey woman, child psychologists spoke about the
denial that some teens feel after discovering they are pregnant, their fear
of disappointing their parents, and the difficulties they encounter in trying
to obtain an abortion. Her decision to return to the prom and act as if
nothing had happened is as pathetic as it is tragic. 8
The late twentieth-century panics left a lasting imprint on public policy.
In 1993, after twelve-year-old Polly Klaas was kidnapped during a slum-
ber party and strangled by a California state prison parolee, states across
the country enacted "three strikes" laws under which repeat offenders
convicted of three ·felonies were sentenced to prison without possibility of
parole. After the 1994 rape and murder of seven-year-old Megan Nicole
Kanka of Hamilton, New Jersey, by a paroled sex offender, many states
adopted "Megan's Laws," requiring the police to notify a community
when a convicted sex offender lived nearby. Reports that men over the age
of twenty-one were responsible for two-thirds of teen pregnancies led
states to revive dormant statutory rape laws. A spate of murders by
youths in their early teens led every state to make it easier to try juveniles
as adults and commit them to adult prisons. 9
Over the past quarter-century, the trumpeting of a dire crisis among the
young proved to be a highly effective way to gain public attention. When-
ever adults sensed that their children were in danger, they responded with
passion. Sociologists use the term moral panic to describe the highly exag-
gerated and misplaced public fears that periodically arise within a society.
Eras of ethical conflict and confusion are especially prone to outbreaks of
moral panic as particular incidents crystallize generalized anxieties and
provoke moral crusades. In recent decades, panics have arisen about
Internet pornography; pedophiles; and the purported link between
grunge, hip hop, and youth violence. These panics arose from legitimate
worries for the safety of the young in a violent and hypersexualized soci-
ety, but they were also fueled by interest groups that exploit parental
fears, well-meaning social service providers, child advocacy groups, na-
tional commissions, and government agencies desperate to sustain fund-
ing and influence. If panics arise out of a genuine desire to arouse an apa-
thetic public to serious problems, the effect of scare stories is not benign.
They frighten parents, intensify generational estrangement, and encourage
schools and legislatures to impose regulations to protect young people
from themselves. 10
When panics drive public policy, society tends to fixate on exaggerated
340 Huck"'s Raft
problems rather than on more serious issues. During the late twentieth
century there was a widespread impression that children's well-being was
declining precipitously and that many of society's worst problems could
be attributed to the young. According to surveys in the 1990s, adults be-
lieved that young people accounted for 40 percent of the nation's violent
crime, three times the actual rate. Adults wrongly assumed that young
people were more violent than their parents' generation had been and
were more likely to smoke, abuse drugs and alcohol, commit suicide, be-
come pregnant, and bear a child out of wedlock. In fact by most measures
young people were healthier and more responsible than their baby-boom
parents' generation. 11
Alarmist myths about youth violence, adolescent sexuality, and declin-
ing academic performance led adults to project a variety of moral failings
onto the young and bred a mistaken impression that contemporary youth
were the worst generation ever. A 1997 poll reported that most adults be-
lieved that the young were in steep "moral breakdown." Today many
adults assume that smoking, binge drinking, illicit drug use, obesity, and
irresponsible sexual behavior are normative among the young and that
adolescents are responsible for most crime in American society. Not sur-
prisingly, such mistaken views discourage adults from supporting school
bond issues and other public programs for the young. 12
Children have long served as a lightning rod for America's anxieties
about society as a whole. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, as anxi-
ety about the Cold War deepened, many Americans doubted that the
young had the moral fiber, intellectual acumen, and physical skills neces-
sary to stand up to Communism. During the 1960s, as the nation under-
went unsettling moral and cultural transformations, public worries again
centered on the young, around such issues as permissive childrearing,
youthful drug and sexual experimentation, and young people's scraggly
hair and unkempt clothing. It is not surprising that cultural anxieties are
often displaced on the young; unable to control the world around them,
adults shift their attention to that which they think they can control: the
next generation.
Toward the end of the twentieth century there was widespread fear that
the country had entered a period of moral and economic decline as Ameri-
cans worried about the country's international competitiveness, budget
deficits and the national debt, and street crime. As in the past, larger so-
cial and economic concerns colored adult perceptions of children. Anxi-
eties about unsafe streets translated into fears about youth gangs and
teenage toughs. Anxieties about welfare dependency were reflected in im-
ages of teenage mothers and high school dropouts. Many adults worried
that American children lagged far behind their foreign counterparts in

their knowledge of science, mathematics, and technology and lacked the
discipline and drive necessary to meet the challenges of the twenty-first
century. Frightening media portraits of youthful nihilism supplanted ear-
lier images of childhood innocence and teenage rambunctiousness. Kids
provided society's most vivid images of urban disintegration. There was a
fixation on crack babies, urban wolf packs, and teenage mothers. Bart
Simpson, the irreverent, undisciplined scamp, "an underachiever and
proud of it," supplanted Haley Mills as a popular symbol of childhood.
Familial, economic, and cultural shifts contributed to an upsurge in pa-
rental anxiety and to a hovering, emotionally intense style of parenting
that made it more difficult for children to forge an independent identity
and assert their growing maturity and competence. During the 1970s a
growing number of Americans came to believe that the "breakdown of
the family"-evident in an increasing divorce rate and a growing number
of single-parent households and working mothers-had devastating con-
sequences for young people's well-being, manifested in rapidly rising rates
of juvenile crime, teen suicide, and substance abuse. In fact family fragility
was not nearly as novel as moralists assumed, nor was the impact of
changes in family structure on children's well-being as negative as many
assumed.
In evaluating familial change, there is a tendency to exaggerate evidence
of decline and to ignore conflicting data. Yet any accurate assessment
must balance gains against costs. On the positive side of the ledger, fami-
lies grew smaller, allowing parents to devote more attention and resources
to each child. Attendance in preschools shot up, providing young people
with opportunities for play and better preparing them for school. While
fewer young children could count on a full-time mother than in the 1950s,
working mothers are less likely to be depressed than stay-at-home moth-
ers and more likely to provide valuable role models, especially for their
daughters.
Divorce was a major source of concern. The number of divorces dou-
bled between the mid-1960s and the late-1970s, before leveling off. Today
nearly half of all children witness the breakup of their parents' marriage,
and close to half of these children experience the breakup of a parent's
second marriage. But rising divorce rates have not had the profoundly
negative consequences that many feared. A substantial body of evidence
suggests that conflict-laden, tension-filled marriages have at least as many
adverse effects on children as divorce. Children from discordant homes
permeated by tension and instability are actually more likely to suffer psy-
chosomatic illnesses, suicide attempts, delinquency, and other social mal-
342 Huck's Raft
adjustments than children whose parents divorce. Empirical evidence does

not indicate that children from "broken" homes suffer more health or
mental problems, personality disorders, or lower school grades than chil-
dren from "intact" homes. 13
Without a doubt, divorce is severely disruptive, at least initially, for a
majority of children, and a minority continue to suffer from its psycholog-
ical and economic repercussions for years after the breakup of their par-
ents' marriage. Boys seem to have a harder time coping than girls, and
younger children appear to have more trouble adjusting than older chil-
dren, partly because they have excessive fears of abandonment and exag-
gerated hopes for reconciliation. Yet most children support their parents'
decision to divorce and show resilience and increased maturity and inde-
pendence in the months following the breakup. 14
Many of the family-related problems that children confront reflect the
country's failure to adjust institutionally to the fact that divorce, unmar-
ried cohabitation, and residence, at least temporarily, in a single-parent
household have become the normative experience for a near majority of
American children. The American legal system has not built in sufficient
safeguards to ensure children's economic well-being or to moderate the
disruptions that follow divorce. Divorce is often accompanied by instabil-
ity in living arrangements, less parental supervision, and loss of contact
with the father's network of connections. Frequent movement between
residences is a particular source of strain for children, since it complicates
the problem of maintaining friendships and adjusting to school. Income
decline is a major problem, resulting from the inadequacy of court-
ordered child support payments, fathers' failure to pay support, and the
fact that many mothers bargain away support payments in exchange for
sole custody of children. But despite the stresses and upheavals that ac-
company divorce, a substantial majority of the young experience the
breakup of their parents' marriage without suffering serious problems. 15
Economics was a driving force behind changing family patterns. During
the 1970s, in a period of prolonged inflation and economic stagnation,
the maintenance of a middle-class standard of living required mothers to
work and to limit births. The influx of married women into the workforce
made daycare a necessity, and job opportunities meant that fewer women
felt forced to remain in loveless or abusive marriages for economic rea-
sons. Economics also contributed to the rapid increase in the proportion
of births to unmarried women as self-supporting single women decided to
become mothers. Meanwhile the real wages of young men in their twen-
ties who lacked a college education fell steeply, making them less attrac-
tive as marriage partners and less willing to commit to marriage. The re-
suit was a return to a pattern common in preindustrial times, in which

formal marriage was concentrated among financially secure partners and
poorer families had less formal arrangements. 16
The rising costs of childcare and college contributed to a sharp reduc-
tion in the birthrate as many parents chose to have just one child. But the
trend to smaller families allowed parents and grandparents to devote
more money to each child. Toygiving, which had largely been confined to
birthdays and Christmas, became a year-round phenomenon. Meanwhile
the service economy became increasingly dependent on part-time teenage
labor, and as afterschool jobs became more common, teens had more dis-
posable income than in the past. This income rarely went to pay for fam-
ily necessities; instead it represented discretionary income that could be
used to pay for a car or to purchase clothes, CDs, and snacks.
Parental anxieties greatly increased in scope and intensity after 1970 as
many parents worried more than in the past about their children's safety,
their vulnerability to drugs, and their academic achievement. Middle-class
parents, in particular, sought to protect children from harm by baby-
proofing their homes, using car seats, and requiring bicycle helmets. At
the same time, the market for childrearing advice books became more
crowded and confused, and these manuals conveyed a sense of urgency
absent in earlier childcare books. Authorities such as Dr. Lee Salk rejected
the easygoing approach championed by Dr. Spock and warned that "tak-
ing parenthood for granted can have disastrous results." The new child-
rearing manuals reflected a sharp rise in parents' aspirations for their chil-
dren. Unlike the parents of the baby boomers, who had wanted their
children to be "average," ambitious late twentieth-century parents sought
to provide their children with every possible opportunity. The impulse to
give children a leg up contributed to the rapid growth of educationally
oriented preschools, which not only provided childcare but also sought to
enhance children's cognitive, motor, language, and social skills. Mean-
while many middle-class parents filled up older children's afterschool time
with lessons, enrichment activities, and organized sports. This led experts
such as David Elkind to decry a tendency toward "hyperparenting," in
which parents overscheduled and overprogrammed their children's free
time, placing excessive pressure on their offspring and depriving them of
the opportunity for free play and hanging out. 17
In the 1970s many parents turned away from an older ideal of a "pro-
tected" childhood and began to emphasize a "prepared" childhood. Fear-
ful that their children were surrounded by risks and dangers, parents re-
jected the notion that it was best to shelter children from adult realities in
order to preserve their innocence. Convinced that a na!ve child was a vul-
344 Huck~s Raft
nerable child, a growing number supported drug abuse education pro-

grams and sex education courses that would inform their children about
the risks of drugs and of sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS. Inde-
pendence and resourcefulness became more highly prized values in chil-
dren as a growing number of children had to learn how to unlock the side
door, call their mother after school, and prepare their own snack and
sometimes their own dinner. 18
Romanticized portraits of the normality of childhood during the
"golden years" earlier in the twentieth century do not hold up under scru-
tiny. Take the example of teen drinking. In 1954 Better Homes and Gar-
dens magazine surveyed 1,000 New York high school students and found
that nearly half of all the students between thirteen and eighteen reported
drinking alcohol in the previous week; one in six started drinking before
the age of eleven and 79 percent by fourteen. Continuity, not discontinu-
ity, has characterized teen drinking habits. In contrast, the historical trend
in teen smoking has been sharply downward, and teen smoking has de-
clined far faster than smoking among adults. Adolescent smoking peaked
in 1963, and the proportion of adolescents twelve to seventeen who
smoke today is half the rate in 1974. Nor is drug use among juveniles as
unprecedented as we sometimes assume. In 1953 a U.S. Senate subcom-
mittee claimed that teenage drug abuse was an "epidemic." Adolescent
drug use rose sharply between the early 1970s and early 1980s, but since
then the trend has been downward. In 1983, 31 percent of high school se-
niors reported using an illegal drug in the past month; in 2001 the figure
was 22 percent. 19
Another widespread misimpression is that teen sexuality and delinquent
behavior have increased sharply. In 2002 U.S. News & World Report an-
nounced in sensationalist language: "At younger ages and with greater
frequency, teens are having sex-and catching more diseases." In fact the
most rapid increase in adolescent sexuality took place in the 1970s,
among the parents of today's high schoolers. During the 1990s teen preg-
nancy and abortion rates fell sharply, and sexual activity among teens de-
clined, especially among boys. Meanwhile violent youth crime has
fluctuated over the past four decades, and stands today at low levels un-
seen since the mid-1960s. Over the past three decades there have been
surges in youthful smoking, drug use, and crime rates, but the general
trend has been downward. Yet if history can be reassuring, it can also
heighten awareness of troubling realities. The child poverty rate in the
United States is higher today than it was three decades ago. In 2002 the
official child poverty rate stood at 16 percent, about 14 percent above
the lows of the early 1970s.20
Other problems have also persisted. Half a century ago, sex researcher
Alfred Kinsey reported that one in four women had been "approached
sexually" before adolescence. About half the approaches involved exhibi-
tionism, 31 percent involved fondling without genital contact, 29 percent
involved genital fondling, and 3 percent involved rape or incest. The over-
all figures today remain about the same, although exhibitionism has de-
clined and unwanted touching has increased. Yet while the sexual abuse
of children has remained fairly constant, public concern has fluctuated
widely. In 1986 nearly a third of adults identified abuse as one of the most
serious problems facing children and youth; in a survey a decade later
abuse went unmentioned. 21
By most measures, the well-being of the young improved markedly be-
tween the early 1970s and the late 1990s, despite the sharp increase in di-
vorce rates, working mothers, and out-of-wedlock births. Binge drinking
among teenagers dropped 25 percent; smoking declined between 20 and
50 percent, depending on the measure; youth homicide and crime rates
are now at their lowest level in thirty years. Today's teenagers miss fewer
days of school, do about as well on aptitude and achievement tests as did
their baby-boom counterparts, and are much more likely to graduate
from high school and enroll in college. Surveys suggest that young people
today feel far less alienation and anomie than their counterparts a quar-
ter-century earlier. Far fewer report that they have seriously considered
suicide or participated in a fight. 22
Our society tends to treat young people's problems separately from
those of adults, as if they were not interconnected phenomena. We hold
youth to perfectionist standards that adults are not expected to meet. In
fact young people's behavior tends to parallel that of adults. Over the last
quarter of the twentieth century, trends in child obesity, teenage drug use,
smoking, drinking, out-of-wedlock births, crime, and violence track
closely with adults'. This result should not be surprising. Young people
tend to behave much like the adults around them, and if those adults
smoke or drink to excess or behave violently, their children are likely to
do the same. 23
In the late twentieth century, American society projected its fears· and
anxieties onto the young and instituted desperate measures to protect
them from exaggerated menaces. The effect of these restrictive policies
was to delay the transition to adult behavior and make that transition
much more abrupt than in the past. Thus it seems likely that the problem
with binge drinking among college students is related to the fact that the
young did not learn to drink responsibly before college. Efforts to protect
the young from the consequences of misbehavior tend to create problems
of their own.
Media images of the young proliferated wildly in the last quarter of the
346 Huck~s Raft
century. There were "stoners," like Bill and Ted, whose Excellent Adven-
tures mocked schooling and academic authority; bright but mischievous
rebels like Ferris Bueller; and girls with special powers like Sabrina the
teenage witch, a popular symbol of girls' empowerment. There were pre-
cocious miniadults, wiser than their parents, modeled on Michael J. Fox
in the situation comedy Family Ties; symbols of juvenile self-sufficiency
like Macauley Caulkin in the Home Alone films; and comic nerds like the
Steve Erkel character played by Jaleel White. But one image of childhood
that didn't conform to the media's penchant for the lighthearted comedy
was an image of deeply alienated and disconnected youth.
Many of the most influential cinematic portraits of youth during the
1980s and 1990s painted a bleak picture of young people's lives, depicting
them as "a tribe apart." Teen angst, youthful alienation, and generational
estrangement have been common themes in film since The Wild One
(1954), but more recent movies offered a grimmer vision. The 1987 film
River~s Edge was based loosely on a 1981 murder in Milpitas, California,
where a sixteen-year-old raped and murdered his fourteen-year-old girl-
friend, bragged about the killing to his friends, and took them to see the
corpse. As in Lord of the Flies, the kids were presented as zombielike in
the face of a blood-chilling crime. A depressing portrait of youthful nihil-
ism in the Reagan era, the film depicts the teens' emotional numbness as a
product of drugs, alcohol, television violence, deafening rock music, vio-
lent video games, and neglectful parents.
The 1995 film Kids followed a group of vacuous New York street chil-
dren over a twenty-four-hour period, hanging out, skateboarding, steal-
ing, brawling, gay-baiting, and getting high. Like River~s Edge, it pre-
sented a picture of young people turning to drugs and sex not as a form of
rebellion, but as a way to fill a void in otherwise empty and meaningless
lives. Kids depicted young people living in a world of insecurity and risk
from unprotected sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and violence. Basket-
ball Diaries, also from 1995, based loosely on poet and musician Jim
Carroll's cult memoir, chronicled the descent of a Catholic high school
basketball star into a heroin addict who turns tricks for drugs. With its
stark portraits of a sadistic priest and a sexually predatory basketball
coach, this film stressed the allure of drugs and sex and the absence of
supportive adults. Crude, stereotyped, and exploitative, these films rein-
forced a variety of caricatures about young people's lives. They supported
the popular impression that young people were caught between two
trends: an increasingly risky, violent, sex-saturated, drug-infested social
environment, and a lack of adult guidance and support.
What, then, has changed in young people's lives? How did childhood in
the late twentieth century differ from that in earlier years? Books with
such titles as The Disappearance of Childhood, The Hurried Child:
Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon, and Ready or Not: Why Treating
Children as Small Adults Endangers Their Future-and Ours argued that
an earlier ideal of childhood as a protected state, in which children were
sheltered from the realities of the adult world, had given way to a very dif-
ferent ideal. We have returned, they contended, to the pre-industrial, pre-
modern conception of children as "little adults." There is some truth to
this argument. Young people, even before they enter their teens, are in-
creasingly knowledgeable about adult realities. Through the instruments
of mass culture, the young are exposed from an early age to overt sexual-
ity, violence, and death. They have also become independent consumers at
an earlier age. A precocious adulthood is apparent in young people's
dress, their earlier initiation into sexuality, and the large number of stu-
dents who hold jobs while going to school. Like their preindustrial coun-
terparts, young people linger longer on the threshold of adulthood, delay-
ing marriage and, in many cases, living off and on with their parents well
into their twenties. Yet despite some superficial similarities, we have not
returned to the premodern world of childhood and youth. We are much
more self-conscious about the process of childrearing. Like our nine-
teenth-century ancestors, we continue to think of young people as funda-
mentally different from adults. Above all, we have institutionalized youth
as a separate stage of life. Young people spend an increasing number of
years in the company of other people their same age, colonized in special-
ized "age-graded" institutions. Young people's interactions with adults
are largely limited to parents, teachers, and service providers. 24
One defining feature of young people's lives today is that they spend
more time alone than their predecessors. They grow up in smaller fami-
lies, and nearly half have no siblings. They are more likely to have a room
of their own and to spend more time in electronically mediated activities,
playing video games, surfing the Internet, or watching television on their
own set. Because fewer children attend neighborhood schools within
walking distance, most children live farther from their friends and play
with them less frequently, experiencing a greater sense of isolation. 25
Meanwhile unstructured, unsupervised free play outside the home dras-
tically declined for middle-class children. As more mothers joined the la-
bor force, parents arranged more structured, supervised activities for their
children. Unstructured play and outdoor activities for children three to
eleven declined nearly 40 percent between the early 1980s and late 1990s.
Because of parental fear of criminals and bad drivers, middle-class chil-
dren rarely got the freedom to investigate and master their home turf in
348 Huck~s Raft
ways that once proved a rehearsal for the real world. Older children, too,
had less free time as they spent more time in school, completing home-
work, performing household chores, and working for wages. The psychia-
trist Bruno Bettelheim estimated that the span of a middle-class child-
hood, defined in terms of freedom from household responsibilities,
declined from eleven years in the 1950s to between five and eight years to-
ward the end of the century. 26
The period of childhood innocence has grown briefer. Originally Barbie
was aimed at six- to ten-year-old girls. Today her popularity peaks with
three- to five-year-olds. By the time girls are eight, frilly dresses have given
way to midriff tops, off-shoulder T-shirts, and low-slung jeans. Marketers
coined the word tween to describe the demographic group from eight to
twelve, which has not yet reached the teen years but aspires to teenage so-
phistication. In an era of niche marketing, the tweens-whose average
weekly income rose from $6 to $22 a week during the 1990s-became
one of the most popular markets for clothing manufacturers and record
companies. 27
The geography of young people's lives has been reshaped. Much of the
"free space" available to youth in the past, from empty lots to nearby
woods, has disappeared as a result of development and legal liability con-
cerns. Public playgrounds continue to exist; but as they were childproofed
to improve safety, they inadvertently reduced the opportunities for the
young to take part in forms of fantasy, sensory and exploratory play, and
construction activities apart from adults. Safety and maintenance con-
cerns led to the removal of sandboxes and swings, metal jungle gyms, and
firepoles. Fear of child abductions and sexual abuse resulted in the elimi-
nation of playgrounds with obstructed views. Meanwhile many tradi-
tional teen hangouts also vanished. McDonald's pioneered the practice
of discouraging teens from hanging out at their restaurants, and this prac-
tice has since been mimicked by other fast-food outlets, pizza parlors,
ice cream shops, and other traditional teen havens. Lacking spaces to
call their own, adolescents engaged in frequent battles with adults as
they sought space at shopping malls, fast-food restaurants, and public
streets. 28
One of the most striking developments was a sharp increase in part-
time teenage employment during the school years. Today about 44 per-
cent of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old males and 42 percent of females
hold jobs, compared with 29 percent of boys and 18 percent of girls in
1953. In the past, teen employment was concentrated among the working
class; it has since become predominantly a middle-class phenomenon.
Most teens work in sales and service jobs requiring no special training or
skills and spend most of their time working with other adolescents, with-
out much adult supervision. 29
Meanwhile a ritual that defined teen life in the past-dating-largely
disappeared, replaced by hanging out at malls, participation in crowd ac-
tivities, group dating, partying, and hooking up. Older symbols of com-
mitment-like pinning or going steady-evaporated, mirroring the desire
to postpone marriage to a later age as well as the general decline of mar-
riage among adults. But of all the changes that took place in young peo-
ple's lives, the most striking involved a marked increase in diversity-
ethnic, economic, and familial. Ethnic diversity became a defining charac-
teristic of childhood. Sixteen percent of young people are black (com-
pared with 14 percent in 1972), 15 percent Hispanic (up from 6 percent),
and 5 percent Asian (up from 1 percent). Diversity extends to family life.
Between a quarter and a third of the children born during the baby
boomlet of the late 1980s and 1990s were born to unmarried mothers,
and about half of all children will spend at least part of their childhood in
a single-parent home. This familial shift was accompanied by a deepening
economic divide. Children born in recent years are the most affluent in

Children at play in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in 1974. Courtesy of the

National Archives, Washington, D.C.
350 Huck!Js Raft
American history-yet one in six lives in poverty. Reinforcing the sense of

diversity is the fact that the generation of young today has not had the
binding social or economic experiences that fostered an intense genera-
tional consciousness among the baby boomers or Depression kids.
The most popular children's names provide an index to society's in-
creasing diversity. While the Roberts and Susans of earlier generations
persisted, new names were added to the cultural stew. There was a sharp
increase in gender-neutral names, such as Alex and Leslie, and feminized
versions of boys' names, such as Sydney and Kari; in unusual and original
names stressing children's uniqueness and individuality, such as Beyonce
and LeToya; and in Waspy names with overtones of wealth and glamor,
such as Kendall and Taylor. The most striking development was a prolif-
eration of names exhibiting pride in ethnic heritage, including a surge in
biblical names like Samuel and Rebecca, and, especially among African
Americans, traditional African and Islamic names such as Jamail and
Yasmin, as well as newly coined names that draw upon African patterns,
such as Makayla and Nyasia.
Youth in America has never been a homogeneous or monolithic group.
It has always been divided along lines of class, ethnicity, and gender. But
as the twentieth century ended, these divisions, which appeared, at least
superficially, to be declining, reasserted themselves. Two of the most cru-
cial divides involved the children of the urban poor and the children of
immigrants. Both demand closer examination.
Growing up in the ghetto has never been easy, but for two brothers
caught in the crossfire of the crack epidemic of the late 1980s it was espe-
cially bleak. Eleven-year-old Lafeyette and nine-year-old Pharoah Rivers
lived in the Henry Horner housing project on Chicago's near west side, a
mile from the Sears Tower. Consisting of sixteen high-rise buildings on
thirty-four acres of concrete eight city blocks long, the complex housed
6,000 residents; 4,000 were under eighteen. Grim and dilapidated, Henry
Horner Homes was plagued by violence. One person was beaten, shot at,
or stabbed at the project every three days during the summer of 1987.
Kids played basketball by shooting the ball through an opening in a jungle
gym.3o
Children in the Chicago projects, observed a teenager, were "like M &
M's-all hard on the outside and sweet on the inside." Tough, swagger-
ing, and ruthless on the outside, because "if they see you're soft in the
projects it's like a shark seeing blood," and on the inside, vulnerable,
frightened, and lost. The Rivers family subsisted on a $931 monthly wel-
fare check, supplemented by odd jobs the boys picked up. Their apart-
ment, infested with cockroaches, had iron bars on the windows, rusted-
out metal cabinets, and a faucet that leaked scalding water into the bath-
tub for two years before the housing authority finally repaired it. The
boys' father, an unemployed bus driver, was addicted to heroin and alco-
hol. An older sister was also a drug addict. One brother was in jail, and
another had been arrested forty-six times before his eighteenth birthday.
In a single year, the boys' mother was mugged, the family lost its welfare
benefits, and Lafeyette was arrested for breaking into a truck and stealing
cassettes. Speaking of his future, Lafeyette said: "If I grow up, I would
like to be a bus driver." "If," not "when. " 31
Inner-city Chicago was not the only place where American children
were exposed to poverty and violence. Even at the height of the economic
boom of the late 1990s, a sixth of young people (and 30 percent of black
children and 28 percent of Hispanic children) lived in poverty; children
were almost twice as likely to live in poverty as any other age group. Nav-
igating the road to adulthood has never been easy, but it is particularly
difficult in the "other America," where children grow up amid the blight
of joblessness and discrimination. Imprisoned by stereotypes, minimal ex-
pectations in school, and inadequate resources, children in the nation's
ghettos quickly learn that society perceives them as potential criminals or
welfare recipients. Constituting about 13 percent of the urban population,
the residents of the neighborhoods where poverty is concentrated loom
far larger in the public imagination, in part because these areas produce
more than half of all those arrested for murder, rape, and nonnegligent
manslaughter. 32
In his classic study of St. Louis's now-demolished Pruitt-Igoe housing
project, the Harvard sociologist Lee Rainwater argued that poverty and
racism produced a very different world of childhood from that found in
middle-class communities. Crowded ghetto conditions as well as the small
size of slum apartments made it impossible to create a child-centered
home or to insulate young children from adult activities. Children in
Pruitt-Igoe grew up in a highly stimulating environment where they fre-
quently interacted with other adults, including many nonfamily members,
and were expected to become socially assertive and socially self-confident
at an early age. Mothers in Pruitt-Igoe did not worry about when their
children began to crawl or walk or talk; their concerns were more imme·
diate: to ensure that their children were safe and adequately fed. 33
Girls were expected to take part in household activities such as cook-
ing, cleaning, and caring for babies, and therefore quickly assumed a rec-
ognized and valued family identity. As children grew older, it often proved
difficult to protect them from the troublemaking possibilities of the out-
side world. Lacking the resources to insulate children from trouble, adults
352 Huck,s Raft
made greater use of physical punishment and cautionary horror stories as

control mechanisms than their middle-class counterparts. Childrearing
methods that might appear harsh by middle-class standards sought to pre-
pare children for a more dangerous environment. As children reached ad-
olescence, some parents stopped closely monitoring their children to pro-
tect themselves from what they might discover. In other instances,
extended relatives formed supportive networks and offered close supervi-
sion to help adolescents negotiate a dangerous passage to adulthood. An
overriding problem facing Pruitt-lgoe's youth was the hostility that they
received from the outside world: the stares, the suspicion, the repeated re-
minders that authority figures neither trusted nor respected them.
What, then, is it like to grow up in America's poorest neighborhoods?
All the challenges of growing up are compounded by poverty and unsta-
ble kinship structures. Temptations and dangers-from alcohol, drugs,
gangs, and casual violence-lurk around young people. Isolated from
mainstream society, many lack successful role models to guide them
through the minefields of youth and instill a sense of their potential. When
they are young, many mothers forbid them to go out to play, considering
it too dangerous. They grow up with a sense of confinement, unfamiliar to
suburban children. They inhabit a world where childhood mischief can
lead to arrest or worse. They learn, from an early age, that they must be
careful never to say or do anything that older youths might take as an in-
sult. They quickly find out that there are places where they cannot go
without provoking hostile stares and nervous glances. 34
Their lives do not conform to the script of television mythology. Their
kinship relationships are much more expansive, with an extended family
of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents who feel responsible for them.
Ties between children and their mothers tend to be exceptionally strong;
relationships with fathers are often complicated and conflicted. Contrary
to the stereotype of uncaring, absent fathers, numerous fathers spend
significant time with their offspring in infancy and early childhood, but
many become disconnected after a few years. 35
By middle-class standards, children in inner-city neighborhoods have to
grow up fast. From an early age, boys and girls are expected to be house-
keepers, nannies, protectors, and providers. The money they contribute,
however little, offers a crucial margin of difference for their families.
Some, convinced that they have no future, give in to immediacy, seeing no
reason to resist the lure and profit of gangs or early pregnancy. Gangs of-
fer some boys a missing source of employment, respect, and identity.
Motherhood offers some girls the same. While overall school dropout
rates have dropped sharply, 40 to SO percent of youth drop out in the na-
tion's most distressed inner-city neighborhoods. Youth unemployment

rates in such areas stand at 40 to 60 percent, three times the rate in 1960.
While labor force participation of white men and women under twenty-
four has risen, the rate for poor black and Hispanic teenagers has fallen.
Altogether, half of all inner-city youth have never held a regular job by
their twenty-fifth birthday. Joblessness and school failure, in turn, contrib-
ute to rates of teen pregnancy and juvenile delinquency that are the na-
tion's highest. The strongest predictors of teenage motherhood are pov-
erty, poor reading skills, and school failure. Similarly, poor academic
performance and a lack of job prospects have produced the nation's high-
est juvenile crime rate. By the age of thirty, over a third of all inner-city
males have been in a youth facility or a jail or placed on probation. 36
But despite popular stereotypes of ghetto pathology, most inner-city res-
idents resist the temptations of crime, drug abuse, or teenage pregnancy.
Indeed, inner-city youth drink less, smoke less, and use drugs less than
their suburban middle-class counterparts. One factor that has contributed
to this pattern is the strength of black mothers, who serve as models and
nurturers of strong and independent behavior. Socialization among Afri-
can Americans historically has not emphasized sex-role dichotomies in the
way found among white families, and as a result many young black
women, even in the poorest neighborhoods, have higher aspirations for
education and a career than many of their white counterparts. 37
Like their inner-city counterparts, the children of immigrants experi-
ence intense challenges as they find their way toward adulthood. Like ear-
lier immigrant children, Esmeralda Santiago faced daunting and painful
cultural adjustments. But unlike previous immigrants, her desire to assim-
ilate clashed with an equally intense desire to maintain her cultural iden-
tity. Her family called her Negi, short for Negrita, "our dear little dark
one." Born in a Puerto Rican barrio in 1948, the eldest of eleven children,
she moved at the age of four to the town of Macun, where her family
crowded into a one-room corrugated metal house on stilts. Each morning
she awoke to a radio program that celebrated traditional jibaro music and
poetry. She later wrote poignant descriptions of incidents in her life in ru-
ral Puerto Rico, including a custom in which she had to close a dead in-
fant's eyelids to let the deceased child rest peacefully. 38
In 1961 she, her mother, and six siblings arrived in Brooklyn. Her
mother, seeking medical help for a son who had injured his foot, was also
trying to escape an unhappy marriage, and supported the family by sew-
ing bras. In Brooklyn Esmeralda's family struggled with a difficult
and sometimes frightening social environment. None spoke a word of
English, and Esmeralda encountered many instances of discrimination.
354 Huck's Raft
Taxi drivers refused to pick her up, people of a variety of ethnic groups
treated her as a foreigner, and even Puerto Ricans born in New York kept
their distance. When she enrolled in public school, the principal wanted to
move her back a grade, and when she refused, he placed her in a class for
learning-disabled students.
Compared with turn-of-the-century immigrant children, Esmeralda felt
much more ambivalence about becoming American. She vividly recalled
going to the Bushwick branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, seeking any
book written by an author with a Spanish name. The closest she came was
to a volume of poetry by William Carlos Williams. "The more I read, the
more I realized that people like me didn't exist in English language litera-
ture," she said. "The feeling was that I wasn't wanted here. Otherwise, I
would be reflected in the culture." She discovered that assimilation in-
volved much more than learning the English language. She studied Archie
comic books to understand the way American girls dressed and talked,
and envied Veronica, who had fancy clothes and a car. 39
Like earlier immigrant children, she had to assume adult responsibilities
at an early age. Barely able to speak English, she translated for her mother
at meetings with a welfare agent. Every few months her family moved, in
search of lower rent or larger rooms. She received conflicting and confus-
ing messages from her family. She was told to strive to get ahead, but not
to leave other family members behind. Her mother warned her to be wary
of men, and did not allow her to have male friends. At the High School
for the Performing Arts in Manhattan, however, Esmeralda encountered a
diverse, multicultural environment. She performed classical Indian dance
and portrayed Cleopatra in a play. When she returned to Puerto Rico af-
ter thirteen years of living in the United States, Puerto Ricans told her that
she wasn't Puerto Rican "because I was, according to them, American-
ized." But she continued to feel a deep sense of uncertainty about whether
she was black or white, rural or urban, Puerto Rican or American. Her
experience was shared by innumerable other immigrant children caught
between two cultures, neither of which they can identify fully as their
own.
Today the number of immigrant children is at an all-time high. A fifth
of all young people in the United States are the children of immigrants-
either immigrants themselves or the U.S.-born children of immigrant par-
ents. In New York City and Los Angeles, about half of all school children
are the children of immigrants. Nationwide about four million children
have limited English proficiency. The current surge in immigration fol-
lowed enactment of the Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Act of 1965,
which ended a quota system that severely restricted immigration from

A young Cuban refugee

enters the United States in
1961 following the Cuban
Revolution. Under Opera-
tion Pedro Pan, the largest
child refugee program in
the history of the Western
Hemisphere, more than
7,000 children arrived in
the United States unac-
companied by their par-
ents. Courtesy of the
Florida Photographic
Collection, Florida State
Archives, Tallahassee.
outside northern and western Europe, and instead emphasized the princi-
ple of family reunification. Today's immigrant children are predominantly
Asian, Caribbean, and Hispanic, and face racial barriers that did not exist
for their European predecessors, as well as economic barriers that limit
their economic prospects. A century ago the children of European immi-
grants joined an expanding American industJ;ial workforce; today's sec-
ond generation finds a stagnating job market with limited prospects for
advancement for those without a college degree. 40
For many children, the immigrant journey exacted a high cost. Many
immigrants fled economic or political upheavals in their country of birth,
and immigration entailed family separation, either because parents mi-
grated ahead of the children or because the children were sent to the
United States first. Altogether, only about 20 percent of immigrant chil-
dren arrived in the United States with their entire immediate family. Fam-
ily reunification often proved to be a prolonged, tension-filled experience,
complicated by the fact that many immigrant parents hold multiple jobs,
and thus have less time to interact with their children. 41
In certain respects the experiences of immigrant children at the end of
the twentieth century mirrored those at the century's start. Many immi-
grant fathers suffer a sharp loss in status following migration, as they
have to take on low-prestige jobs to support their families, diminishing
356 Huck,s Raft
their authority over their children. Role reversal remains quite common,
as children must serve as cultural and linguistic interpreters, but also very
unsettling. Lan Cao, a Vietnamese immigrant who arrived in the United
States at the age of thirteen, explained: "I was the one who would help my
mother through the hard scrutiny of ordinary life." She, like other chil-
dren of immigrants, had to assume adult responsibilities quickly: "I would
have to forgo the luxury of adolescent experiments and temper tantrums,
so that I could scoop my mother out of harm's way." As in earlier genera-
tions of immigrant families, the experiences of boys and girls diverged.
Girls assumed greater domestic responsibilities as translators, as interme-
diaries in financial, legal, and medical transactions, and as babysitters,
and were more likely to face restrictions on dating and other activities
outside the home. One unexpected consequence of those restrictions was
that immigrant girls viewed school as a liberation, unlike many non-
immigrants, who considered school a form of detention. 42
Unlike early twentieth-century immigrants' children, who felt they had
to reject the Old World to get ahead in the new, many contemporary im-
migrant children feel less eager to assimilate and less pressure to reject
their cultural traditions. Foreign-language television shows, newspapers,
magazines, radio talk shows, and the Internet allow immigrant children to
maintain regular contact with family and friends in their country of birth.
Some groups are able to sustain their native language at high rates, includ-
ing about 70 percent of Haitian-American and Filipino-American chil-
dren. Nevertheless, like second-generation immigrants of a century ago,
immigrant children encounter the humbling experiences of learning Eng-
lish and of generational tensions with elders who find American culture
profoundly alienating. For today's immigrant children, the process of ad-
justment is made all the more difficult by a sense of a profound gap with
American-born children, who seem preoccupied with boyfriends, clothes,
and the latest fads.
The lives of children of immigrants involve a paradox. On the one
hand, they are healthier than nonimmigrant children, even though more
than a quarter do not have a regular source of health care. Immigrant
children also work harder in school than do nonimmigrant children, and
are overrepresented as high school valedictorians. Yet the more American-
ized these children become, the more likely they are to engage in risky be-
havior, such as smoking, drinking, using illegal drugs, engaging in unpro-
tected sex, joining gangs, or committing crime. This trend seems to be
related not only to the impoverished neighborhoods that many immigrant
children live in, but also to the social expectations that children of immi-
grants encounter, especially the preconception that they are of lower intel-
ligence or are dangerous. Some immigrant children who feel themselves

marginalized and disparaged respond by embracing an adversarial iden-
tity, hostile to authority and school achievement. At the same time, many
find themselves forced into preexisting American racial and ethnic catego-
ries, required to choose between being white, black, Asian, or Hispanic. 43
During the last quarter of the twentieth century, many of the most divi-
sive domestic policy issues, from gun control to the Internet, were debated
in terms of their impact upon children. Images of fragile and vulnerable
children, unable to assert their needs or defend their interests, gave legisla-
tive proposals a moral weight that they would otherwise have lacked.
During the 1970s, liberals and conservatives discovered that child endan-
germent was a highly effective way to mobilize political support. It was a
liberal, Marian Wright Edelman, the first black woman admitted to the
Mississippi bar, who pioneered the politics of child advocacy by founding
the Children's Defense Fund in 1973. Recognizing that support for pro-
grams identified with racial minorities and the poor was dwindling, she
concluded that "new ways had to be found to articulate and respond to
the continuing problems of poverty and race, ways that appealed to the
self-interest as well as the conscience of the American people." By shifting
the focus from poverty to children, she sought to generate support for
childcare, child nutrition, and child health programs during a period of
conservative ascendancy. Among the successes that can be attributed to
lobbying by the Children's Defense Fund were an expansion of Head
Start, prekindergarten, and afterschool programs; the Earned Income Tax
Credit (a refundable federal income tax credit for low-income families en-
acted in 1975 to offset social security taxes and provide an incentive to
work); the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, providing unpaid paren-
tal leaves; and the 1997 Children's Health Insurance Program, which fur-
nishes health insurance to children in families with incomes too high to
qualify for Medicaid but too low to afford private insurance. 44
Social conservatives and political moderates quickly discovered that
they could use the politics of childhood for their own purposes. Many
policies they proposed in children's name proved to be highly restrictive.
Convinced that it was politically counterproductive to regulate adult be-
havior, legislators imposed regulations on the young, including curfews,
curbs on smoking and drinking, competency testing in schools, and more
restrictive policies on teenage driving. Meanwhile school boards iqstituted
dress codes, especially in middle schools, and zero-tolerance policies on
drug use and school violence. A few mandated random drug tests for stu-
dents engaged in extracurricular activities.
One of the most contentious issues was whether to fund daycare for the
358 Huck's Raft
children of working mothers. The issue of how to care for children when
their mothers worked burst onto the political agenda in 1964, when a De-
partment of Labor study counted almost a million "latchkey" children
who were unsupervised for large portions of the day. Over the years, their
numbers skyrocketed. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the number
of working mothers with children five or under who worked outside the
home tripled. Today two-thirds of all children under the age of six have a
mother who works, more than three out of every five children under the
age of four are in a regularly scheduled childcare program, and nearly half
of all one-year-olds spend part of their day in nonparental care. As the
number of working mothers grew, many family experts advocated orga-
nized daycare programs as a necessary response. 45
Liberals, led by Democratic Senator Walter Mondale, called for a na-
tional system of comprehensive child development and daycare centers.
Building on the model of Head Start, Mondale proposed in 1971 that the
federal government establish a care system that would include daycare,
nutritional aid for pregnant mothers, and afterschool programs for teens.
President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill in a stinging message that called
the proposal fiscally irresponsible, administratively unworkable, and a
threat to "diminish both parental authority and parental involvement
with children." Tapping into the widespread view that childcare was a pa-
rental responsibility, the president warned against committing "the vast
authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches
to child rearing over against the family-centered approach." 46
Following the presidential veto, congressional support for a compre-
hensive system of federally funded centers evaporated. Nevertheless, a
fragmentary patchwork emerged, consisting of ad-hoc, makeshift ar-
rangements by individual parents; informal, family-style care in private
homes; and a wide variety of nonprofit and for-profit centers. This crazy-
quilt included regulated and unregulated and custodial and educationally
oriented programs. In the United States, childcare is thought of primarily
as a family responsibility, whereas in Europe it is regarded as a public re-
sponsibility. Yet despite ingrained hostility toward state intervention in
the family, public involvement in childcare gradually increased. Direct
federal funding was restricted almost exclusively to the poor and to mili-
tary personnel, but the federal government also indirectly subsidized
childcare through grants to organizations that operate daycare centers as
well as through tax incentives and credits to individual families. In con-
trast, corporate support for childcare for their employees has remained
negligible, with about 5 percent of employees eligible for corporate child-
care benefits. In 2000, forty-three states provided part-time prekinder-

garten programs, usually targeted at four-year-olds.
While most parents say that they are satisfied with the care that their
children receive, expert studies have concluded that the care is of poor or
mediocre quality for half of children in childcare arrangements. The most
significant problem is inequality of access to educationally oriented pro-
grams, with 75 percent of the three- to five-year-olds of wealthier parents
and only 45 percent of those of low-income parents in such programs.
Other problems include the low status and pay of childcare workers, min-
imal standards for training, high staff turnover, prohibitive fees, and
widely varied, loosely enforced regulations.
The politics of childhood has focused less on practical policies like
childcare than on regulating children's lives. In 1970 Dr. Arnold
Hutschnecker, who had once served as Richard M. Nixon's personal phy-
sician, recommended that the president order psychological testing for all
seven- and eight-year-olds in order to determine whether they had "vio-
lent and homicidal tendencies." Disturbed, angry, rebellious, undisci-
plined, and disruptive children were to receive therapy from counselors
and psychologists in afterschool programs and special camps. Dr. Butsch-
necker's proposal was greeted with horror; critics labeled the treatment
centers "concentration camps." While nothing like Dr. Hutschnecker's
proposal for universal psychological testing has been implemented, there
have been expanded efforts over the past three decades to intervene in
children's behavior at an early age. These included greatly expanded use
of psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin, not only among older children but
also among preschoolers. There is also increased use of "sex-offense-spe-
cific" therapies directed at "children with sexual behavior problems," un-
der which children as young as two have been diagnosed and treated for
inappropriate behavior such as fondling or masturbating compulsively.
The most pronounced trend was toward imposing new kinds of restraints
and controls on the young. 47
More than forty years ago, social critic Edgar Z. Friedenberg wrote that
adults' hostility toward youth-"rooted in fear of disorder, and loss of
control; fear of aging, and envy of life not yet squandered"-was often
disguised as efforts to help the young. Friedenberg's comment provides an
insight into the way society has addressed children's welfare since the
early 1970s. Convinced that adult behaviors were deeply entrenched and
not susceptible to change, persuaded that most problem behaviors take
root in the early years of life, policymakers and advocacy groups focused
on changing young people's behavior. This approach allowed authorities
360 Huck"'s Raft
to address pervasive social problems without alienating adult voters.

More disturbingly, focusing on youth provided a thinly veiled way to tar-
get minority and lower-income youths without provoking widespread
outcries of racism or class bias. This "tough love" approached seemed to
offer a commonsense solution to social problems. But if the ostensible
goal was to ensure young people's safety and well-being, zero-tolerance
policies also sent the message that young people's needs were subordinate
to those of adults. 48
In 1994 two boys, aged ten and eleven, attacked five-year-old Eric
Morse in a Chicago public housing project because he had refused to steal
candy for them from a local supermarket. The boys stabbed him, sprayed
him with Mace, and pushed him downstairs before dangling him out a
fourteenth-floor window and dropping him to his death. At the time the
two boys were the youngest people in American history to be jailed for
murder, but they were not isolated examples of "kids killing kids." At
least ten youths, twelve or younger, were charged with murder in Chicago
in 1993 and 1994. In the weeks following the boys' arrest, additional
facts came to light that helped explain the factors that predisposed them
to violence, including troubled families, neglectful schools, and law en-
forcement authorities who had failed to do their job. Both had fathers in
prison, and one boy's mother was a drug addict. Both grew up sur-
rounded by violence. Although one boy had skipped classes for much of
the year and had failed all his courses, he had been promoted to the next
grade. Finally, in the six months before Eric's murder, one of the boys had
been arrested eight times, including once for possession of ammunition,
but was released each time, even though Chicago police guidelines man-
dated a referral to a juvenile court after three arrests. 49
The murder of Eric Morse raised troubling questions. Should ten- and
eleven-year-olds be held culpable for serious crimes? What should be done
about children who are deeply troubled and are at risk of growing into vi-
olent adults? In the wake of the Morse murder and a 1996 case in which a
six-year-old Richmond, California, boy pulled a one-month-old baby
from his crib and kicked, punched, and beat the infant with a broomstick,
every state moved to prosecute as adults juveniles who committed serious
crimes, such as murder, armed robbery, and burglary. By being placed in
the adult justice system, juveniles would receive stiffer sentences and be
jailed under harsher conditions. Some jurisdictions adopted laws prevent-
ing juvenile court records from being expunged and requiring that schools
be notified whenever a juvenile was taken into custody for a crime of vio-
lence or when a deadly weapon was used. Meanwhile, many increased
minimum sentences for juvenile offenders, and at least three states auto-
matically tried delinquents with three previous convictions as adults. 50
During the 1996 presidential campaign, President Bill Clinton urged
cities to enact curfew laws to keep teenagers off the streets at night tore-
duce youth violence. "We simply cannot go into the 21st century with
children having children, children killing children, children being raised
by other children or raising themselves on the streets alone," he told
10,000 African-American church women. Curfews, he maintained, "give
parents a tool to impart discipline, respect and rules at an awkward and
difficult time in children's lives." At the time he made this speech, 146 of
the 200 largest cities had curfews to keep youths off the street after dark. 51
Clinton also called for other measures to reassert discipline and increase
adults' authority. These included requiring school uniforms in elementary
and middle schools; establishing a television rating system that used let-
ters like V for violence and S for sex; preventing the movie, music, and
video-game industries from marketing violent, sexually explicit products
to children; requiring libraries to install filtering software on Internet-
accessible computers; and placing "V-chips" in television sets to allow
parents to block offensive programming. He also urged school districts to
adopt "zero-tolerance" policies on illicit drug use, smoking, and violence
to restore "order in our children's lives." The president portrayed these
ideas as neither too coercive nor too strict. Young people needed to know
that "these rules are being set by people who love them and care about
them and desperately want them to have good lives." Like other measures
that President Clinton took on behalf of parents and children-such as
unpaid leave for teacher conferences and doctors' appointments, mini-
mum hospital stays for childbearing, and a ban on tobacco ads aimed at
the young-these had an activist flavor but required no new federal
government spending. For a president accused of a pot-smoking, draft-
evading, womanizing past, talking tough on values provided some rhetor-
ical insulation from conservative attacks. 52
In 1985 an elementary school in Oakland, California, launched an
antidrug, antialcohol campaign with a simple message: "Just Say No."
This campaign, which drew national attention after it gained vocal sup-
port from First Lady Nancy Reagan, was one of a number of efforts to al-
ter youthful behavior through education. D.A.R.E., Drug Abuse Resis-
tance Education, founded in Los Angeles in 1983 by then Police Chief
Darryl Gates, was another. In nearly 70 percent of the nation's school dis-
tricts, police officers lead classroom lessons on ways to resist peer pressure
and live drug and violence-free lives. Usually in the fifth grade, students
362 Huck~s Raft
are asked to sign a pledge that they will keep their bodies drug free, de-
spite the fact that no scientific study has uncovered any statistically
significant difference in drug usage rates between students who had taken
D.A.R.E. and those who had not. 53
Similar efforts urged young people to say no to sex. The 1996 Welfare
Reform Act earmarked $50 million a year in federal funds for states im-
plementing programs that had as their "exclusive purpose, teaching the
social, psychological and health gains" of sexual abstinence. In order to
receive funding, the "exclusive purpose" of sex education must be to
teach "that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of
marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity" and "that
sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful
psychological and physical effects." Schools that received these grants had
to teach abstinence as the only reliable way to prevent pregnancy and sex-
ually transmitted diseases. Grant recipients were not to discuss contracep-
tion except in the context of failure rates of condoms. Supporters claimed
that abstinence education helped youngsters develop the skills to "say no
to sex." Critics noted that in a society in which half of high school stu-
dents and three-fifths of high school seniors report having had inter-
course, the abstinence-only approach failed to provide them with the
information they needed about sexually transmitted diseases and contra-
ception. By 1999 nearly a quarter of all sex education teachers taught ab-
stinence as the only way of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted
diseases, compared with just 2 percent in 1988. 54
To buttress the "just say no" programs, many schools implemented
zero-tolerance rules that mandated expulsion, denial of a diploma, or loss
of a driver's license if a high school student smoked, drank, or used drugs.
In North Carolina, teen smokers could be fined up to $1,000, and in
Florida, Minnesota, and Texas, teen smokers could lose their driver's li-
censes. No empirical evidence has shown these programs to be effective in
inoculating the young against substance abuse or premature sex. For a
significant number of adolescents, risky behavior is a way to assert their
individuality, define an identity, rebel against authority and conventional-
ity, and symbolize their initiation into adulthood. Given that our society
offers few positive, socially valued ways for the young to demonstrate
their growing competence and independence, it is not surprising that
many embrace these symbols of maturity. 55
In the spring of 1993 national media focused on first-grader Jonathan
Previte, who kissed a girl on the cheek at his North Carolina school. The
principal, upon being informed of Jonathan's kiss, decided that he should
be punished under the school's sexual harassment policy. The school sub-
sequently retreated from the sexual harassment label, yet its initial re-
sponse generated a media frenzy citing "political correctness" run amok.
That same year, LaShonda Davis, a fifth-grader in Monroe County, Geor-
gia, was harassed for five months by a boy who rubbed up against her, re-
peatedly grabbed her breasts and genital area, and asked her for sex. She
and her mother complained to school officials to no avail. It took three
months of daily requests before the boy was moved to another desk, and
LaShonda was so depressed that she wrote a suicide note. The harassment
ended only after she and her mother swore out a criminal warrant against
the boy, who pleaded guilty to sexual battery. The family then sued the
school district, claiming that its failure to take any action to stop the per-
vasive and damaging harassment violated Title IX, the federal law that
prohibits schools from discriminating on the basis of sex. In 1999 the Su-
preme Court ruled in LaShonda's behalf, holding that when a school is de-
liberately indifferent to "severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive" ha-
rassment, a student has the right to compensation. 56
Jonathan and LaShonda served as proxies in a broader culture war, a
struggle over gender roles, abortion, homosexuality, and censorship that
raged from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. School vouchers, charter
schools, Internet filtering software, and abstinence-only sex education
served as battlegrounds. Even potty training could become fodder in this
Kulturkampf. John Rosemond, a North Carolina psychologist and a pop-
ular conservative writer on childrearing, attacked the pediatrician
T. Berry Brazelton, whom he accused of adopting a "laissez-faire" ap-
proach to toilet training. Rosemond insisted that properly disciplined chil-
dren needed to be toilet trained by the age of two. 5 7
Child discipline was a central arena of conflict. At one pole were ex-
perts who echoed concerns first voiced by then Vice President Spiro T.
Agnew: that too much coddling of children and overresponsiveness to
their demands resulted in adolescents who were disrespectful, rebellious,
and undisciplined. An extreme example of this viewpoint was James
Dobson's Dare to Discipline, first published in 1970, which called on par-
ents to exercise firm control of their children through the use of corporal
punishment. At the other pole was Thomas Gordon's 1970 million-plus
seller, Parent Effectiveness Training, which advised parents to stop pun-
ishing children and start treating them "much as we treat a friend or a
spouse. " 58
The acceptability of spanking became a point of contention as
definitions of what constituted "enlightened" childrearing underwent a
dramatic transformation. In 1998 the American Academy of Pediatrics
called on parents to reject spanking, saying that the practice taught chil-
364 Huck~s Raft
dren that "aggressive behavior is a solution to conflict." Murray A.

Straus, an expert on abuse, called spanking a "major psychological and
social problem" that could doom a child to a lifetime of difficulties rang-
ing from juvenile delinquency to depression, sexual hangups, limited job
prospects, and lowered earnings. Defenders of the practice included
Dobson and Rosemond, whose To Spank or Not to Spank advocated the
light swat on the bottom as "a relatively dramatic form of nonverbal com-
munication. " 59
The issue of corporal punishment extended to the schools. As recently
as the 1940s, corporal punishment in schools was legal in all but one
state. By the end of the century, twenty-seven states and many municipali-
ties had banned the practice. Increasingly, corporal punishment was con-
centrated in the South, where proponents argued that they were seeking
"a return to accountability, authority, and increased order in schools." On
the other side were those _who wanted "to make schools a sanctuary from
social violence," and who believed that corporal punishment contributed
to disruptive student behavior. Despite four decades of efforts to ban the
practice, corporal punishment remains a reality in many school districts. 60
The gender wars were repeatedly played out in the juvenile arena. Dur-
ing the 1980s and 1990s a number of influential studies argued that girls
were "underserved" and "shortchanged": that gender-biased teachers
overlooked girls in class; that girls were less likely to participate in school
sports; and that female students were discouraged from pursuing mathe-
matics, science, and technology. Such popular writers as Peggy Orenstein
and Mary Pipher reported that many adolescent girls had poor self-
esteem, an obsession with body image, and encounters with sexual harass-
ment. Their adversaries, such as Christina Hoff Sommers, claimed that
boys had it worse. High school boys lagged three years behind girls in
writing, one and a half years behind in reading, and were 50 percent more
likely to be held back a grade. Boys were also three times more likely to be
enrolled in special education programs, four times more likely to be diag-
nosed with attention deficit disorders, five times more likely to be in-
volved in drugs and alcohol, and eight times more likely to commit
suicide. 61
During the last decades of the twentieth century, arguments over gender
were often fought over how best to socialize girls and boys. One side saw
the traditional virtues of boyhood as threatened by psychologists who
"medicalized" and "pathologized" everyday boyhood behavior, treating
physicality, mischief, rough-and-tumble play, and confrontation as psy-
chological disorders. Their opponents argued that boys needed to have
more of the nurturing, expressive qualities associated with girls, while
girls needed to be more "boylike": tougher, less preoccupied with popu-

larity and appearance, and more analytical, athletic, and competitive.
Such authorities as William Pollack and James Garbarino believed that
boys were programmed at an early age to be little men, to refrain from
crying, to keep their feelings inside, and never to display vulnerability, and
therefore found it difficult to express their emotions without feeling ef-
feminate or to manage their anger and frustration in a way that did not
involve violence. 62
In fact both sexes face significant problems that need to be addressed
and have unique voices that need to be heard. Neither boys nor girls find
it easy to navigate the path to maturity, and both sexes suffer from gender
stereotyping. Thanks in large part to the battles fought by feminists, girls
are now better able to synthesize disparate worlds, such as the world of
sports, academics, and relationships. But anorexia and bulimia have in-
creased in frequency, and girls must still navigate a social landscape that
urges them to define themselves in terms of physical appearance. Both the
academic and social problems faced by boys and the inequities and cul-
tural expectations about appearance and proper behavior that girls con-
front need to be remedied. 63
Neither the Democratic nor the Republican political party has been
consistent on issues relating to children. Generally Republican conserva-
tives favored parents' authority to raise their families without government
interference. But in two of the highest-profile public controversies of the
1980s and 1990s-involving twelve-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Walter
Polovchak and six-year-old Cuban Elian Gonzalez-conservatives took
the lead in arguing that children should be allowed to decide where to
live, even if this conflicted with their parents' wishes. Conversely, liberal
Democrats, who generally emphasized the ideals of free expression,
choice, and questioning authority, took the lead in advocating school
dress codes, curfews, and other restrictions on youthful behavior. Clearly,
political ideology does not always determine policy. 64
One of the most explosive issues in the culture war involved introduc-
ing children to the reality of gay parents. Leslea Newman's Heather Has
Two Mommies was the first picture book depicting a young child living
with two lesbian parents. Published in 1989, it presented the story of
Heather, a preschooler, who discovers that her friends have very different
sorts of families. Juan has a mommy and a daddy and a big brother
named Carlos. Miriam has a mommy and a baby sister. And Joshua has a
mommy, a daddy, and a stepdaddy. Their teacher encourages the children
to draw pictures of their families, and reassures them that "each family
is special" and that "the most important thing about a family is that all
366 Huck's Raft
the people in it love each other." This book produced a firestorm of

controversy.
A curriculum guide in New York City, which urged first-grade teachers
to acknowledge "the positive aspects of each type of household," includ-
ing those headed by gays and lesbians, placed Heather Has Two
Mommies on a list of recommended books. School boards in Brooklyn,
the Bronx, and Queens banned the guide, calling it inappropriate for first-
graders. Critics termed it a document designed to help recruit gays and
lesbians, and in 1993 it headed the list of books that people sought to ban
from public library shelves. The next year, after Republican Senator Jesse
Helms branded the book an example of the "disgusting, obscene materials
that's laid out before school children in this country every day," the U.S.
Senate voted sixty-three to thirty-six to deny federal funds to schools
that "implement or carry out a program that has either the purpose or ef-
fect of encouraging or supporting homosexuality as a positive lifestyle
alternative. " 65
Heather Has Two Mommies was the product of a trend in children's lit-
erature in which writers dealt much more openly than in the past with
such topics as divorce, death, domestic abuse, and the psychological com-
plexity of childhood and adolescence. Joanne Greenberg's I Never Prom-
ised You a Rose Garden (1964) charted a new direction in adolescent lit-
erature by treating an openly sexual relationship as a symbol of growing
up. John Donovan's 1969 novel, I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the
Trip, introduced homosexuality as a theme. Alice Childress' A Hero Ain't
Nothing but a Sandwich (1973), which described a thirteen-year-old her-
oin addict, depicted drug abuse as an escape from an intolerable environ-
ment and inept parenting. Books for younger children also underwent a
radical shift in tone and content. In 1963, Where the Wild Things Are by
Maurice Sendak aroused controversy because of its depiction of a child's
temper tantrum. To be sure, works of fantasy and adventure, like the
Harry Potter series, persist, but many of the escapist elements of earlier
children's books were disputed. 66
Of all the battlefields in the culture war involving children, the most
hotly contested involved education. There were bitter controversies over
Ebonies-the concept that vernacular black English is different enough
from standard English to be considered a separate language-whole-lan-
guage versus phonics in reading instruction, school vouchers, and ac-
countability testing. At the heart of these battles was a conflict between
traditional pedagogy, with its emphasis on the importance of memoriza-
tion, discipline, and a traditional canon, and progressive pedagogy, with
its stress on active learning, relevance, and skills-building. Five devastat-
ing critiques of public schools in the late 1970s and early 1980s touched
off a wave of breast-beating over the state of American education. The
most influential, A Nation at Risk, argued that there had been no measur-
able increase in student achievement despite sharp increases in school
spending. In its most memorable passage, the report warned: "The educa-
tional foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising
tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people
. . . If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America
the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well
have viewed it as an act of war." Other studies reported that American
students ranked near the bottom in scores on international mathematics
and science tests. 67
Critics challenged the contention that student achievement was eroding,
arguing that the proportion of poor students and those with limited Eng-
lish proficiency had sharply increased and that much of the increase in ed-
ucational expenditures went to remedial tutoring, special education, gui-
dance counselors, and social workers. Their arguments were rejected.
Two movements to revitalize education arose. A back-to-basics movement
called on schools to emphasize traditional reading, grammar, and arith-
metic skills, while a movement for academic excellence sought to improve
student achievement by raising requirements for graduation and imposing
exit exams. In response to fears that students were not learning enough,
that expectations were too low, and that a stronger curriculum was
needed for all students, every state increased its graduation requirements,
and many imposed "minimum competency tests" to ensure that children
were learning basic skills. In 2002 the No Child Left Behind act required
the states to create standards in math, reading, and science and to test
every student's progress toward those standards. As a result of these cam-
paigns, school curricula became more test driven and more tightly focused
on reading, mathematics, and science. 68
Not surprisingly, these years also saw a succession of movies and books
that depicted schools in harshly negative terms. Unlike the more idealistic
movies of the mid-1960s, like To Sir with Love, Back to School, Bill and
Ted's Excellent Adventure, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Porky's pre-
sented a depressing picture of schools as little more than detention camps
populated by rigid, uncaring teachers and lackadaisical, disconnected stu-
dents. While some books, like Jonathan Kozol's Amazing Grace, dis-
cussed inequities in educational spending on the rich and the poor, others
like Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good about
Themselves but Can't Read, Write or Add expressed a fear that schools, in
their preoccupation with educational fads and instilling self-esteem, had
368 Huck's Raft
allowed student achievement to decline; that textbooks had decreased in

difficulty by two grade levels over the last quarter-century; and that chil-
dren were not encouraged to work hard or to master rigorous or complex
material. The schools became politicized, and as a result legislatures in-
creasingly dictated curricula and graduation standards. 69
The culture wars played out in the courtroom as well, as a series of le-
gal cases functioned as moral theater, gripping the public's attention and
allowing it to debate its beliefs and values. In the mid-1980s the Baby M
case, the first high-profile court case involving surrogate mothering, gen-
erated intense controversy about the meaning of the "best interests of the
child" standard. William and Elizabeth Stern agreed to pay Mary Beth
Whitehead $10,000 and medical expenses to be artificially inseminated by
the father's sperm and carry the child to term. After the birth, Whitehead
refused to turn over the baby to the Sterns. A lower court awarded cus-
tody to William Stern, the biological father, and gave Elizabeth Stern the
right to adopt the infant, partly on the ground that their higher income
would allow them to better provide for the child. This decision was over-
turned in 1988 by the New Jersey Supreme Court, which awarded cus-
tody to William Stern, banned the practice of bearing children for money,
prohibited Elizabeth Stern from adopting the baby, and granted Mary
Beth Whitehead visitation rights.
The case of ''Baby Jessica" dramatized the conflicting rights of biologi-
cal and adoptive parents. In 1991, two days after giving birth, Cara
Clausen signed papers giving up the child for adoption. Two weeks later
she filed papers to revoke the decision. The child's biological father, who
had not previously been informed that the child had been put up for
adoption, sued for custody. The adoptive parents, Jan and Roberta
DeBoer, contested the case in court and, after a protracted legal battle,
were ordered in 1993 to give Baby Jessica to the child's biological father.
The case of Gregory Kinsley, a twelve-year-old Nintendo-playing Florida
boy, involved the conflicting rights of parents and children. In 1992 he be-
came the first minor to successfully sue his parents for a "divorce." In the
preceding eight years his mother had spent only one year with him, and he
asked to be placed with his foster parents, an upper-middle-class Mormon
family. His biological mother argued that the boy was seeking more
affluent parents and, as a Catholic, should not be placed with Mormons.
The judge ultimately ruled that in cases involving overwhelming abuse or
neglect, children had a right to sue to terminate their parents' rights.
In cases involving children, the courts had to balance three competing
claims: young people's independent rights, including the right to make de-
cisions about medical treatment and to decide where and with whom to
live; the right of parents, in the absence of abuse or neglect, to raise their
child as they saw fit; and government's authority to regulate children's be-
havior. A majority on a bitterly divided Supreme Court took the position
that earlier court decisions had fostered legalistic and adversarial relations
within homes and schools, undercut adult authority, and undermined the
nurturing environments young people needed to grow up. The conserva-
tive majority also expressed concern that federal and state governments
were intruding on parents' right to raise their children as they wished.
In one area, young people's health, the Court extended children's rights.
In three landmark decisions-Planned Parenthood of Missouri v.
Danforth (1976), Carey v. Population Services International (1977), and
Belloti v. Baird (1979)-the Court declared that juveniles had a right to
obtain birth control information, contraceptives, and abortions even over
their parents' objections. The Court's majority held that pregnancy had
such significant implications for young people's future life that they had to
be empowered to make this decision for themselves. In a 1981 case, H. L.
v. Matheson et al., the Court upheld the constitutionality of a Utah statute
that required parental notice in cases of unemancipated minors seeking
abortions, while affirming juveniles' right to an abortion. But the high
court also required states with parental notification laws to provide a "ju-
dicial bypass" process allowing judges to drop the notification require-
ment.
While the Court extended juvenile rights in the area of reproductive
health, the justices gave greater deference to the authority of parents and
government in other realms. In a 1979 decision, Parham v. ]. R., the Su-
preme Court affirmed the right of parents to institutionalize their children
without due process. The Court also granted school officials leeway in
disciplining students and regulating their behavior. It ruled in 1977 that
states could allow children to be paddled in school without parental con-
sent or a hearing; in 1986, that a principal could suspend a student for
making an obscene speech; and in 1988, that principals could censor
school newspapers. The courts also held that school dress codes and re-
strictions on hairstyle were permissible so long as they were not unreason-
able or discriminatory; and that school administrators could search lock-
ers without demonstrating probable cause.
In 1995 the high court ruled that schools could test entire teams of stu-
dent athletes, even if individual team members were not suspected of us-
ing drugs, on the grounds that athletes were important role models. In
2002 the Court went further and upheld the random drug testing of stu-
dents in all extracurricular activities, not just athletics. The Court's con-
servative majority summed up its new attitude in a 1985 decision that up-
370 Huck,s Raft
held the right of school officials to search a New Jersey girl's purse after
she was caught smoking in a lavatory. "Maintaining order in the class-
room has never been easy, and drug use and violent crimes in the schools
have been a major problem," declared Justice Byron R. White. "Accord-
ingly we have recognized that maintaining security and order in the
schools requires a certain degree of flexibility in school disciplinary proce-
dures." A commitment to child protection trumped the principle of chil-
dren's rights.
Early in 2000, six-year-old Dedrick Owens shot and killed a six-year-
old classmate, Kayla Rolland, at their elementary school in Mount Morris
Township, Michigan. Under a revision of the state's juvenile justice law in
1997, generally considered the nation's toughest, Dedrick, despite his age,
could be tried as an adult for murder. After the initial shock gave way, the
complexities of treating juveniles as adults became apparent. Dedrick's
classmates considered him a bully, and he had already been suspended for
stabbing a classmate with a pencil. But there was also a sense in which
Dedrick was himself a victim. His father was in jail. He, his mother, and
his brother, lived with an uncle in a boardinghouse that local authorities
called a crack house. His uncle, his closest male adult role model, ex-
changed drugs for stolen guns, one of which Dedrick brought to school to
show off. After he shot Kayla and was taken into police custody, he drew
pictures and asked whether he would see Kayla the next day. Ultimately
he was deemed too young to be held criminally responsible and was
placed in a private institution for children who have emotional problems.
For the past three decades, the overarching narrative of childhood has
consisted of a discourse of crisis: a story of unstable families, neglectful
parents, juvenile oversophistication, and teenage immorality. Individual
children served as potent symbols in this morality tale. There was Jessica
Dubroff, the would-be Amelia Earhart, who died because her father
wanted her to become the youngest person to fly across the United States.
Or JonBenet Ramsey, the six-year-old whose mother sought to make her a
beauty queen. Rather than treasuring these children for their own sake,
their parents treated them as pint-sized extensions of their own egos.
These girls served as symbols of a society that professed to prize children,
but in fact viewed them as means to their parents' fulfillment.
Americans are usually considered believers in progress, but the narra-
tive of childhood turns the theme of progress on its head. However, this
emphasis on decline is deeply flawed. It treats all children as if they were
alike, while ignoring the crucial variables of gender and class. If the lives
of suburban, middle-class white boys have grown riskier, middle-class
girls and minority children have more opportunities and role models than
ever before. Equally important, the discourse of decline exaggerates the
impact of family structure on children's well-being even as it distracts our
attention from the genuine stresses that afflict the lives of the young, ten-
sions that came glaringly to light in the youthful rampage at Columbine
High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999.
chapter seventeen
The Unfinished Century of the Child
IN 1900 the Swedish reformer Ellen Key predicted that the twen-
tieth century would be the century of the child. Just as the nineteenth cen-
tury had brought recognition of women's rights, the twentieth century
would bring acceptance of children's rights. She argued on behalf of a
childhood free from toil in factories and fields, devoted to play and educa-
tion, and buttressed by legislation guaranteeing children's well-being. She
also called for a child-centered pedagogy tailored to children's abilities
and interests. 1
During the twentieth century the United States moved a long way to-
ward fulfilling Key's noble visiori. During the Progressive era a loose coali-
tion of child psychologists, educators, jurists, physicians, and settlement-
house workers, supported by thousands of middle-class women, took the
crucial first steps toward universalizing the middle-class ideal of a pro-
tected childhood, through the establishment of playgrounds and kinder-
gartens, the expansion of high schooling, and enactment of mothers' pen-
sions and a separate system of juvenile justice emphasizing rehabilitation
rather than punishment. The 1920s saw a proliferation of childrearing ad-
vice based on the most up-to-date understanding of children's psychologi-
cal and developmental needs. The New Deal marked another significant
advance as the most exploitative forms of child labor were outlawed, an
economic safety net for dependent children was established, and high
school education became a normative experience, irrespective of class, re-
gion, and race. The late 1960s and early 1970s marked the culmination of
Key's century of the child as fundamental legal rights-to due process,
The Unfinished Century of the Child 373

Within sixteen minutes Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed thirteen people at Columbine
High School in Littleton, Colorado, and wounded twenty-one others in the deadliest
school shooting in American history. Over an eighteen-month period in 1998 and 1999,
there were six multiple-victim school shootings. Courtesy of the Jefferson County Sheriff's
Office, Golden, Colorado.
freedom of expression, gender and racial equity, and contraception and

abortion-were established.
But the century of the child ended with a bang, not a whimper. On
April 20, 1999, eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and seventeen-year-old
Dylan Klebold, clad in long black coats, stormed into Columbine High
School in Littleton, Colorado, a suburb south of Denver. The high school
seniors were armed with two sawed-off 12-gauge shotguns, a 9-millimeter
semiautomatic rifle, and a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. They also
carried fifty-one bombs, including an explosive fashioned from two
twenty-pound propane tanks and a gasoline-filled canister that they
placed in the school cafeteria. The bomb-filled with nails, BB's, and bro-
ken glass-contained enough propane and gasoline to kill a majority of
the 500 students in the school's lunchroom. The two youths apparently
timed the attack to coincide with the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth.
Within sixteen minutes they had gunned down twelve classmates and a
374 Huck~s Raft
teacher and wounded twenty-three others. Less than an hour after their
rampage began, each committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. 2
Before the rampage, no one noticed anything unusual about their be-
havior, even though the boys had left numerous warning signs. Klebold
walked down his school's halls making aggressively racist remarks and
wore black clothing lettered with German phrases. Police testified that the
youths had left a sawed-off shotgun barrel and bombmaking materials in
plain sight in one of the boys' rooms. In the weeks preceding the assault,
the shooters exploded pipe bombs and fired automatic weapons in the
mountains near Denver. The boys were arrested for breaking into a van
and stealing $400 worth of electronic equipment. In a class in video pro-
duction, they made a videotape showing trench-coat-clad students walk-
ing down the hallways of Columbine High School shooting athletes dead.
Meanwhile Harris, who had been suspended for hacking into the school
computing system, posted on a website drawings of shotgun-toting mon-
sters and skulls and instructions for making pipe bombs like those he
brought to Columbine. Eight times, a classmate's parents contacted the lo-
cal sheriff's office with allegations that Harris had threatened their son.
The complaints were ignored. Because the boys came from affluent, intact
two-parent families, those danger signs were disregarded. Their mood
swings and infatuation with violence and death were dismissed as if they
represented typical examples of adolescent alienation and resentment. The
Columbine massacre produced an unsettling picture of a suburb where
adults had only the most superficial insight into the lives and mentality of
the young. 3
Why would two boys from stable, affluent homes try to massacre their
classmates? Police investigators concluded that Harris and Klebold were
angry and alienated and were seeking revenge for years of perceived
slights from peers. "You've been giving us shit for years," Klebold had
written. "You're fucking going to pay for all the shit." According to po-
lice officials, the shooters were also motivated by a desire to become cult
heroes. Like Leopold and Loeb, the pair felt superior to their peers.
"We're the only two who have self-awareness," wrote one. In a flagrant
attempt to gain publicity, the boys left a diary and videotapes for the po-
lice to find. One thread was an expectation of notoriety. "Directors will
be fighting over this story," wrote Klebold. 4
The Columbine shooting was partly the grotesque outcome of a long-
running feud with the more popular cliques at the school. The "preps"
and "jocks" who dominated the school apparently taunted the pair by re-
ferring to them with derogatory homosexual terms. But unlike high
school misfits of an earlier generation, Klebold and Harris were willing to
The Unfinished Century of the Child 3 75
offend, antagonize, and ultimately kill their tormentors. Nor were they
alone in expressing their resentments with violence. The Columbine mas-
sacre was the sixth multiple-victim school shooting over an eighteen-
month span in 1998 and 1999. During the 1990s the number of school
shootings with multiple victims climbed from an average of two a year to
an average of five. In West Paducah, Kentucky, fourteen-year-old Michael
Carneal told schoolmates that "it would be cool" to shoot into a student
prayer group. He did as promised, killing three girls and wounding five
other students who were praying in a school hallway. In Edinboro, Penn-
sylvania, Andrew Wurst, also fourteen, started shooting at his eighth-
grade prom, killing a teacher and injuring three others. In Jonesboro, Ar-
kansas, eleven-year-old Andrew Golden and thirteen-year-old Mitchell
Johnson activated a fire alarm and shot four girls and a teacher to death
and wounded ten others as they evacuated the school. In Springfield, Ore-
gon, fifteen-year-old Kipland Kinkel killed his parents, then shot twenty-
four people in his school cafeteria, killing two students. In Pearl, Missis-
sippi, a suburb of Jackson, sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham stabbed his
BLOCKEDIMAGEATTHE
At a makeshift memorial to the Columbine High School shooting victims, the public left stuffed animals,
crosses, angels, candles, bouquets, and ribbons. Because the Columbine rampage could not be blamed on
broken homes, poverty, or a rural gun culture, it provoked disturbing questions about how American
society raises children, especially boys. Courtesy of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, Golden,
Colorado.
376 Huck's Raft
mother to death before shooting nine students, killing two, at his high
school. In Bethel, Alaska, sixteen-year-old Evan Ramsey murdered a pop-
ular athlete and then tracked and killed the school principal. 5
Some commentators argued that media coverage of these shootings was
overblown, since multiple-victim school shootings were extremely rare.
Not only was school violence not a new phenomenon; it had actually
peaked during the 1992-93 school year, when nearly fifty young people
and adults were killed in school-related violence. Yet what made these
school shootings especially shocking was that violence had spread from
urban to rural and suburban areas and involved multiple victims. The
schoolyard killings in 1998 and 1999 were not gang related, nor were
they fights over money or girlfriends. The victims were chosen randomly,
and the motives for the killings were obscure. 6
In general, explanations of juvenile violence stress a process of brutal-
ization, involving abuse, exposure to violence, and emotional numbing;
but in none of the schoolyard shootings of 1998 and 1999 was there evi-
dence of a history of physical abuse, severe corporal punishment, or fam-
ily violence. Nor could the shootings be blamed on such suspects as urban
poverty, broken families, or single parenthood. The Columbine rampage
was particularly unsettling, since unlike the earlier school attacks, it could
not be explained as the product of southern or rural gun culture. The kill-
ings seemed to embody two characteristics: gestural suicide, intended to
provoke widespread attehtion; and revenge fantasies, modeled on the in-
discriminate violence featured on television and video games, in which the
victims provide an audience for the killers to work out their needs. 7
Adolescent revenge fantasies were not new. They first became a recog-
nized part of popular culture's image of adolescence in Carrie, the 1976
film version of the Stephen King novel, in which a tormented teen un-
leashed her occult force to incinerate her high school. Even earlier, toward
the end of his own tortured teenage years, King had written a novel called
Rage (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman). In those days he remem-
bered the feeling of "rejection, of being an outsider, what it was like to be
teased relentlessly, and to entertain visions, fantasies of revenge on the
people who'd done it to you-the system that had done it to you." In the
book, a boy took his class hostage and murdered his teacher. In the school
shootings, life appeared to imitate art. In 1993 in Grayson, Kentucky,
Scott Pennington took his senior English class hostage and killed his
teacher and a custodian. Three years later fourteen-year-old Barry
Loukaitis of Moses Lake, Washington, took over his junior high algebra
class, killed two students and a teacher, and wounded another student. 8
Images of student-inflicted violence proliferated during the final years
The Unfinished Century of the Child 3 77
of the twentieth century. Influential songs and movies depicted schools as

rife with fierce social tensions and fantasies of violent retaliation. The
1989 film Heathers featured a character wearing a dark trench coat who
carried a revolver, which he pulled out when two athletes teased him in
the cafeteria. Later he tried to blow up the school during a pep rally. In
the 1995 movie The Basketball Diaries, a character played by Leonardo
DiCaprio fantasized about pulling a shotgun from beneath his trench coat
and killing his classmates. Although the links between media imagery and
actual behavior are complex, there is little doubt that the revenge fanta-
sies in film and literature gave expression to some young people's feelings
of powerlessness and resentment. 9
Popular explanations of the violence that took place in Littleton, West
Paducah, and Pearl emphasized such factors as young people's easy access
to semiautomatic weapons, capable of firing off dozens of rounds of am-
munition in less than a minute; their exposure to video games that in-
volved the graphic killing of human targets; a popular culture in which
people settle scores violently; and a lack of an adult presence in their lives.
Many commentators attributed the school rampages to school status hier-
archies, suburban alienation, and inadequate parental supervision. Social
contagion and copycat killing, with one rampage feeding on another, cer-
tainly played a role.
Several threads linked the rampages. Each case involved a child or
youths who felt unpopular, rejected, or picked upon. Many student killers
exhibited signs of serious depression. Most were suicidal, writing notes
before the killings that assumed they would die. For many, the attack of-
fered a way to end a life of torment in a blaze of terror. To varying de-
grees, the attackers were obsessed with violent popular culture and preoc-
cupied with guns, death, and killing. For many school killers, the
boundaries between reality and fantasy had eroded, and many of the
shootings had a gamelike quality. In the Jonesboro, Arkansas, killings, an
eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old dressed up in fatigues and hid in
the bushes like snipers and killed four girls and a teacher in the crossfire.
There was frequently a misogynist element in the shootings, with girls,
mothers, and female teachers constituting a majority of the victims. Like
Harris and Klebold, most of the shooters left a road map of warning signs
pointing toward the violence to come, often in detailed writings at school.
In case after case, friends and acquaintances heard boasts and muttered
plans for mayhem. Many of the student killers had a history of violent be-
havior. Kip Kinkel set off firecrackers in cats' mouths, threw rocks at cars
from an overpass, and gave a talk in speech class about how to build a
bomb. But the clues were missed by parents who were unable to face the
378 Huck's Raft
evidence of serious mental turmoil and by teachers who failed to take

threats seriously. 10
Were the schoolhouse shootings aberrations or were they symptoms of
unacknowledged failings in the ways that Americans raise children, espe-
cially boys? Precisely because the Littleton rampage could not be attrib-
uted to "broken homes," to a violent or abusive family life, or to declin-
ing job prospects in decaying working-class communities, it focused
public attention on the stresses besetting the lives of privileged youths. It
led commentators to focus on the social dynamics of secondary schools,
where social ostracism, marginalization, and alienation are commonplace;
a boyhood "culture of cruelty," where bullying, taunting, and insults are
everyday occurrences; and the psychological impact of movies that feature
casual cruelty and gratuitous violence, music that is fixated on death and
features the abuse of women, and video games that involve the graphic
killing of opponents. 11
During the twentieth century, high schools had become the primary
arena where American adolescents tried out new styles, trends, and identi-
ties. But high schools also mimicked some of the most disconcerting as-
pects of adult society, including clearly defined ladders of status and pres-
tige. At the end of the twentieth century, popular culture reexamined these
status hierarchies from a much more critical perspective. No longer was
the ideal simply to "fit in" or join the "in crowd." Such teen films as Clue-
less (1995), Jawbreaker (1998), and Varsity Blues (1999) portrayed high
schools as brutal, Darwinian environments that were status-obsessed, ma-
terialistic, hierarchical, and savagely competitive. In real life, too, second-
ary schools were roiling emotional cauldrons, filled with bullying and
snobbery. Middle and high schools had their own social pecking order,
with a status hierarchy defined largely by looks, athletic prowess, and
money. 12
In recent years the cliques found in middle schools and high schools
have proliferated. Alongside the strutting jocks, cheerleaders, and
preppies of the past, there were now skateboarders, freaks, Goths, ston-
ers, and other outcast cliques as geeky loners banded together. Unlike yes-
teryear's high schools, where the nerds, wallflowers, and other outcasts
felt truly powerless, their contemporary counterparts were less willing to
suppress their hostilities and resentments. The social dynamics of second-
ary schools, where kids engage in various forms of social ostracism and
casual sadism, lurked behind many of the schoolhouse shootings. It is
clear that the killers felt disrespected and unnoticed and desperately
wanted power and attention. While secondary schools address young peo-
ple's intellectual needs, they do not do an effective job of meeting their
psychological and emotional needs. They are filled with social as well as
academic stresses, and many students feel a deep sense of isolation and es-
trangement. A recent survey of 100,000 students found that only 1 in 4
said they went to a school where adults and other students cared for
them. 13
Gender hostility was another thread running through the school shoot-
ings. All the schoolhouse assailants were male, and over half of their vic-
tims were female. Rage or resentment against female teachers and stu-
dents helped generate violence. Gender hostility was not new. Younger
boys have long pulled girls' pony tails, and adolescent male culture has
long treated girls as sex objects. One boys' rhyme from the 1970s went:
Tra ra ra boom de ay!

Have you had yours today?
I had mine yesterday
from the girl across the way.
I laid her on the couch
and all she said was "Ouch!"
Tra ra ra boom de ay!
Tra ra ra boom de ay! 14
Yet even as an antifeminist backlash against female assertiveness spread

within the adult male culture, it appeared in the youth culture, too, espe-
cially among deeply disaffected middle-class adolescent males. Anger and
rage at women became part of the background noise of their world. One
of the harshest complaints against rap music, which found its largest and
most enthusiastic audience among white suburban teenaged boys, was
that it glorified sexist, misogynist, patriarchal ways of thinking and be-
having. Rap lyrics frequently associated blunt sexist language and graphic
descriptions of rape and violence against women with manliness and re-
belliousness.15
There can be no doubt that youth violence in the United States is highly
gendered. During the 1990s, 96 percent of youths committing serious acts
of violence were male. Most school killers showed signs of clinical depres-
sion, and responses to depression vary by gender. Depressed girls are more
likely than boys to cry openly or talk about their problems; they are also
more prone than boys to self-mutilate or attempt suicide. Boys, in con-
trast, have fewer socially acceptable outlets to express depression or frus-
tration and rage. Depressed boys tend to withdraw socially or group to-
gether with others who feel outcast, to act out aggressive impulses, and to
succeed in committing suicide. 16
Sometimes isolated incidents, like bolts of lightning that suddenly illu-
380 Huck's Raft
minate a darkened landscape, can reveal stresses and contradictions oth-

erwise difficult to discern. The school shootings point to contradictions
that lie at the very heart of the contemporary conception of childhood. By
most measures, the young were better off than ever. They were bigger,
richer, better educated, and healthier than at any other time in history. In
many ways they were uniquely privileged. They had grown up in a period
of sustained prosperity, had access to unprecedented amounts of informa-
tion and education, and had more private space in their homes than ever
before. Girls and racial and ethnic minorities had unparalleled opportuni-
ties and role models to emulate. Yet despite genuine gains, 60 percent of
all adult Americans and 77 percent of African Americans said that their
children were worse off than when they were children. 17
Certainly, some of this anxiety reflects nostalgia for a lost world of
childhood innocence, when six-year-old girls didn't wear slinky dresses,
lycra, and glitter nail polish, and preteen boys didn't wear earrings or dye
their hair purple. Partly, adults' concern involves the problems facing
poor children. Even at the height of the economic boom of the 1990s,
child poverty remained a severe problem, with 13.5 million children living
in poverty and 12 million lacking health insurance. Still, when the public
expressed alarm about the young, it reflected their sense that for all young
people, not simply the poorest, childhood and adolescence had grown
riskier and more stressful. Adults worried that children were growing up
too quickly and faced pressures, risks, and choices far greater than those
that they experienced at a similar age. Drugs, alcohol, unstable families,
sexual pressures, and the risks of sexually transmitted diseases were only
a few of the perils the young faced. They also confronted school stresses
greater than those their parents encountered. There was a widespread im-
pression that the number of young people with serious emotional and be-
havioral problems, especially depression, had rapidly increased over the
preceding decades, and that the age of onset was occurring earlier. Young
people, too, worried that something was wrong. A 1999 survey found
that a majority of teens agreed with the statement that young people were
powerless, that they would make little difference to the country, or would
make things worse. Other surveys reported that many felt lonely and iso-
lated, overwhelmed by stress, pressure, and responsibilities. 18
Contemporary childhood is characterized by a host of contradictions.
Numerically, today's children are the largest generation of young people
ever, even bigger than the baby boom at its peak in 1964. Nevertheless,
with the average age of Americans over thirty-three, the United States is a
more adult-centered society, deeply ambivalent toward the young. Adults
mimic the styles of the young and envy their appearance, energy, and viril-
ity, but intergenerational contact is increasingly confined to relationships
between children and parents, teachers, and service providers. More fully
integrated into the consumer economy than ever before, and at a much
earlier age, the young are, at the same time, more segregated than ever in
a peer culture. Kids have more space than ever inside their homes, but less
space outside to call their own.
American society romanticizes childhood and adolescence as carefree
periods of exploration, a time of freedom and irresponsibility, and young
people do have more autonomy than ever before in their leisure activities,
grooming, and spending. Yet there has simultaneously been a counter-
trend toward the systematic overorganization of young people's lives, a
trend especially noticeable in schools, where student behavior is much
more closely monitored than it was three or four decades ago, and where
many nonacademic and extracurricular activities have been eliminated. As
anxiety intensified over whether the young were prepared to compete in
the global economy, many schools curtailed recess (which has been elimi-
nated in about 40 percent of school districts), cut programs in art and mu-
sic, expanded summer school programs, imposed competency testing,
eliminated many extracurricular activities and assemblies, and reempha-
sized drill and repetition as part of a "back to basics" movement. Not sur-
prisingly, fewer students found school intellectually stimulating or
fulfilling. Instead, they found it stressful and pressured.
The underlying contradiction in youthful lives is the most disturbing.
Young people mature physiologically earlier than ever before. The media
prey on children and adolescents with wiles of persuasion and sexual in-
nuendo once reserved for adult consumers. The young have become more
knowledgeable sexually and in many other ways. They face adultlike
choices earlier. Yet contemporary American society isolates and juve-
nilizes young people more than ever before. Contemporary society pro-
vides the young with few positive ways to express their growing maturity
and gives them few opportunities to participate in socially valued activi-
ties. American society sends young people many mixed and confusing
messages. The young are told to work hard and value school, but also to
enjoy themselves. They are to be innocent but also sexually alluring. They
are to be respectful and obedient, but also independent consumers be-
holden to no one. They are to be youthful but not childish. The basic con-
tradiction is that the young are told to grow up fast, but also that they
needn't grow up at all, at least not until they reach their late twenties or
early thirties.
382 Huck,s Raft
History offers no easy 'Solutions to the problems of disconnection,

stress, and role contradictions that today's children face, but it does pro-
vide certain insights that might be helpful as we seek solutions. The first is
that nostalgia for the past offers no solutions to the problems of the pres-
ent. It is not possible to recreate a "walled garden" of childhood inno-
cence, no matter how hard we might try. No V-chip, Internet filtering soft-
ware, or CD-rating system will immunize children from the influence of
contemporary culture. Since we cannot insulate children from all malign
influences, it is essential that we prepare them to deal responsibly with the
pressures and choices they face. That task requires knowledge, not shel-
tering. In a risk-filled world, ·naivete is vulnerability.
Second, we must recognize that the solutions to young people's prob-
lems cannot simply come from individual parents, nor should they; effec-
tive solutions will necessarily be communal. Today's parents are beset
with economic stresses, time pressures, and emotional upheavals of their
own. American society could not put children's needs first to the exclusion
of adults', even if it wanted to. What Americans can do seems so obvious
that it is hard to understand the reluctance to take the necessary steps.
Government can ensure that all young people grow up with their basic
needs for food, clothing, schooling, and health care met. It can guarantee
that children have access to high-quality preschool and afterschool care. It
can moderate the economic disruptions of divorce on children's lives. It
can encourage family-friendly workplace policies to allow parents to
spend more time with their children. Above all, our society can provide
the young with meaningful opportunities to contribute to their communi-
ties, and provide the young with adult mentoring relationships. Young
Huck needs Jim as he and his little raft brave a raging Mississippi.
A little more than a century ago, the American ideal of childhood as a
world apart, a period of freedom and self-discovery, received its most
influential and lasting embodiment in The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn. In superficial ways, that ideal was realized. Emancipated from tradi-
tional forms of child labor, youth has become a prolonged period of edu-
cation and leisure. More than ever before, youth has come to occupy a
separate and autonomous realm, free from its traditional familial obliga-
tions. Yet in a deeper sense, the world we created is the polar opposite of
the ideal embodied by Twain's novel. Over the past century and a half, the
timing, sequencing, and stages of growing up have become ever more pre-
cise, uniform, and prescriptive, purportedly to better meet children's de-
velopmental needs, but in practice often failing them. In Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn~ many ties connected the young to a host of adults,
some of whom were family members, but many of whom, like the fugitive
slave Jim, were not. Today, connections that linked the young to the
world of adults have grown attenuated. The young spend most of their
day in an adult-run institution, the school, or consuming a mass culture
produced by adults, but have few ties to actual adults apart from their
parents and teachers.
Huckleberry Finn represented a rejection of the idea that childhood was
a period of life that was important merely as preparation for adulthood.
Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mark Twain considered childhood valuable
in and of itself. We may cling to that idea in the abstract, but in practice
American culture-oriented toward mastery and control-views child-
hood as a "project," in which the young must develop the skills, knowl-
edge, and character traits necessary for adulthood success, which is
increasingly defined in terms of academic skills, knowledge, and compe-
tencies-and the forms of discipline those require. We expect even very
young children to exhibit a degree of self-control that few adults had 200
or more years ago. Meanwhile, forms of behavior that previous genera-
tions considered normal are now defined as disabilities. American society
is unique in its assumption that all young people should follow a single,
unitary path to adulthood. Those who cannot adjust are cast adrift, to
float aimlessly in a river that threatens to sink their lonely raft.
Contemporary American childhood is characterized by a fundamental
paradox. More than ever before, children are segregated in a separate
world of youth. We live at the tail end of a protracted process in which
childhood was redefined as a special and vulnerable period of life that re-
quired affection, freedom from work, and separation from the adult
world. In response, childhood was prolonged and sentimentalized, and
new institutions were created to ensure that children's upbringing took
place in carefully calibrated steps that corresponded with their developing
capacities. Yet at the same time, children became more tightly integrated
into the consumer society and more knowledgeable about adult realities
at an earlier age. The result is a deepening contradiction between the child
as dependent juvenile and the child as incipient adult.
In recent years, the psychological costs of this contradiction have grown
more apparent. Hovering parents make it more difficult for children to
separate; schools, preoccupied with testing and discipline, monitor stu-
dents more closely and make education an increasingly stressful experi-
ence; demanding peer groups enforce conformity and ostracize those who
fail to fit in. Our challenge is to reverse the process of age segmentation,
to provide the young with challenging alternatives to a world of malls, in-
384 Huck's Raft
stant messaging, music videos, and play dates. Huck Finn was an abused
child, whose father, the town drunk, beat him for going to school and
learning to read. Who would envy Huck's battered childhood? Yet he en-
joyed something too many children are denied and which adults can pro-
vide: opportunities to undertake odysseys of self-discovery outside the
goal-driven, overstructured realities of contemporary childhood.
Notes
Index
BLANK PAGE
Notes
Preface
1. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation~ ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New
York: Modern Library, 1952), 25.
Prologue
1. Ron Powers, Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark
Twain (New York: Da Capo, 1999); idem, Tom and Huck Don~t Live Here
Anymore: Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America (New York: St.
Martin's, 2001 ), 2, 32-34, 40, 131; Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Lighting Out for
the Territories: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997).
2. Powers, Dangerous Water, 26, 84, 167; idem, Huck and Tom~ 78.
3. Richard Weissbourd, The Vulnerable Child: What Really Hurts America,s
Children and What We Can Do about It (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley,
1996), 48.
4. On changes in the onset of sexual maturation, see Marcia E. Herman-Giddens
et al., "Secondary Sexual Characteristics and Menses in Young Girls Seen in
Office Practice," Pediatrics 99 (April1997), 505-512. In 1890 the average age
of menarche in the United States was estimated to be 14.8 years; by the 1990s,
the average age had fallen to 12.5; 15 percent of white girls and 48 percent of
African-American girls showed signs of breast development or pubic hair by
age eight.
5. Stephen Robertson, "The Disappearance of Childhood," http://teaching.arts.
usyd.edu.au/history/2044/.
6. James A. Schultz, The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages~
1100-1350 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 11.
388 Notes to Pages 5-13
7. Leslie Fielder, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey," Partisan Review
25 (June 1948), 664-671; Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark
Twain and African-American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993).
1. Children of the Covenant

1. John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
(New York: Knopf, 1964).
2. Quoted in Rosalie Murphy Baum and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, "John Wil-
liams," in Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter, 4th ed.,
vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 521-523.
3. Titus King, Narrative of Titus King (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society,
1938), 17.
4. Demos, Unredeemed Captive, 144-146; James Axtell, "The White Indians of
Colonial America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 32 (1975), 55-88,
57, 62-63, 68, 85.
5. Anne S. Lombard, Making Manhood: Growing Up Male in Colonial New
England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 43, 52-53;
C. John Sommerville, The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (Ath-
ens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).
6. James Axtell, The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New
England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 4; David Hall, Worlds of
Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England
(New York: Knopf, 1989), 154.
7. Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and the Life
Course: Explorations in the Social History of Early America (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1992), 116, 144, 146-148; Gerald F. Moran, "Ad-
olescence in Colonial America," in Encyclopedia of Adolescence, ed. Richard
Lerner, Anne C. Petersen, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, vol. 1 (New York: Gar-
land, 1991 ), 157-164.
8. Leah S. Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in
Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1978).
9. Ibid.; Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and Life Course, 116; Sandford
Fleming, Children and Puritanism (1933; reprint, New York: Arno, 1969),
96; David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1977), 50.
10. Sommerville, Discovery of Childhood, 21-68.
11. Michael Zuckerman, Friends and Neighbors: Group Life in America's First
Plural Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 42; Barry Levy,
Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley,
1650-1765 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 100; Richard Archer,
"New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the Seventeenth Cen-
tury," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 47 (October 1990), 477-502.
Notes to Pages 13-19 389
12. Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Or-
der in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1967), 14; Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massa-
chusetts County, 1649-1699 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1986), 34; Lombard, Making Manhood, 35.
13. Carole Shammas, "Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative
Perspective," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 52 (January 1995), 117.
Axtell, School upon a Hill, 22-23.
14. Lombard, Making Manhood, 15-16, 74, 80.
15. Edward Shorter, A History of Women!Js Bodies (New York: Basic Books,
1982); Catherine M. Scholten, Childbearing in American Society, 1650-1850
(New York: New York University Press, 1985); Charles R. King, Children's
Health in America (New York: Twayne, 1993 ), 11; Moran and Vinovskis, Re-
ligion, Family, and Life Course, 106, 215; Peter Gregg Slater, Children in the
New England Mind (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977).
16. Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and Life Course, 110-111.
17. Axtel, School upon a Hill, 6, 13; Daniel Scott Smith, "Continuity and Discon-
tinuity in Puritan Naming: Massachusetts, 1771," William and Mary Quar-
terly, 3d ser., 51 (January 1994 ), 67-91; Joseph Illick, "Childrearing in Seven-
teenth-Century England and America," in The History of Childhood, ed.
Lloyd DeMause (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), 325; Hall, Worlds of
Wonder, 153.
18. Smith, "Continuity and Discontinuity in Puritan Naming," 67.
19. Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 81, 86, 136; Er-
nest Caulfield, "Infant Feeding in Colonial America," Journal of Pediatrics 41
(1952), 676.
20. Valerie A. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986), 351, 379. According to
Fildes, Wet Nursing, 130, breast milk was the most commonly advertised
commodity in colonial newspapers.
21. Monica M. Kiefer, American Children through Their Books (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1948), 182; Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, "Na-
ture versus Nurture: Patterns and Trends in Seventeenth Century French
Child-Rearing," in DeMause, The History of Childhood, 269; Karin Lee
Fishbeck Calvert, "To Be a Child: An Analysis of the Artifacts of Childhood"
(Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1984) 32, 36, 108.
22. Calvert, "To Be a Child," 42.
23. Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family, ·and Life Course, 121; Colonial Soci-
ety of New England, ed., Seventeenth-Century New England (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1984 ), 168; Axtell, School upon a Hill, 22-23.
24. John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning,
and Education, 1560-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
123, 143; Illick, "Childrearing in Seventeenth-Century England and Amer-
ica," 316; Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and Life Course, 117, 120.
25. Constance B. Schultz, "Children and Childhood in the Eighteenth Century,"
in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, ed. Jo-

seph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), 71;
Kiefer, American Children through Their Books, 191.
26. Illick, "Childrearing in Seventeenth-Century England and America," 316, 349
n. 123.
27. John Norris, Spiritual Counsel, or, The Father's Advice to his Children (Lon-
don: S. Manship, 1694).
28. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 230; Moran and Vinovskis. Religion, Family, and
Life Course, 5, 225; Stannard, Puritan Way of Death, 66; Larzer Ziff, Puri-
tanism in America (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 278; Lombard, Making
Manhood, 23.
29. Rose Ann Lockwood, "Birth, Illness, and Death in 18th Century New Eng-
land," Journal of Social History 12 (1978), 118, 119; King, Children's Health
in America, 9-11; Gordon E. Geddes, Welcome Joy: Death in Puritan New
England (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), 48; Hall, Worlds of Won-
der, 167.
30. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 34, 35, 37, 47; Axtell, School upon a Hill, 12.
31. Axtell, School upon a Hill, 29; Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and
Life Course, 124; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 34; Morgan, Godly Learning,
160.
32. Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and Life Course, 125, 127; Hall,
Worlds of Wonder, 34; Morgan, Godly Learning, 160; Lombard, Making
Manhood, 32.
33. On Salem witchcraft, see Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Pos-
sessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1974); Elaine G. Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devil-
ish Indians and Puritan Fantasies (New York: New York University Press,
1996); John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture
of Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Richard
Godbeer, The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David D. Hall, Witch-
Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History,
1638-1692 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991); Peter Charles
Hoffer, The Devil's Disciples: The Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials (Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996); Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape
of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1987); Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witch-
craft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Knopf, 2002).
34. On age and gender and the witchcraft scare, see Karlsen, Devil in Shape of a
Woman; Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2d
ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); W. de Blecourt, "The
Making of the Female Witch: Reflections on Witchcraft and Gender in the
Early Modern Period," Gender & History, 12 (2000), 287-309.
35. Young boys, unlike girls, did not wear head coverings; Lombard, Making
Manhood, 22, 31.
36. Thompson, Sex in Middlesex, 92.

37. Illick, "Childrearing in Seventeenth-Century England and America," 258,
330; Ross W. Beales Jr., "In Search of the Historical Child: Miniature Adult-
hood and Youth in Colonial New England,'' American Quarterly 27 (1975),
384; Lombard, Making Manhood, 21.
38. Morgan, Godly Learning, 146-147; Illick, "Childrearing in Seventeenth-Cen-
tury England and America," 330; Christine Leigh Heyrman, Commerce and
Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 255; Beales, "In Search of the Historical
Child," 33; The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. John Bigelow (Phil-
adelphia: Lippincott, 1868), 85-86, 90-93, 103-107, 114.
39. Fleming, Children and Puritanism, 154-55; Stannard, Puritan W~y of
Death.
40. N. Ray Hiner, "Adolescence in Eighteenth-Century America," History of
Childhood Quarterly 3 (1975), 259.
41. Ross W. Beales Jr., "The Child in Seventeenth-Century America," in Hawes
and Hiner, American Childhood, 36; Axtell, School upon a Hill, 28; Hiner,
"Adolescence in Eighteenth-Century America," 261; Thompson, Sex in
Middlesex, 72.
42. Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and Life Course, 92.
43. Ibid., 64, 69, 92; Axtell, School upon a Hill, 7.
44. Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and Life Course, 31, 9 5, 100.
45. Maris A. Vinovskis, "Family and Schooling in Colonial and Nineteenth-
Century America," Journal of Family History 12 (1987), 19-37; Mbran artd
Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and Life Course 4. . . 5, 99, 101.
46. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee, 42.
47. Thompson, Sex in Middlesex, 92; Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great
House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 287-288.
48. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 4, 5, 10, 210-11, 258.
49. Thompson, Sex in Middlesex, 95.
50. Steven Mintz, "Regulating the American Family," Journal of Family History
14 (1989), 387-408; Thompson, Sex in Middlesex, 67, 91, 93; Beales, ''The
Child in Seventeenth-Century America," 37.
51. Thompson, Sex in Middlesex, 105; Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family,
and Life Course, 153-154.
52. Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and Life Course, 102, 154.
53. Axtell, School upon a Hill, 45; Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and
Life Course, 154, 199.
54. Fleming, Children and Puritanism, 60; Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Fam-
ily, and Life Course, 152-153.
56. Glenn Wallach, Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in
American Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 17;
Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and Life Course, 151.
2. Red, White, and Black in Colonial America

1. John Van Der Zee, Bound Over: Indentured Servitude and American Con-
science (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985); Peter Williamson, Authentic
Narrative of the Life and Surprising Adventures of Peter Williamson (Albany,
N.Y.: H. C. Southwick, 1813), 43-47.
2. Memorial for Poor Peter Williamson ... against Alexander Cushnie ... 1762,
CS29/10/3: 1762, National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh; Printed signet
letters at instance of Peter Williamson . . . v. bailie William Fordyce of
Aquhorties, April 9, 1762, GD248/590/4, ibid.
3. VanDerZee, Bound Over, 209-211.
4. Elizabeth Sprigs, "We Unfortunate English People Suffer Here," http://
www.historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5796/.
5. VanDerZee, Bound Over, 160-161, 164.
6. Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and Servitude in North America, 1607-1800 (Edin-
burgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2000), 44; VanDerZee, Bound Over, 12-
13.
7. Zeisberger quoted in James Axtell, The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A
Documentary History of the Sexes (New York: Oxford University Press,
1981), 23-25. Joseph E. Illick, American Childhoods (Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 8.
8. Quoted in Axtell, Indian Peoples, 42; Adriaen Van der Donck (1655) quoted
in Steven Mintz, ed., Native American Voices, 2d ed. (St. James, N.Y.:
Brandywine, 2000), 60; John Long (1791) quoted in ibid., 61.
9. Illick, American Childhoods, 9; Axtell, Indian Peoples, 41-42.
10. Axtell, Indian Peoples, 42; Adriaen Vander Donck (1655) quoted in Mintz,
Native American Voices, 60.
11. Axtell, Indian Peoples, 42-43, 52, 60.
12. Ibid., 44, 46, 50-51.
13. Gerald F. Moran, "Adolescence in Colonial America," in Encyclopedia of Ad-
olescence, ed. Richard Lerner, Anne C. Petersen, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn,
vol. 1 (New York: Garland, 1991), 157, 164-167.
14. Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eigh-
teenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980),
26,35, 79,149,176,243-44,265.
15. Ibid., 80, 124, 265; Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, Religion, Fam-
ily, and the Life Course: Explorations in the Social History of Early America
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 149.
16. Frethorne quoted in "The Experiences of an Indentured Servant, 1623," Vir-
tual Jamestown, http://www.iath. virginia.edu/vcdh/jamestown/frethorne.html.
17. Moran, "Adolescence in Colonial America," 164-167.
18. Smith, Inside the Great House, 21-22; Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Fam-
ily, and Life Course, 171, 176.
19. Moran, "Adolescence in Colonial America," 166; Smith, Inside the Great
House, 25, 286.
20. Smith, Inside the Great House, 25, 139, 191, 286; Moran, "Adolescence in
Colonial America," 166-167.
21. Smith, Inside the Great House, 151, 161, 245-246; Anne S. Lombard,
Making Manhood: Growing Up Male in Colonial New England (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 37.
23. Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Vir-
ginia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Moran, "Adolescence
in Colonial America," 167.
24. Alan Taylor, "The Exceptionalist," New Republic, June 9, 2003, 36.
25. San Diego Union-Tribune, September 15, 1999, E-1; New York Daily News,
July 20, 1997, 22; ibid., December 7, 1997, 8.
26. Joyce Hansen and Gary McGowan, Breaking Ground, Breaking Silence: The
Story of New York's African Burial Ground (New York: Henry Holt, 1998);
New York Daily News, July 20, 1997, 22; ibid., December 7, 1997, 8.
27. Otto bah Cugoano, Narrative of the Enslavement of Ottobah Cugoano, aNa-
tive of Africa; Published by Himself, in the Year 1787 (London: Hatchard,
1825), 123-124.
28. George Francis Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving (Westport: Negro Universities
Press, 1970), 172-173; John Warner Barber, History of the Amistad Captives
(New York: Arno, 1969), 9-15. See Sylviane A. Diouf, Growing Up in Slavery
(Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook, 2001 ), 12, 17.
29. Park quoted in Colin A. Palmer, "The Middle Passage," in Captive Passage:
The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas, ed. Beverly C.
McMillan (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 56.
30. Samuel Moore, Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua (Detroit: Geo. E.
Pomeroy, 1854), 41; Diouf, Growing Up in Slavery, 18; Palmer, Captive Pas-
sage, 60.
31. Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to
America, vol. 3 (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), 45; Palmer, Captive Pas-
sage, 54; Diouf, Growing Up in Slavery, 21.
32. Steven Mintz, ed., African American Voices, 3d ed. (St. James, N.Y.:
Brandywine, 2004), 16-18, 27-28.
33. Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-century
Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998), 501-502, 507, 509.
34. Ibid., 508.
35. Ibid., 499-501, 518.
36. Ibid., 510, 512.
37. Ibid., 540-541; Mintz, African American Voices, 110.
38. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 528-529, 537, 545-547.
39. Michael Zuckerman, ed., Friends and Neighbors: Group Life in America's
First Plural Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 5, 13.
40. Gottlieb Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1960).
41. Smith, Inside the Great House, 289; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Vir-
ginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 198.2),
136, 309; Stephanie Grauman Wolf, As Various as Their Land: the Everyday
Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans (New York: HarperCollins, 1993),
30; Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts
County, 1649-1699 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 157.
42. Wolf, As Various as Their Land, 42-46; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia,
294.,-95, 305.
43. Wolf, As Various as Their Land, 42.
44. Billy G. Smith, The ~~Lower Sort,,: Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750-
1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 177, 183.
45. Smith, Inside the Great House, 288; Barry Levy, "The Birth of the 'Modern
Family' in Early America: Quaker and Anglican Families in the Delaware Val-
ley, Pennsylvania, 1681-1750," in Zuckerman, Friends and Neighbors, 26-
64.
46. Winthrop D. Jordan, "Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the
King, 1776," Journal of American History 60 (1973), 294, 295; Moran, ''Ad.,.
olescence in Colonial America," 167-16 8.
4 7. Moran, "Adolescence in Colonial America," 16 8; Harold E. Selesky, War and
Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
48. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Pa-
rriarchal Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), esp.
chap! 2; Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social
History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), 45-46.
49. Paine quoted in Wolf, As Various as Their Lands, 135.
3. Sons and Daughters of Liberty

1. V. T. Dacquino, Sybil Ludington: The Call to Arms (Fleischmanns, N.Y.: Pur-
ple Mountain, 2000).
2. James Kirby Martin, Ordinary Courage: The Revolutionary War Adventures
of Joseph Plumb Martin (St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine, 1999); Joseph Plumb
Martin, Private Yankee Doodle, ed. George E. Scheer (Boston: Little, Brown,
1962), 186-187.
3. Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of james Forten (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002). Forten quoted in Neil J. William Smelser,
William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell, eds., America Becoming: Racial
Trends and Their Consequences (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press,
2001), 175.
4. Hannah More quoted in Steven J. Novak, The Rights of Youth: American
Colleges {lnd Student Revolt, 179 8-1815 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1977), v.
5. Gerald F. Moran, "Adolescence in Colonial America," in Encyclopedia of Ad-
olescence, ed. Richard Lerner, Anne C. Petersen, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn,
vol. 1 (New York: Garland, 1991), 168-169.
6. Edwin Burrows and Michael Wallace, "The American Revolution: The Ideol-
ogy and Psychology of National Liberation," Perspectives in American His-
tory 6 (1972), 193; Melvin Yazawa, From Colonies to Commonwealth: Fa-
milial Ideology and the Beginnings of the American Republic (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 85.
7. Winthrop D. Jordan, "Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the
King, 1776," Journal of American History 60 (1973-74 ), 304-305; Burrows
and Wallace, "American Revolution," 168, 177, 186, 212, 232.
8. Burrows and Wallace, "American Revolution," 168, 177, 193, 204, 215;
Yazawa, From Colonies to Commonwealth, 96, 221, 295.
9. Yazawa, From Colonies to Commonwealth, 260.
10. Ibid., 167-306.
11. Burrows and Wallace, "American Revolution," 186; Yazawa, From Colonies
to Commonwealth, 47, 261; Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philoso-
phy, vol. 2 (Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1755), 192.
12. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty~s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of
American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 85-86, 88.
13. Yazawa, From Colonies to Commonwealth, 61-63, 65-68, 72.
14. Novak, Rights of Youth, 2-3.
15. Ibid., 2, 4; Thomas Hine, Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York:
Bard, 1999), 89.
16. Charity Clarke Moore and Clement Clarke Moore papers, 1767-1863, Co-
lumbia University; George DeWan, "A Woman Ready to Fight," Newsday,
December 22, 1997, A17.
17. Robert Leckie, George Washington's War (New York: HarperCollins, 1990)
48, 49; Todd Alan Kreamer, "Sons of Liberty," http://earlyamerica.com/
review/fall96/sons.html.
18. Diary of Anna Green Winslow: A Boston school Girl of 1771, ed. Alice
Morse Earle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894 ); Ray Raphael, A People's His-
tory of the American Revolution (New York: New Press, 2001 ), 112, 117.
19. "Captain Prescott's Account of the Boston Massacre," Boston Massacre His-
torical Society, http://www. bostonmassacre.net/trial/acct-preston2.htm.
20. Raphael, People~s History of American Revolution, 112, 117.
21. Ebenezer Fox, The Adventures of Ebenezer Fox in the Revolutionary War
(Boston: Charles Fox, 1847).
22. Raphael, People's History of American Revolution, 64-65; M. M. Quaife,
ed., "Documents-A Boy Soldier under Washington: The Memoir of Daniel
Granger," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 16 (1930), 538-560.
23. Martin, Ordinary Courage, xv.
24. Quoted in Jeanne Winston Adler, "In the Path of War," Appleseeds, October
2000, 21-22.
25. Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 157; Elisabeth O'Kane Lipartito, "The Misfor-
tunes and Calamities of War: The Impact of the Revolutionary War on Civil-
ian Society, 1775-1781" (Ph.D., University of Houston, 1990), 1-2, 112,
175, 326.
26. Lipartito, "Misfortunes and Calamities of War," 24, 43-44, 47-48, 50, 65;
"Depositions of Elisabeth Cain and Abigail Palmer" (Philadelphia: Continen-
tal Congress, March 22, 1777).
27. Lipartito, "Misfortunes and Calamities of War," 70, 79, 91, 97; Mary Beth
Norton, The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England (Boston: Lit-
tle, Brown, 1972), 32.
28. Lipartito, "Misfortunes and Calamities of War," 273, 273, 283, 293, 303,
330.
29. Ibid., 308, 310-11,319, 322.
30. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, "The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the
Revolution," Political Science Quarterly 76 (1961), 799-816.
31. Douglas Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers (New York: Norton, 1974),
7, 10.
32. Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience -1607-
1782 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Donald George Tewksbury, The
Founding of American Colleges and Universities before the Civil War (New
York: Teacher's College, Columbia University, 1932).
33. Raphael, People's History of American Revolution, 15. The historian Pauline
Maier draws a useful distinction between the older and younger revolutionar-
ies, suggesting that the older leaders took pride in the British constitution and
were reluctant to make a final break with the British empire. See Pauline
Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams
(New York: Knopf, 1980). Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick argued that sup-
porters of the Constitution were on average ten to twelve years younger than
their opponents. They contended that the Federalists were young men who
had partly taken on national political office because the older Anti-Federalists
had already monopolized the best state offices. In contrast, Jackson T. Main
found no significant age difference between supporters and opponents of the
Constitution; The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1961 ), 259.
34. Main, The Antifederalists, 288.
35. Nancy F. Cott, "Notes toward an Interpretation of Antebellum Childrearing,"
Psychohistory Review 7, no. 4 (1973), 8; Yazuka, From Colonies to Com-
monwealth, 191.
36. Yazuka, From Colonies to Commonwealth, 144, 168, 192.
37. See Nancy Shippen: Her Journal Book, The International Romance of a
Young Lady of Fashion of Colonial Philadelphia, ed. Ethel Ames (Philadel-
phia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935); Randolph Shipley Klein, Portrait of an Early
American Family: The Shippens Of Pennsylvania across Five Generations
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975); Norton, Liberty's
Daughters, 48, 236.
38. Penny Colman, Girls: A History of Growing Up Female in America (New
York: Scholastic, 2000), 59.
39. Ibid., 59-60, 62.
40. Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 236.
4. Inventing the Middle-Class Child

1. Increases in the uniformity of the life course are examined in Howard
Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage:
Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
2. Kett, Rites of Passage.
3. James Holt McGavran, Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations,
Postmodern Contestations (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 128,
137; Judith Plotz, "Perpetual Messiah," in Regulated Children/Liberated
Children, ed. Barbara Finkelstein (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979), 67;
James Holt McGavran, Romanticism and Children:Js Literature in Nineteenth-
Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991 ); Kett, Rites of
Passage, 286-287.
4. McGavran, Literature and the Child, 25.
5. Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood, the Individual and Society: A Study
of the Theme in English Literature, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967), 291;
Kett, Rites of Passage, 129.
6. Kett, Rites of Passage, 115.
7. Jacqueline S. Reinier, From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775-
1850 (New York: Twayne, 1996), 61, 90; Chudacoff, How Old Are You? 93-
4,97.
8. See Karin Lee Fishbeck Calvert, "To Be a Child" (Ph.D. diss., University of
Delaware, 1984 ), 32.
9. Nancy F. Cott, "Notes toward an Interpretation of Antebellum Childrearing,"
Psychohistory Review 7, no. 4 (1973), 8.
10. John Demos and Virginia Demos, "Adolescence in Historical Perspective,"
Journal of Marriage and the Family 31 (1969), 633; Kett, Rites of Passage,
44; Cott, "Notes toward Interpretation of Antebellum Childrearing," 5.
11. Cott, "Notes toward Interpretation of Antebellum Childrearing," 6.
12. Reinier, From Virtue to Character, 10, 48.
13. Anne Scott MacLeod, "Children's Literature in America from the Puritan Be-
ginnings to 1870," in Children's Literature: An Illustrated History, ed. Peter
Hunt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 111.
14. Gillian Avery, Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-
1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 ), 61-62; Anne Scott
MacLeod, A Moral Tale: Children:Js Fiction and American Culture, 1820-
1860 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975), 37-39; idem, "Children's Liter-
ature in America," 110-112.
15. Annette Atkins, We Grew Up Together: Brothers and Sisters in Nineteenth-
Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 155.
16. David J. Rothman, "Documents in Search of a Historian: Toward a History
of Children and Youth in America," in Growing Up in America, ed. Harvey J.
Graff (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 78.
17. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformation in Masculinity
from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 32,
52, 58.
18. Ibid., 32, 53-54.
19. Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth
Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 9.
20. Joseph F. Kett, "Growing Up in Rural New England, 1800-1840," in Graff,
Growing Up in America, 175-184; Nancy F. Cott, "Young Women in the Sec-
ond Great Awakening," in ibid., 187.
21. Karin Lee Fishbeck Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of
Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992),
100, 111, 113; Monica Mary Kiefer, American Children through Their
Books, 1700-1835 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1948),
111, 113,217.
22. Lynne Vallone, Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and
, Nineteenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 114; Penny
Colman, Girls: A History of Growing Up Female (New York: Scholastic,
2000), 12.
23. Vallone, Disciplines of Virtue, 124, 131; Welter, Dimity Convictions, 13, 61;
Colman, Girls, 21.
24. Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England
(Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981 ), 20-23; Welter, Dimity Convic-
tions, 27, 60.
25. To Read My Heart: The Journal of Rachel Van Dyke, 1810-1811, ed. Lucia
McMahon and Deborah Schriver (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2000).
26. Welter, Dimity Convictions, 7; Atkins, We Grew Up Together, 138, 166.
27. Reinier, From Virtue to Character, 40; Kett, Rites of Passage, 36-37.
28. Harvey J. Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
29. Welter, Dimity Convictions, 17; Cott, "Young Women in Second Great Awak-
ening," 187-188.
30. Rotundo, American Manhood, 21, 251; Glenn Wallach, Obedient Sons: The
Discourse of Youth and Generations in American Culture, 1630-1860
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1997), 59; Mary P. Ryan, "Privacy
and the Making of the Self-Made Man: Family Strategies of the Middle Class
at Midcentury," in Graff, Growing Up in America, 251.
31. Wallach, Obedient Sons, 61, 67-68.
32. Ibid., 81.
33. Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern American
Childrearing (New York: New York University Press, 2003).
34. Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Re-
formers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 58-59.
35. Horace Mann quoted in "Children Everywhere: Schooling," Old Sturbridge
Village, http://www.osv.org/education/ChildrenEverywhere/Schooling.html.
36. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? 3.
37. Carl F. Kaestle and Maris A. Vinovskis~ Education and Social Change in
Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1980), 149, 153.
38. Joseph M. Rice, The Public School System of the United States (1893), in Da-
vid B. Tyack, ed., Turning Points in American Educational History (Waltham,
Mass.: Blaisdell, 1967), 330.
39. Ibid., 37.
40. Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy against Fam-
ily Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford Univer . .
sity Press, 1987).
5. Growing Up in Bondage
1. Melton A, McLaurin, Celia~ A Slave (Ath~ns: University of Georgia Press,
1991), 20.
2. Ibid., 21, 125 n. 8.
3f Douglass quoted in Christine Stf}nsell, "The Pages of Eros," New Republic~
March 6, 2000, 33. Wilma King, Stolen Childhood (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), x:ix-xx; Thomas L. Webber, Deep like the Rivers: Ed-
ucation in the Slave Quarter Community~ 1831--1865 (New York: Norton,
1978), 136.,...137.
4. Sylviane A. Diouf, Growing Up in Slavery (Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook,
2001), 25.
5. King, Stolen Childhood~ xxi, 1, 90; Thomas H. Jones, The Experience of
Thomas H. Jones~ Who Was a Slav~ for Forty-three Years (Boston: Bazin and
~handler, 1862), 6.
6. Piouf, Growing Up in Slavery~ 37.
7. King, Stolen Childhood~ 5; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage (Cam-
bridge~ Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)-1 27.
8. King, Stolen Childhood~ 9-11; Schwartz, Born in Bondage~ 64, 68; Steven
Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of Ameri-
can Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), 73.
9. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions~ 73.
10. Steven Mintz, African American Voices (St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine, 2000),
103-104; Dio4f, Growing Up in Slavery~ 29.
11. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions:t 70.
12. Schwartz, Born in Bondage~ 85, 87~88, 146; Peter Bardaglio, 'fThe Children
of Jubilee: African American Childhood in Wartime," in Divideq Houses~
Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine C~inton and Nina Silber (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 216; Mintz, African American Voices~ 90-92.
13. Schwartz, 8orn in Bondage~ 91, 102, 105; King, Stolen Childhood~ 24, 105;
David K. Wiggins, 'fThe Play of Slave Children in the Plantation Communities
of the Old South, 1820-.60," in Growing Up in America~ ed. N. Ray Hiner
and Joseph M. Hawes (Urbana; University of Illinois, 1985), 175; King,
Stolen Childhood~ 45, 48; Webber, Deep like the Rivers~ 95; Albert J.
Raboteau, Slave Religion: The ccinvisible Institution" in the Antebellum South

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 282; Stephen C. Crawford,
"Quantified Memory" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1980), 169-170.
14. King, Stolen Childhood, 7; Cheryll Ann Cody, "Naming, Kinship, and Estate
Dispersal: Notes on Slave Family Life on a South Carolina Plantation, 1786
to 1833," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 39 (January 1982), 192-211;
idem, "There Was No 'Absalom' on the Ball Plantations: Slave-Naming Prac-
tices in the South Carolina Low Country, 1720-1865," American Historical
Review 92 (1987), 563-596; John C. Inscoe, "Carolina Slave Names: An In-
dex to Acculturation," Journal of Southern History 49 (1983), 527-554; John
Thornton, "Central African Names and African-American Naming Patterns,"
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 50 (October 1993), 727-742.
15. Only rarely were daughters named for mothers; Cody, "There Was No 'Absa-
lom,"' 573-576, 591, 594.
16. Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 71, 86; King, Stolen Childhood, 14.
17. Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 83, 140-41; King, Stolen Childhood, 15, 17, 30.
18. Octavia George in Remembering Slavery, ed. Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and
Steven F. Miller (New York: New Press, 1998), 40, 43.
19. Michael P. Johnson, "Upward in Slavery," New York Review of Books, De-
cember 21, 1989, 53-54.
20. Diouf, Growing Up in Slavery, 44.
21. King, Stolen Childhood, 21-22.
22. Ibid., 27, 29-30.
23. Ibid., 24, 29-30, 34-35; Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 108, 145.
24. Webber, Deep like the Rivers, 21; Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 26, 108, 123,
133-4, 136, 139, 146, 149; King, Stolen Childhood, 38-39.
25. Stephanie J. Shaw, "Mothering under Slavery in the Antebellum South," in
Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn,
Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994), 237-
~8; King, Stolen Childhood, 98; Webber, Deep like the Rivers, 20.
26. Mintz, African American Voices, 87-89; Bardaglio, "Children of Jubilee,"
215.
27. Francis Black, First Series, Library of Congress Rare Book Room Collection,
Texas Narratives, vol. 4, 87 ff.
28. Webber, Deep like the Rivers, 33, 42; Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 91-92.
29. King, Stolen Childhood, 53; Webber, Deep like the Rivers, 20; Wiggins, "Play
of Slave Children," 185.
30. Stephanie Coontz, "United States," in International Encyclopedia of Mar-
riage and Family, ed. James J. Ponzetti Jr. (New York: Macmillan Reference,
2003), 1683; Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 95.
31. Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 9; Diouf, Growing Up in Slavery, 26; Webber,
Deep like the Rivers, 68.
32. Diouf, Growing Up in Slavery, 65; Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black
Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 38, 39.
33. Wiggins, "Play of Slave Children," 188; Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 45-46,
97, 99-100, 125.
34. Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 80, 167; King, Stolen Childhood, 56.
35. King, Stolen Childhood, 53; Webber, Deep like the Rivers, 20; Wiggins, "Play
of Slave Children," 185.
36. Wiggins, "Play of Slave Children," 175; King, Stolen Childhood, 45, 48;
Webber, Deep like the Rivers, 95; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 282.
37. King, Stolen Childhood, 48; Wiggins, "Play of Slave Children," 177.
38. Wiggins, "Play of Slave Children," 180, 187; Webber, Deep like the Rivers,
95; King, Stolen Childhood, 48.
39. Wiggins, "Play of Slave Children," 181.
40. Douglass quoted in Stansell, "The Pages of Eros," 33. King, Stolen Child-
hood, xix-xx; Webber, Deep like the Rivers, 136-137.
41. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New
York: Knopf, 1979), 25, 29, 53.
42. Webber, Deep like the Rivers, 66, 134.
43. Ibid., 66, 134. Douglass is quoted in Janet Duitsman Cornelius, "When I Can
Read My Title Clear": Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 1.
44. Cornelius, "When I Can Read My Title Clear," 61, 69; Diouf, Growing Up in
Slavery, 70; Webber, Deep like the Rivers, 66, 134.
45. Diouf, Growing Up in Slavery, 73.
46. King, Stolen Childhood, 60; Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 156, 158, 179.
47. Crawford, "Quantified Memory," 162; Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry
Hammond and the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1982); John B. Edmunds Jr., Francis W. Pickens and the Politics of Destruc-
tion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Charles C.
Osborne, ]ubal: The Life and Times of General ]ubal A. Early (Chapel Hill,
N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1992).
48. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 177, 267; Webber, Deep like the Rivers, 129.
49. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 266, 268, 270, 275, 279.
SO. Bardaglio, "Children of Jubilee," 218-219; Wiggins, "Play of Slave
Children," 184.
51. Bardaglio, "Children of Jubilee," 222, 224.
52. Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, Families and Freedom: A Documentary His-
tory of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era (New York: New
Press, 1997), 97, 99, 100; Bardaglio, "Children of Jubilee," 221.
53. David Brion Davis and Steven Mintz, Boisterous Sea of Liberty (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 538; Berlin and Rowland, Families and Free-
dom, 77, 103, 112.
54. Rebecca J. Scott, "The Battle over the Child: Child Apprenticeship and the
Freedmen's Bureau in North Carolina," in Hiner and Hawes, Growing Up in
America, 204. ·
55. Ibid., 195; Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom, 211, 221.
56. Scott, "Battle over the Child," 196; Berlin and Rowland, Families and Free-
dom, 242.
57. Scott, "Battle over the Child," 194, 197, 206.
58. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 62, 64, 67, 79.
59. Ibid., 10.

60. Ibid., 11-13, 16, 24.
61. Ibid., 4, 7, 9, 28, 34, 41.
62. Ibid., 9, 16, 20.
63. Ibid., 13, 19, 34, 44.
6. Childhood Battles of the Civil War

1. Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United
States Colored Troops Late 1st S. C. Volunteers (Boston: Privately printed,
1902), 5.
2. Emmy E. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses: Children's Voices from the Civil W~r
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 43.
3. James Marten, The Children's Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998).
4. Joseph T. Glatthaar, American Civil War: The War in the West, 1863-1865
(Oxford: Osprey, 2001), 75-76.
5. G. Clifton Wisler, When Johnny Went Marching: Young Americans Fight the
Civil War (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 1-2; Patricia Polacca, Pink and
Say (New York: Putnam, 1994); William B. Styple, The Little Bugle: The Tr14e
Story of a Twelve-Year-Old Boy in the Civil War (Kearney, N.J.: Belle Grove,
1998); Wisler, When Johnny Went Marching, 10-13; S. Emma E. Edmonds,
Nurse and Spy in the Union Army (Hartford: W. S. Williams; Philadelphia:
Jones Bros., 1865); Sylvia G. L. Dannett, She Rode with the Generals: The
True and Incredible Story of Sarah Emma Seelye, Alias Franklin Thomp~on
(Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1960); "Why Did Women Fight in the Civil War?"
Smithsonian Associates, http://civilwarstudies.org/features/women.htm; Gail
Skroback Hennessey, "Uncommon Soldiers: Women during the Civil War,"
http://teacher.scholastic.com/lessonrepro/lessonplans/womcivwar.htm.
6. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, 9; Jim Murphy, The Boys' War: Confederate
and Union Soldiers Talk about the Civil War (New York: Clarion Books,
1990), 8.
7. Murphy, Boys' War, 11, 13.
8. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, 12; Murphy, Boys' War, 27.
9. Murphy, Boys' War, 27-28, 48-49, 55.
10. William Bircher, A Drummer-Boy's Diary: Comprising Four Years of Service
with the Second Regiment Minnesota (St. Paul: St. Paul Book and Statioq.ery,
1889).
11. Murphy, Boys' War, 84.
12. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, 25; Murphy, Boys' War, 70, 78.
13. Murphy, Boys' War, 63, 86; Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, 32-34, 23-24.
14. Ibid., 93-94.
15. Ibid., 105, 113.
16. Marten, Children's Civil War, 101; Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, 15, 28, 51.
17. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, 59-60, 64, 72, 154.
18. Ibid., 52, 82.
19. Anne Scott MacLeod, American Childhood (Athens: University of Georgia

Press, 1994), 107; Marten, Children's Civil War, 155.
20. George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the
Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 226; Werner, Reluc-
tant Witnesses, 58.
21. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, 53-54; Marten, Children's Civil War, 152.
22. Marten, Children's Civil War, 157.
23. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, 8; Marten, Children's Civil War, 118, 165, 177,
179.
24. Glatthaar, American Civil War, 85; Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, 127,
141.
25. Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993 ); Marten, Children's Civil War, 76; Ste-
phen M. Frank, Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nine-
teenth-Century American North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1998), 180; David Brion Davis and Steven Mintz, Boisterous Sea of Liberty
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 523.
26. James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrade: What They Fought For,
1861-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Davis and Mintz,
Boisterous Sea of Liberty, 544; Marten, Children's Civil War, 116; Werner,
Reluctant Witnesses, 20.
27. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 219; James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist
Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1975).
28. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, 5; Davis and Mintz, Boisterous Sea of Liberty,
555-556.
29. David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in
Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998).
30. LeRoy Ashby, Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in
American History (New York: Twayne, 1997) 34, 63.
31. Marten, Children's Civil War, 205-206.
32. Richard Sennett, Families against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial
Chicago, 1872-1890 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).
7. Laboring Children
1. Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889),
42-45, 120-121, 152-157.
2. Ibid., 42-45, 120-121, 152-157; Shirley Marchalonis, The Worlds of Lucy
Larcom, 1824-1893 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989); Daniel
Dulany Addison, ed., Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1895); Bernice Selden, The Mill Girls: Lucy Larcom, Har-
riet Hanson Robinson, Sarah G. Bagley (New York: Atheneum, 1983).
3. Linda S. Peavy and Ursula Smith, Frontier Children (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1999), 37; Frances Cavanah, ed., We Came to America
(Philadelphia: Macrae Smith, 1954), 136-143; Mary Goble Pay, "Death

Strikes the Handcart Company," in A Believing People: Literature of the Lat-
ter-Day Saints, ed. Richard H. Cracroft and Neal E. Lambert (Provo: Brigham
Young University Press, 1974), 143-150; Priscilla Ferguson Clement,
Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850-1890 (New York:
Twayne, 1997), 7, 225.
4. Clement, Growing Pains, 7, 225.
5. Ibid., 37, 62, 78, 86, 120; Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country: Child-
hood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1989), 253-254.
6. Nan Wolverton Franklin, "Toying with 1830s Childhood," Old Sturbridge
Village, http://www.osv.org/education/OSVisitor/Toying.html.
7. Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile In-
dustry, 1790-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
8. Anthony F. C. Wallace, "The World of Work in a Nineteenth-Century Mill
Town," in Family Life in America, 1620-2000, ed. Mel Albin and Dominick
Cavallo (St. James, N.Y.: Revisionary, 1981), 174-175.
9. Thomas Dublin, "Women and Outwork in a Nineteenth-Century New Eng-
land Town," in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation, ed.
Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1985), 51-69.
10. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 16, 130.
11. Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present
(New York: Basic Books, 1977), 144-172.
12. Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You?: Age Consciousness in American
Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 19.
13. Glenn Wallach, Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in
American Culture, 1630-1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1997), 55-88.
14. Rorabaugh, Craft Apprentice, 27-29, 37, 41, 69, 83, 97-101, 161, 190-194.
15. Ibid., 165, 170-171.
16. Ibid., 164-165, 167; Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their
Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War
(New York : Oxford University Press, 1990).
17. Rorabaugh, Craft Apprentice, 130, 133, 166.
18. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Commu-
nity in Lowell, Massachusetts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).
19. Penny Colman, Girls: A History of Growing Up Female in America (New
York: Scholastic, 2000), 76.
20. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860
(New York: Knopf, 1986), 158.
21. Jacqueline S. Reinier, From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775-
1850 (New York: Twayne, 1996), 126; Stansell, City of Women, 50-51, 53,
116, 204.
22. Stansell, City of Women, 50, 53-54; Barbara M. Brenzel, Daughters of the
State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983); Wallace, "World of Work," 179.
23. Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish
Famine, 1845-1850 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 53, 121, 168-169;
"Famine and Starvation in the County of Cork," Illustrated London
News, January 16, 1847, http://vassun.vassar.edu/?sttaylor/FAMINEIILNI
CorkFamine/CorkFamine.html.
24. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Kennedys (New York: Summit Books,
1984), 21-22; Cecil Woodham Smith, The Great Hunger (New York: H.
Hamilton, 1962).
25. Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 282; Kerby A. Miller
and Paul Wagner, Out of Ireland (Niwot, Colo.: Robert Rinehart Publishers,
1997), 27, 31; Collier and Horowitz, The Kennedys, 21-22; Robert Whyte,
Robert Whyte!Js 1847 Famine Ship Diary: The Journey of an Irish Coffin Ship,
ed. James J. Mangan (Cork: Mercier, 1994), 13-22; David Brion Davis and
Steven Mintz, Boisterous Sea of Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 449-451.
26. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 319.
27. Hasia R. Diner, Erin!Js Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the
Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 31-
32; Mathew Carey, "Appeal to the Wealthy of the Land," in The Irish in
America, 550-1972, ed. William D. Griffen (New York: Oceana, 1973), 46.
28. Diner, Erin's Daughters, 45-46, 55, 59-61, 132-133, 140-141.
29. Ibid., 109.
30. Phillip Hoose, We Were There, Too! Young People in U.S. History (New
York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001), 168-171.
31. Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of
American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), 102; Susan Campbell
Bartoletti, Growing Up in Coal Country (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996),
13-16.
32. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 103-104.
33. James Kirby Martin et al., America and Its Peoples, 5th ed. (New York:
Pearson Longman, 2003), 339.
34. Emmy E. Werner, Pioneer Children on the Journey West (Boulder: Westview,
1995), 46.
35. Pay, "Death Strikes the Handcart Company."
36. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 96-97; John Faragher, Women
and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979),
66,69, 71-84,106,136-143.
37. Donald Zochert, Laura: The Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Chicago: Contem-
porary Books, 1976); Dwight M. Miller, ed., Laura Ingalls Wilder and the
American Frontier: Five Perspectives (Lanham, Md.: University Press of
America, 2002); Ann Romines, Constructing the Little House: Gender, Cul-
ture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1997).
38. Clement, Growing Pains, 124; West, Growing Up with the Country, 75-76,
88, 246.
39. West, Growing Up with the Country, 91, 192; Elliott West, "Heathens and
Angels: Childhood in the Rocky Mountain Mining Towns," in Growing Up
in America: Historical Experiences, ed. Harvey J. Graff (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1987), 370.
40. West, "Heathens and Angels," 372; West, Growing Up with the Country, 76,
77, 88.
41. West, "Heathens and Angels," 374, 379.
42. West, Growing Up with the Country, 91, 192; West, "Heathens and Angels,"
370.
43. West, Growing Up with the Country, 254, 255; Columbus Dispatch, May 3,
1998, 7G; New York Times, August 10, 1980, sec. 3, 1; Elizabeth Hampsten,
Settlers' Children: Growing Up on the Great Plains (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1991 ), 234.
44. Clements, Growing Pains, 130; West, Growing Up with the Country, 168.
45. Gilbert C. Fite, "Daydreams and Nightmares: The Late Nineteenth-Century
Agricultural Frontiers," Agricultural History 40 (1966), 285-291.
46. On the useful and the invaluable but economically useless childhood, see
Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of
Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
8. Save the Child

1. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860
(New York: Knopf, 1986), 194, 202, 205; Robert H. Bremner, ed., Children
and Youth in America: A Documentary History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1970), 755, quoted in Ken Libertoff, "The Runaway Child
in America," in Family Life in America, 1620-2000, ed Mel Albin and
Dominick Cavallo (St. James, N.Y.: Revisionary, 1981), 272.
2. Seth Rockman, Welfare Reform in the Early Republic (Boston: Bedford/St.
Martin's, 2003 ), 87-88, 90.
3. In the early nineteenth century, poor relief typically represented more than
half of towns' budgets; LeRoy Ashby, Endangered Children: Dependency, Ne-
glect, and Abuse in American History (New York: Twayne, 1997), 34;
"Howard," Baltimore American, February 2, 1820, quoted in Rockman, Wel-
fare Reform in Early Republic, 17.
4. Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nine-
teenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1985), 10, 298.
5. Between 1820 and 1890 the ratio of whites under age fifteen to those over
fifteen fell from 96 per 100 to 53 per 100; U.S. Bureau of the Census, The Sta-
tistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Stam-
ford, Conn.: Fairfield, 1965), 10.
6. Michael Grossberg, "Changing Conceptions of Child Welfare in the United
States, 1820-1935," in A Century of Juvenile Justice, ed. Margaret K.
Rosenheim, Franklin E. Zimring, DavidS. Tanenhaus, and Bernardine Dohrn

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 22-27; Lela B. Costin, Howard
Jacob Karger, and David Stoesz, The Politics of Child Abuse in America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 47, 50.
7. Annette Atkins, We Grew Up Together: Brothers and Sisters in Nineteenth-
Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 105-106;
E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of
Adoption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 7; David J.
Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New
Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971 ); Kenneth Cmiel, A Home of Another
Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995); Judith A. Dulberger, "Mother Donit fore
the Best": Correspondence of a Nineteenth-Century Orphan Asylum (Syra-
cuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996); Nurith Zmora, Orphanages Recon-
sidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1994 ).
8. Ashby, Endangered Children, 27-34; Dulberger, "Mother Donit fore the
Best,"'"' 9.
9. Dulberger, "Mother Donit fore the Best,_,_, 111.
10. Ashby, Endangered Children, 90.
11. Quoted in Nina Bernstein, "Don't Bring Back the Bad Old Days," Newsday,
November 30, 1994, A35.
12. Ashby, Endangered Children, 101-110, 120.
13. John E. Yang, "The Speaker Comes to Boys Town," Washington Post, Octo-
ber 24, 1995, A3; Bernstein, "Don't Bring Back the Bad Old Days."
14. John R. Sutton, Stubborn Children: Controlling Delinquency in the United
States, 1640-1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 74; Rob-
ert Mennel, "Juvenile Delinquency in Perspective," History of Education
Quarterly 13 (fall1973), 275; RobertS. Pickett, House of Refuge: Origins of
Juvenile Reform in New York State, 1815-1857 (Syracuse: Syracuse Univer-
sity Press, 1969); Rockman, Welfare Reform in Early Republic, 85-86, 87-
88, 95-96.
15. Sutton, Stubborn Children, 77, 81; Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers:
America"'s Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995), 90-92.
16. Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers, 90-92.
17. Ibid., 92.
18. Barbara M. Brenzel, Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Re-
form School for Girls in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1983), 354, 357-359.
19. Ashby, Endangered Children, 18.
20. Ibid., 236.
21. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 241.
22. Ibid., 238, 247.
23. Jacob Krason, "A Grave Threat to the Family: American Law and Public Pol-
icy on Child Abuse and Neglect," in Defending the Family: A Sourcebook, ed.
Paul C. Vitz and Stephen M. Krason (Steubenville, Ohio: Catholic Social Sci-
ence Press, 1998), 235-267.
24. Lee E. Teitelbaum, "Family History and Family Law," Wisconsin Law Re-
view, 1985, 1158-59.
25. Carp, Family Matters, 4-7, 11-12; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 196.
26. Stephen O'Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and
the Children He Saved and Failed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001 ); Miriam
Z. Langsam, Children West: A History of the Placing-Out System of the New
York Children's Aid Society, 1853-1890 (Madison: State Historical Society of
Wisconsin, 1964).
27. Carp, Family Matters, 10.
28. Quoted in San Diego Union-Tribune, August 16, 2000, B-7.
29. Clay Gish, "Rescuing the 'Waifs and Strays' of the City: The Western Emigra-
tion Program of the Children's Aid Society," Journal of Social History 33
(1999), 121-141.
30. Ibid., 133, 136.
31. New York Times, December 15, 1990, 26; Marilyn Irvin Holt, The Orphan
Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1992),
156-87.
32. Paula S. Fass, Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 21-56.
33. Ashby, Endangered Children, 55-59; Costin, Karger, and Stoesz, Politics of
Child Abuse, 52-61.
34. Costin, Karger, and Stoesz, Politics of Child Abuse, 74; Ashby, Endangered
Children, 57.
35. Costin, Karger, and Stoesz, Politics of Child Abuse, 63; Linda Gordon,
Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence:
Boston, 1880-1960 (New York: Viking, 1988); Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic
Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against Family Violence
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 69-87.
36. Costin, Karger, and Stoesz, Politics of Child Abuse, 65.
37. Gordon, Heroes in Their Own Lives; Costin, Karger, and Stoesz, Politics of
Child Abuse, 89; Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 205-216.
38. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New
York, ed. Sam Bass Warner (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1970), 124-129; Viviana A. Zeliser, Pricing the Priceless
Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books,
1985).
39. Nicola Kay Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Re-
production in Victorian America (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1997), 37, 65, 91.
40. Bessie V. Cushman, "Another Maiden Tribute," Union Signal, February 17,
1887, 8-9; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution,
and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: Norton, 1992);
Marilynn Wood Hill, Their Sisters' Keepers: Prostitution in New York City,
1830-1870 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Mary E. Odem,
Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality

in the United States~ 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1995).
41. Katherine G. Aiken, Harnessing the Power of Motherhood: The National
Florence Crittenton Mission (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1998).
42. Quoted in Columbus Dispatch~ August 23, 1995, 1E.
43. Peavy and Smith, Frontier Children~ 120; Lisa May, "An Indian School Is Re-
membered," Newsday~ May 28, 2000, A29.
44. Peavy and Smith, Frontier Children~ 120; May, "An Indian School Is Remem-
bered."
45. During the twentieth century at least 50,000 Indian children were adopted by
non-Indians, prompting Congress in 1978 to pass the Indian Child Welfare
Act, which gave tribes preference in adopting children of Indian heritage; Tim
Vanderpool, "Lesson No. 1: Shed Your Indian Identity," Christian Science
Monitor, April 2, 2002, 14.
46. Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chi-
cago (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
4 7. Jack Hall, Juvenile Reform in the Progressive Era: William R. George and the
Junior Republic Movement (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971 ), 1-34,
302-309.
48. Ibid., 307.
49. Michael Katz, "Child-Saving," History of Education Quarterly 26 (1986),
413-424.
50. LeRoy Ashby, Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children~ 1890-
1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 13, 84; Katz, "Child-
Saving," 418-421; Sutton, Stubborn Children~ 134.
51. Joseph Mayer Rice, "The Absurdity of Primary Education," in The Annals of
America~ vol. 2: 18 84-1894~ Agrarianism and Urbanization (Chicago: Ency-
clopedia Britannica, 1976), 396-403; Michael B. Katz, "The New Departure
in Quincy, 1873-1881: The Nature of Nineteenth-Century Educational Re-
form," New England Quarterly 40 (1967), 3-30.
52. Alexander W. Siegel and Sheldon H. White, "The Child Study Movement:
Early Growth and Development of the Symbolized Child," in Advances in
Child Development and Behavior, vol. 17, ed. Hayne W. Reese (New York:
Academic, 1982), 244; Ashby, Endangered Children~ 99; Selma Cantor
Berrol, Immigrants at School: New York City~ 1898-1914 (1967; reprint,
New York: Arno, 1978), 115.
53. Dominick Cavallo, "The Politics of Latency," in Regulated Children/
Liberated Children~ ed. Barbara Finkelstein (New York: Psychohistory Press,
1979), 158-83; David I. Macleod, The Age of the Child: Children in America~
1890-1920 (New York: Twayne, 1998), 72; Berrol, Immigrants at School~
130.
54. "A Faithful Mirror: Standards," College Board, http://www.collegeboard.
cornlfaithfulmirror/standards/who.html.
55. Henry L. Minton, Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in Psychological Testing (New
York: New York University Press, 1988); Paul Davis Chapman, Schools as
Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing

Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1988).
56. Daniel Eli Burnstein, "Clean Streets and the Pursuit of Progress: Urban Re-
form in New York City in the Progressive Era'' (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers Univer-
sity, 1992), 307, 312, 323.
57. Richard A. Meckel, Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the
Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850-1929 (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 1998).
58. Victoria Gettis, The Juvenile Court and the Progressives (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2000); Anne Meis Knupfer, Reform and Resistance: Gender,
Delinquency, and America's First Juvenile Court (New York: Routledge,
2001).
59. Mennel, "Juvenile Delinquency in Perspective," 280; Sutton, Stubborn
Children, 135.
60. Macleod, Age of the Child, 142.
61. Mennel, "Juvenile Delinquency 1n Perspective," 280; Sutton, Stubborn
Children, 135.
62. Thomas V. DiBacco, "Kids and Crime," USA Today, May 3, 1989, lOA;
Sutton, Stubborn Children, 147, 173.
63. In Chicago, overburdened juvenile court judges hear an average of sixty cases
a day; New York Times, July 21, 1997, Al; USA Today, December 16, 1999,
3A; Jeffrey A. Butts and Daniel P. Mears, "Reviving Juvenile Justice in a Get
Tough Era," Youth & Society, December 2001, 169-198.
64. Willrich, City of Courts, 241-259.
65. Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban
Reform, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
66. Costin, Karger, and Stoesz, Politics of Child Abuse, 68; Clement, Growing
Pains, 108; Sonya Michel, Children's Interests/Mothers' Rights: The Shaping
of America's Child Care Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
67. Ashby, Endangered Children, 79-80, 112-114.
68. Kriste Lindenmeyer, '"'"A Right to Childhood": The U.S. Children's Bureau
and Child Welfare, 1912-46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 37,
41,52, 108,119-138.
69. More than 60,000 mentally retarded or mentally ill women were involun-
tarily sterilized; Philip R. Reilly, Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary
Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1991); Charles R. King, Children's Health in America (New York: Twayne,
1993), 140.
70. Costin, Karger, and Stoesz, Politics of Child Abuse, 68.
71. Leon Stein, Triangle Fire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
72. "Newsboys Act and Talk," New York Times, July 25, 1899, 3; David Nasaw,
Children of the City: At Work and at Play (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/
Anchor, 1985), 168-177.
73. Newsstands and home delivery eliminated the need for "newsies," while
pneumatic tubes reduced the need for "runners" in department stores;
Macleod, Age of the Child, 117.
74. Walter I. Trattner, Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child
Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America (Chicago: Quadrangle

Books, 1970); Macleod, Age of the Child, 115-116.
75. Macleod, Age of the Child, 116.
76. Ibid.; Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918); NLRB v. Jones &
Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937).
77. Scribner's, August 1892, 244; Costin, Karger, and Stoesz, Politics of Child
Abuse, 63.
78. Macleod, Age of the Child.
9. Children under the Magnifying Glass

1. Gillian Avery, Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-
1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 61-62; Anne Scott
MacLeod, A Moral Tale: Children's Fiction and American Culture, 1820-
1860 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1975), 37-39; idem, "Children's Literature in
America from the Puritan Beginnings to 1870," in Children's Literature, ed.
Peter Hunt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 110-112.
2. Atlantic Monthly, December 1865, 724.
3. Jerry Griswold, Audacious Kids (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),
36, 47, 95; Priscilla Clement, Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age,
1850-1890 (New York: Twayne, 1997), 164: A. S. Byatt, "Harry Potter and
the Childish Adult," New York Times, July 7, 2003.
4. Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice
about Children (New York: Knopf, 2003); G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence (New
York: D. Appleton, 1904), x-xi.
5. Charles R. King, Children's Health (New York: Twayne, 1993), 65, 85, 91;
Richard A. Meckel, Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the
Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850-1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1990), 1.
6. Charles Darwin, "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant," Mind 2 (1877), 285-
294; Ann Hulbert, "The Century of the Child," Wilson Quarterly, winter
1999, 20.
7. Alexander W. Siegel and Sheldon H. White, "The Child Study Movement," in
Advances in Child Development and Behavior, vol. 17, ed. Hayne W. Reese
(New York: Academic Press, 1982), 251.
8. Ibid.,_249; Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 287, 290-291.
9. Ibid., 293-294, 340 n. 57.
10. Ibid., 300, 304-06, 307.
11. Hulbert, "Century of the Child," 14-29.
12. Hulbert, Raising America, 63-93.
13. Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern American
Childrearing (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 42.
14. Barbara Ehrenreich, "What It's Like to Be a Child," New York Times, May
24, 1987, sec. 7, 3; Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein, eds., Childhood
in Contemporary Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
15. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America (New York: Free Press, 1996), 181-
188; Mark Gerson, A Choice of Heroes: The Changing Faces of American

Manhood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 51; David I. MacLeod, "Act
Your Age: Boyhood, Adolescence, and the Rise of the Boy Scouts of Amer-
ica," Journal of Social History 16 (1982), 5.
16. David I. MacLeod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts,
the YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madison: University of Wis-
consin, 1983), 285. '
17. Ibid., 2, 50-51, 110, 119, 123.
18. Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular
Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999).
19. Griswold, Audacious Kids, 21; Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls' Culture in
England, 1880-1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 149.
20. Fairfax Downey, Portrait of an Era as Drawn by C. D. Gibson (New York:
Charles Scriber's Sons, 1936).
21. Mitchell, New Girl, 173, 183, 188; idem, "Girls and Their Ways," American
Literary History 10 (1998), 350-359.
22. Ross, G. Stanley Hall, 327.
23. James A. Schultz, "Medieval Adolescence: The Claims of History and the Si-
lence of German Narrative," Speculum 66 (1991), 519-539; John Demos and
Virginia Demos, "Adolescence in Historical Perspective," Journal of Marriage
and the Family 31 (1969), 632-638.
24. Ibid., 333, 335, 337.
25. Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present
(New York: Basic Books, 1977), 215-244.
26. Ibid., 319.
27. Ibid., 320.
28. Ibid., 183-184.
29. Ibid., 183-186; Stephen Hardy, How Boston Played: Sport, Recreation, and
Community, 1865-1915 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1982).
30. Kett, Rites of Passage, 243-244.
10. New to the Promised Land

1. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 187-
188; Magdalena J. Zaborowska, How We Found America: Reading Gender
through East-European Immigrant Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1995).
2. Antin, Promised Land, 187-188.
3. Melvyn Dubofsky, "Some of Our Mothers and Grandmothers: The Making
of the 'New' Jewish Woman," Reviews in American History 19 (1991), 385-
386; Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1989); Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and
Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1985), 230.
4. Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 13.
5. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in

Buffalo~ 1880-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 106, 167; Selma
Cantor Berro!, Growing Up American: Immigrant Children in America~ Then
and Now (New York: Tawyne, 1995), 16-17, 22.
6. Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars~ 20-21.
7. Berro!, Growing Up American~ 44, 52; Selma Cantor Berro!, Immigrants at
School: New York City~ 1898-1914 (1967; reprint, New York: Arno, 1978),
55, 86, 115.
8. Berroll, Growing Up American~ 31, 43; Berroll, Immigrants at School~ 122,
127, 228-229.
9. Berro!, Growing Up American~ 34-35, 55.
10. Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community; Jerome Karabel, "The Reasons
Why," New York Review of Books~ February 8, 1979, 8; Berro!, Growing Up
American, 35, 37; Selma Cantor Berrol, review of Stephan A. Brumberg,
Going to America~ Going to School, History of Education Quarterly 26
(1986), 646.
11. Michael R. Olneck and Marvin Lazerson, "The School Achievement of Immi-
grant Children: 1900-1930," History of Education Quarterly 14 (1974),
453-482; James W. Sanders, The Education of an Urban Minority: Catholics
in Chicago, 1833-1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
12. Berrol, Growing Up American, 44, 45, 49, 52-53; Selma Cantor Berro!, "Im-
migrant Children at School," in The Social Fabric: American Life from the
Civil War to the Present, ed. John H. Cary, Thomas L. Hartshorne, and Rob-
ert Anthony Wheeler, 8th ed., vol. 2 (New York: Longman, 1999), 111.
13. Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, "The Settlements: Social Work, Culture, and Ide-
ology in the Progressive Era," History of Education Quarterly 31 (1991),
253.
14. Ewen, Immigrant Women~ 77-79, 85, 89, 91, 135-136, 138-139.
15. Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower
East Side (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 108-112, 123-127.
16. Stephen Cole, "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl," American Historical
Review 99 (1994), 1265; Cohen, Out of the Shadow~ 108-12, 123-27, http://
womhist. binghamton. edu/shirt/doc 1.htm.
17. Berro!, Growing Up American~ 60, 63, 68, 80.
18. Ewen, Immigrant Women~ 122, 125, 153; Berro!, Growing Up American~ 65.
19. Ewen, Immigrant Women~ 98, 101.
20. Paula S. Fass and Mary Ann Mason, Childhood in America (New York: New
York University Press, 2000), 631.
21. Cohen, Out of the Shadow~ 119-135.
22. Beverly Gordon, "'They Don't Wear Wigs Here': Issues and Complexities in
the Development of an Exhibition," American Quarterly 47 (1995), 117-119,
123-125, 127, 136; Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Im-
migrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Ewen, Immigrant Women, 25, 71.
23. Gordon, '"They Don't Wear Wigs Here," 124-125, 127, 129-131, 136;
Ewen, Immigrant Women~ 71-72.
24. Ewen, Immigrant Women, 71-72, 88.

25. Ibid., 72-73.
26. Hilda Satt Polacheck, I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl (Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
27. Cole, "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl," 1265; Berrol, Growing Up
American, 92; Ewen, Immigrant Women, 98, 104, 106, 197-198.
28. Ewen, Immigrant Women, 195; Bernard J. Weiss, "The World of Our
Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women," History of Education
Quarterly 29 (1989), 163.
29. Dubofsky, "Some of Our Mothers and Grandmothers," 388; Ewen, Immi-
grant Women, 190; Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and
Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Cha-
pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
30. Beverly Gordon, '"They Don't Wear Wigs Here,"' 116; Susan Sachs, "Ameri-
can Dreams, No Illusions," New York Times, January 9, 2000, sec. 1, 21;
Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, ed., Becoming American: Personal Essays by
First-Generation Immigrant Women (New York: Hyperion, 2000).
11. Revolt of Modern Youth

1. Gilbert Geis and Leigh B. Bienen, Crimes of the Century (Boston: Northeast-
ern University Press, 1998); Paula S. Fass, Kidnapped: Child Abduction in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 57-93; Armand
Deutsch, "The First Crime of the Century," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Septem-
ber 10, 1996, B1; Dianne Zuckerman, "Inside the Leopold, Loeb Case," Den-
ver Post, October 22, 2001, EE2; "'Intellectual' Murder in Chicago," Literary
Digest 82 (July 15, 1924), 40.
2. Fass, Kidnapped, 76-83; Douglas 0. Linder, "The Leopold and Loeb Trial,"
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/leoploeb/
Accountoftrial.htm.
3. Judge Ben Lindsey quoted in Fass, Kidnapped, 67.
4. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity
from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 259;
Linda W. Rosenzweig, Anchor of My Life: Middle-Class American Mothers
and Daughters, 1880-1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1993),
170-171; Kathleen W. Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child: American Fam-
ilies, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 128.
5. Rosenzweig, Anchor of My Life, 170-171; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell
Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1929); Ben Wattenberg, "Middletown 1," The First Mea-
sured Century, http://www. pbs. orglfmc/timeline/dmiddletown.htm.
6. Theodore Caplow and Howard M. Bahr, "Half a Century of Change in Ado-
lescent Attitudes: Replication of a Middletown Survey by the Lynds," Public
Opinion Quarterly 43 (1979), 1-17.
7. Quoted in Paula S. Pass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in
the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 53, 382 n. 22.
8. Pass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 90-91, 93-95; James R. McGovern,
"The American Woman's Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and
Morals," Journal of American History 55 (1968), 319 nn. 25, 26.
9. Gary Cross, Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Child-
hood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); San Antonio Ex-
press-News, November 15, 2002, F1; Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A
History of Modern Childrearing in America (New York: New York University
Press, 2003), 82; Washington Post, November 14, 20002, B1.
10. Nan Wolverton Franklin, "Toying with 1830s Childhood," Old Sturbridge
Visitor, spring 1998, 4-5, http://www.osv.org/education/OSVisitor/Toying
.html; Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Com-
mercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993 ).
11. Cross, Kid's Stuff.
12. On Stratemeyer, see Deidre Johnson, Edward Stratemeyer and the Strate-
meyer Syndicate (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993); Carol
Billman, The Secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate (New York: Ungar, 1986);
John T. Dizer Jr., Tom Swift & Company (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1982);
Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tillman Romalov, eds., Rediscovering
Nancy Drew (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1995).
13. Sally Squires, "She Learned to See the World through the Eyes of a Child,"
Washington Post, November 28, 1989, Z17; Fass, The Damned and the
Beautiful, 87.
14. Joseph M. Hawes, Children between the Wars: American Childhood, 1920-
1940 (New York: Twayne, 1997), 82.
15. Stearns, Anxious Parents, 42; Margo Horn, Before It's Too Late: The Child
Guidance Movement in the United States, 1922-1945 (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1989), 142-144.
16. Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child, 121, 123-128, 132.
17. Ibid., 8, 47, 67-68, 80-81, 84, 174.
18. Ibid., 14, 94, 124-25, 137-138.
19. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls
(New York: Random House, 1997), 15; Rosenzweig, Anchor of My Life,
78, 81.
20. James H. Jones, Alfred Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (New York: Norton,
1997), 67, 69.
21. Ibid., 33, 40, 49, 52.
21.. Ibid., 57, 64, 75; David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy:
The Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin, 1983).
23. Helen Mayer Hacker, "The New Burdens of Masculinity," Marriage and
Family Living 19 (1957), 230; David Tyack and Elisabeth Hanson, Learning
Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools (New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 1990), 227-242; Christian Science Monitor, January 5,

1996, 11; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America (New York: Free Press,
1996), 160; Peter N. Stearns, "Girls, Boys, and Emotions: Redefinitions and
Historical Change," Journal of American History 80 (1993), 48; Ottawa Citi-
zen, March 5, 2001, All.
24. Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child, 133, 159-160, 180-181, 183.
25. Ibid., 73; Rosenzweig, Anchor of My Life, 73, 77.
26. Roberta J. Park, "Physiology and Anatomy Are Destiny," Journal of Sport
History 18 (1991), 37, 38, 39, 60.
27. Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after
the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 125; Birgitte
S0land, Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Wom-
anhood in the 1920s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 22, 25-26;
John Modell, "Dating Becomes the Way of American Youth," in Essays on
the Family and Historical Change, ed. Leslie Page Moch and Gary D. Stark
(College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1983 ), 107, 112-113.
28. S0land, Becoming Modern, 41; Beth Brophy, "Dear Diary: A History," U.S.
News & World Report, October 23, 1995, 89; Brumberg, Body Project, 60-
61; Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1993 ), 22.
29. S0land, Becoming Modern, 14, 21, 54-55, 70; McGovern, "American
Woman's Pre-World War I Freedom," 320; Rosenzweig, Anchor of My
Life, 41.
30. Randolph S. Bourne, "The Handicapped-by One of Them," Atlantic
Monthly, 1911; Daniel Aaron, "American Prophet," New York Review of
Books, November 23, 1978, 136-140; Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Commu-
nity: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo
Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1990), 64; Randolph S. Bourne, Youth and Life (New York: B. Franklin,
1971), 20.
31. Richard Wightman Fox, "Apostle of Personality," New York Times, January
13, 1985, sec. 7, 12; Blake, Beloved Community, 63-64; Randolph S. Bourne,
"Youth,'' Atlantic Monthly, April 1912, 436-437, reprinted in Lillian
Schlissel, ed., The World of Randolph Bourne (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1965), 9-11, 15.
32. Michael Gordon, "Was Waller Ever Right? The Rating and Dating Complex
Reconsidered," Journal of Marriage and the Family 43 (1981), 67-76; White,
First Sexual Revolution, 14.
33. Brumberg, Body Project, xxviii.
34. Quoted in Modell, "Dating Becomes Way of American Youth," 119.
35. Ibid., 95; White, First Sexual Revolution, 167; D. C. Thorn, Guiding the Ado-
lescent, quoted in Modell, "Dating Becomes Way of American Youth," 94.
36. Modell, "Dating Becomes Way of American Youth," 121-122.
37. Ibid., 101, 108-109, 114; Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 262-263,
324-335.
38. Mary P. Ryan, "The Movie Moderns in the 1920s," in Decades of Discontent,
ed. Lois Scharf And Joan M. Jensen (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983),
118-119.
39. Steven Mintz and Randy Roberts, Hollywood's America, 3d ed. (St. James,
N.Y.: Brandywine, 2001), 13-14.
40. Kimball Young, "Children's Sleep," American Journal of Sociology 41 (1935),
255; Henry James Foreman, "What Our Children Learn When They Go to
the Movies," New York Times Book Review, December 24, 1933, 3; idem,
Our Movie-Made Children (New York: Macmillan, 1933).
41. Foreman, "What Our Children Learn," 3.
42. Ibid.
43. Cornelia A. P. Comer, "A Letter to the Rising Generation," Atlantic Monthly,
February 1911, 145.
44. Randolph S. Bourne, "The Two Generations," Atlantic Monthly, May 1911,
591.
45. Leslie J. Vaughan, Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 62-64; Bourne, "Youth."
12. Coming of Age in the Great Depression

1. In 1998 the Ontario government awarded Yvonne, Annette, and Cecile $4
million (Canadian) in compensation for separating them from their parents
and placing them on public display; Cleo Paskal, "Curiosity and the Canadian
Quints," St. Petersburg Times, July 28, 2002, 1E; Saila K. Dewan, "Yvonne
Dionne Dies at 67," Montreal Gazette, June 25, 2001, A3; Ian Parker, "Dark
Side of the Famous Five," The Independent (London), November 5, 1995, 4.
American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), 140; Robert Cohen,
Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 7.
3. Grace Palladino, Teenagers (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 37; Caroline
Bird, Invisible Scar (New York: D. McKay, 1966); Glen H. Elder Jr., Children
of the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Cohen,
Dear Mrs. Roosevelt, 7-9, 146.
4. Russell Baker, Growing Up (New York: Congdon and Weed, 1982), 21-22,
80, 84; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 133.
5. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 136.
6. Cohen, Dear Mrs. Roosevelt, 19, 75-76; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revo-
lutions, 136-137.
8. Ibid., 138-140.
9. Glen H. Elder Jr., John Modell, and Ross D. Parke, eds., Children in Time and
Place (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 7, 16.
10. Cohen, Dear Mrs. Roosevelt, 46, 61, 106, 156, 162-163, 176-177,206-208.
11. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 140; Errol Lincoln Uys, Riding the
Rails: Teenagers on the Move during the Great Depression (New York: TV
Books, 1999), 11, 22; Cohen, Dear Mrs. Roosevelt, 92.
12. Betty and Ernest K. Lindley, A New Deal for Youth: The Story of the National
Youth Administration (1938; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1972), 184; Rich-
ard A. Reiman, The New Deal and American Youth (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1992); Carol A. Weisenberger, Dollars and Dreams: The Na-
tional Youth Administration in Texas (New York: P. Lang, 1994); Palladino,
Teenagers, 45.
13. Lindley, New Deal for Youth, 194; Palladino, Teenagers, 13.
14. James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York:
Free Press, 1981), 61-65, 85-86, 218-219; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic
Revolutions, 141; Charles S. Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1934 ).
16. I am deeply grateful to Wilma King for permission to quote from "What a
Life This Is: An African American Girl Comes of Age during the Great De-
pression," a chapter in her book African American Childhoods in Historical
Perspective, 1600-2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
17. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 141; Cohen, Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,
196.
18. Steven Mintz, Mexican American Voices (St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine, 2000),
165.
19. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 143-144; Mintz, Mexican Ameri-
can Voices, 160, 164-165.
20. Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1969); James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Pantheon, 1994).
21. Uys, Riding the Rails, 13, 15-16, 29.
22. Ibid., 28.
23. Thomas Minehan, Boy and Girl Tramps of America (New York: Farrar and
Rinehart, 1934); Gail Pennington, "Teen Hobos," St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
April 13, 1998, E6.
24. "Tough Guy Mitchum Dies," Toronto Star, July 2, 1997, C1; Uys, Riding the
Rails, 30, 38, 145, 154-155, 220-230; Walter Goodman, "The Depression's
Victims, Hopping the Freights," New York Times, April13, 1998, E5.
25. Cohen, Dear Mrs. Roosevelt, 6-9, 13, 91-92; Lindley, New Deal for
Youth, 11.
26. Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of
Welfare, 1890-1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994).
27. Palladino, Teenagers, 39; Cohen, Dear Mrs. Roosevelt, 8, 91-92; Lindley,
New Deal for Youth, 66.
28. Palladino, Teenagers, 39-42.
29. Lindley, New Deal for Youth, 14-15, 18, 66; Cohen, Dear Mrs. Roosevelt, 8,
91-92; Palladino, Teenagers, 41; Uys, Riding the Rails, 41-42.
30. Uys, Riding the Rails, 42.
31. Theodore H. Draper, "The Life of the Party," New York Review of Books,
January 13, 1994.
32. Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993 ).
33. Robert Cohen, "Activist Impulses: Campus Radicalism in the 1930s," New
Deal Network, http://newdeal.feri.org/students/essay02.htrn.
34. Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young.
35. Cohen, "Activist Impulses"; Eunice Fuller Barnard, "The Class of '36: The
Graduate Is Socially Minded, Soberer than His Predecessor," New York
Times:~ June 21, 1936, 3.
36. Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Cul-
ture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
37. Quoted in Martha Sherrill, "Dimply the Best," Washington Post, July 16,
1995, G1; Robert Coles, "The Gloom and the Glory," New York Times:~ June
18, 1989, sec. 8, 1.
38. Palladino, Teenagers:~ 45.
39. Ibid., 52.
40. Stephen Holden, "After the War, the Time of the Teen-Ager," New York
Times, May 7, 1995, sec. 4, 6; John Lyttle, "They Don't Make Them like
They Used To," The Independent, September 13, 1994, 24.
13. Mobilizing Children for World War II

1. Dorinda Makanaonalani Nicholson, Pearl Harbor Child (Honolulu: Arizona
Memorial Museum Association, 1993 ), 15-20; Emmy E. Werner, Through
the Eyes of Innocents: Children Witness World War II (Boulder: Westview,
2000), 61-67.
2. Jane Fishman, "I Could See Their Goggles," Savannah Morning News, June
13, 2001.
3. William M. Tuttle Jr., "Kansas in World War II," http://ktwu.wuacc.edu/jour-
neys/scripts/905b.htrnl.
4. Jonathan Yardley, "On the Horne Front," Washington Post, September 12,
1993, sec. 10, 3; Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A
Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), 152-
153; William M. Tuttle Jr., Daddy's Gone to War: The Second World War in
the Lives of America's Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
5. Deborah Gorham, "They Use Real Bullets: An American Family's Experience
of the Second World War: A Fragment of Memoir," Women's History Review
6 (1997), 22.
6. Yardley, "On the Horne Front"; Tuttle, Daddy's Gone to War, 14.
7. Tuttle, Daddy's Gone to War, 3, 6, 8; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolu-
tions, 167.
9. Ibid., 155-156.
10. Ibid., 156, 162-163.
11. Ibid., 157.
12. Werner, Through the Eyes of Innocents:~ 68-69, 72; Mintz and Kellogg, Do-
mestic Revolutions:~ 160.
13. William M. Tuttle Jr., "America's Home Front Children in World War II," in
Children in Time and Place, ed. Glen H. Elder Jr., John Modell, and Ross D.
Parke (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 29; idem, Daddy,s
Gone to Wa~ 124; Yardley, "On the Home Front."
15. Ibid., 166.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 165.
18. Ibid., 161-162.
19. Ibid., 161-163; Tuttle, Daddy,s Gone to Wa~ 8-1-82.
20. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 163; Tuttle, "Kansas in World
War II."
21. Tuttle, Daddy,s Gone to Wa~ 26.
23. Ibid.
24. 319 u.s. 624, 628.
25. Tuttle, "Home Front Children in World War II," 29; idem, Daddy,s Gone to
War, 119-122, 187; idem, "Kansas in World War II."
26. Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Cul-
ture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), chap. 3.
27. Tuttle, Daddy,s Gone to Wa~ vii.
28. Werner, Through the Eyes of Innocents, 66.
29. David Hinckley, "Blue Eyes Sinatra at the Paramount," New York Daily
News, June 11, 1998, 67.
30. Quoted in Jim Auchmutey, "Sinatra: An Appreciation," Atlanta Journal and
Constitution, May 17, 1998, G1.
32. Ibid.
33. Grace Palladino, Teenagers (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 64, 86, 106.
34. Ibid., 104, 109-110; Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teen-
ager (New York: Bard, 1999), 237.
35. Washington Post, AprilS, 1998, C1.
36. Tuttle, Daddy,s Gone to Wa~ 166, 174, 184.
37. Cary Quan Gelerntner, "Artifacts of Internment," Seattle Times, November
24, 1991, A1, K1.
38. Werner, Through the Eyes of Innocents, 84.
39. Fred Barbash, "Internment: The 'Enemy' 40 Years Ago," Washington Post,
December 5, 1982, A1.
41. Werner, Through the Eyes of Innocents, 83, 87-88.
42. Gelerntner, "Artifacts of Internment," K1; Werner, Through the Eyes of Inno-
cents, 84; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 168-170.
43. Steven Mintz, Mexican American Voices (St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine, 1998),
175-176.
44. Palladino, Teenagers, 58; Hine, Rise and Fall of American Teenage~ 239.
45. Mintz, Mexican American Voices, 175-178.
46. Quoted in ibid., 178-181.
47. Gorham, "They Use Real Bullets," 5-28; Tuttle, Daddy,s Gone to Wa~ 218,
220.
48. Tuttle, Daddy,s Gone to War, 171.

49. Ibid., 44, 241.
14. In Pursuit of the Perfect Childhood

1. Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977).
2. Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman, Growing up with Dick and Jane:
Learning and Living the American Dream (San Francisco: Harper, 1996), 59.
3. Only three other countries-Canada, Australia, and New Zealand-experi-
enced a prolonged baby boom; Landon Y. Jones, Great Expectations: Amer-
ica and the Baby Boom Generation (New York: Coward, McCann and
Geoghegan, 1980), 21.
4. Approximately 22 percent of the women born in 1908 bore no children; ibid.,
15, 28. Only 8 percent of the married women born in the early 1930s were
childless; Charles E. Strickland and Andrew M. Ambrose, "The Baby Boom,
Prosperity, and the Changing Worlds of Children, 1945-1963," in American
Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, ed. Joseph M.
Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), 535-536;
Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties
(Boston: Beacon, 1992), 59.
5. Tampa Tribune, August 8, 1995, 1; Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A
History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1996), 59, 60, 85.
6. Kismaric and Heiferman, Growing Up with Dick and Jane, 15, 64; Jones,
Great Expectations, 39; Strickland and Ambrose, "Baby Boom, Prosperity,
and Changing Worlds," 542-543.
7. Owram, Born at the Right Time, 81-82.
8. Kismaric and Heiferman, Growing Up with Dick and Jane, 38.
9. "Goodbye to Barbie's Maker," New York Times, April 30, 2002, A28; Ginia
Bellafante, "It Was Fashion That Set Barbie Free," New York Times, April 30,
2002, B8.
10. A "live" virus vaccine, which was based on a weakened virus and developed
by Albert Sabin, was approved in 1960. It required no shots and was origi-
nally taken on a sugar cube.
11. Claudia Ann Miner, "What about the Children? Americans' Attitudes toward
Children and Childhood in the 1950s" (Ph.D. diss., Washington State Univer-
sity, 1986), 77, 78; Strickland and Ambrose, "Baby Boom, Prosperity, and
Changing Worlds," 533.
12. Nicholas Stowell Sammond, "The Uses of Childhood: The Making of Walt
Disney and the Generic American Child, 1930-1960" (Ph.D. diss., University
of California at San Diego, 1999), 414, 417.
13. Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
14. Ibid.; Owran, Born at the Right Time, 256, 259; Ferdinand Lundberg And
Marynia F. Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Grosset and
Dunlap, 1947) 402-403.
15. Daniel Gomes, '"Sissy' Boys and 'Unhappy' Girls: Childrearing during the
Cold War," in Thresholds: Viewing Culture, vol. 9 (University of California
at Santa Barbara, 1995), http://proxy.arts.uci.edu/---nideffer/Tvc/section1/
05.Tvc.v9.sect1.Gomes.html; Miner, "What about the Children?" 6, 37-38.
16. Jones, Great Expectations, 49; Breines, Young, White, and Miserable, 47, 64-
65; John R. Seeley, R. Alexander Sim, and Elizabeth W. Loosley, Crestwood
Heights: A Study of the Culture of Suburban Life (New York: Basic Books,
1956).
17. Seeley, Sim, and Loosley, Crestwood Heights; Breines, Young, White, and
Miserable, 64.
18. Breines, Young, White, and Miserable, 69.
19. "Ah, she eats him alive and he takes it," James Dean says about his father. "If
he had guts to knock Mom cold one time then maybe she'd be happy and stop
picking on him." Owram, Born at the Right Time, 256, 259.
20. W. E. Blatz quoted in Owram, Born at the Right Time, 41-42; Breines,
Young, White, and Miserable, 8, 41.
21. Owram, Born at the Right Time, 87.
22. Jones, Great Expectations, 56; Owram, Born at the Right Time, 105, 107-
108.
23. Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass
Media (New York: Times Books, 1994), 43; William Graebner, Coming of
Age in Buffalo: Youth and Authority in the Postwar Era (Philadelphia: Tem-
ple University Press, 1990), 69.
24. Douglas, Where the Girls Are.
25. Breines, Young, White, and Miserable, 74, 107, 111, 234; Michael Barson
and Steven Heller, Teenage Confidential: An Illustrated History of the Ameri-
can Teen (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998), 108.
26. Barson and Heller, Teenage Confidential, 26.
28. Ibid., , 50, 78.
29. Ibid., 92-93, 108.
30. Owram, Born at the Right Time, 141, 145; Frank Furstenberg, "The Sociol-
ogy of Adolescence and Youth in the 1990s," Journal of Marriage and the
Family 62 (2000), 896-910; Gerald Grant, The World We Created at Hamil-
ton High (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 16; Breines,
Young, White, and Miserable, 132-133.
32. Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-
century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 81;
Owram, Born at the Right Time, 256-257.
34. Owram, Born at the Right Time, 147; Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat,
50; Graebner, Coming of Age in Buffalo, 98.
35. Owram, Born at the Right Time, 50; Kismaric and Heiferman, Growing Up
with Dick and Jane, 30; Paul Dickson, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century
(New York: Walker, 2001), 117; Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). The Associated Press an-
nouncement can be found at http://wire.ap.org/APpackages/20thcentury/
57sputnik.html; Bennett quoted in www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/
sputnik/chap 11.html; Teller quoted in http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/
scitechlsputnik_race/.
36. Dickson, Sputnik.
37. Educational Policies Commission, Education for All American Youth (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Educational Policies Commission, National Education Associa-
tion of the United States and the American Association of School Administra-
tors, 1944 ); Thomas R. McCambridge, "Liberal Education and American
Schooling" (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1997), http://
www.realuofc.org/libed/mcam/ch3.html.
38. Arendt quoted in Richard Rothstein, The Way We Were: The Myths and Real-
ities of America's Student Achievement (New York: Century Foundation
Press, 1998), 11-13.
39. Ibid.; Floyd M. Hammack, "Current Prospects for the Comprehensive High
School," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational
Research Association, New Orleans, April, 2000, http://pages.nyu.edu/
----fmh1/AERA_2000.htm; William G. Wraga, "The Comprehensive High
School and Educational Reform in the United States, Retrospect and Pros-
pect," High School Journal 88, no. 3 (February/March 1998), 121-133;
Christopher Jencks, "Hard Marker," New York Review of Books, January 9,
1964.
40. James Bryant Conant, The American High School Today: A First Report to
Interested Citizens (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), xi.
41. Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritoc-
racy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).
42. Fred M. Hechinger, "The Middle School is 20 Years Old," New York Times,
March 17, 1981, C1.
43. Miner, "What About the Children?" 152, 159, 162, 164; Robert Lindner
quoted in Steve Rubio, "The Kids Are Alright," Bad Subjects, no. 47 (January
2000), http://eserver.org/bs/4 7/rubio.html.
44. John M. McGuire, "Comic Books as a Corrupting Influence," St. Louis Post-
Dispatch, October 16,2000, F3; James Burkhart Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage:
America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1986), 97.
45. Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage, 101.
46. Walter Goodman, "Seducing the Innocent," New York Times, October 8,
2000, sec. 4, 2; Jay Maeder, "No Harm in Horror," New York Daily News,
September 17, 1998, 41; Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage, 92, 101; Miner, "What
about the Children?" 147. Mad magazine satirized Frederic Wertham with an
article titled "Baseball Is Ruining Our Children" supposedly written by
"Frederick Werthless, M.D."
4 7. Barson and Heller, Teenage Confidential, 52; Thomas Patrick Doherty, Teen-
agers and Teenpics: The ]uvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s
(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 109.
48. Miner, "What about the Children?" 136-137, 141-142.

49. Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage, 71, 79; Graebner, Coming of Age in Buffalo, 52.
50. "How Gangs Started and Got Those Names," New York Times, October 3,
1999, sec. 14, 5; Eric C. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings:
Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999), 52
51. Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage, xix, 53, 71, 184.
52. Ibid., 75; Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, 75 and passim;
Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (New York: Macmillan,
1965), 37.
53. Strickland and Ambrose, "Baby Boom, Prosperity, and Changing Worlds,"
566.
54. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, 138.
55. Allan Luke, Literacy, Textbooks and Ideology: Postwar Literacy and the My-
thology of Dick and Jane (London: Palmer Press, 1988); "Dick and Jane's
Lost Dad," University of Chicago Magazine, December 1998, http://
magazine. uchicago.edu/9 812/html/enquirer2.htm.
56. Rudolf Franz Flesch, Why Johnny Can't Read-And What You Can Do about
It (New York: Harper, 1955).
57. Jim Davies, "What Mad, Worry?" The Guardian, October 5, 1992, 25.
58. W. Tasker Witham, The Adolescent in the American Novel, 1920-1960 (New
York: Frederick Ungar, 1964), 214.
59. Ibid., 12, 22, 25, 41-43.
60. Lynn Spigel, "Seducing the Innocent: Childhood and Television in Postwar
America," in The Children's Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York:
New York University Press, 1998), 117; Sammond, "The Uses of Childhood,"
508.
61. Spigel, "Seducing the Innocent," 128; Sammond, "The Uses of Childhood,"
509.
62. It is perhaps not a coincidence that in an era when many social critics argued
that Americans were becoming conformist puppets, and childrearing experts
feared that children were tied to their mothers' apron strings, children's shows
featured marionettes, hand puppets, and dummies; Susan Vaughn, "Welcome
to the 'Good Old Days,"' Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1997, 14; W. T.
Lhamon, Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American
1950s (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).
63. Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics, 113.
64. Owram, Born at the Right Time, 142; Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage, 64, 187;
Barson and Heller, Teenage Confidential, 61; Doherty, Teenagers and
Teenpics, 146-147, 180.
65. Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics:J 188, 193, 196.
66. James M. Curtis, Rock Eras: Interpretations of Music and Society, 1954-
1984 (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987),
37; Deena Weinstein, "Rock: Youth, and Its Music," in Adolescents and Their
Music: If It:Js Too Loud, You're Too Old, ed. Jonathon S. Epstein (New York:
Garland, 1994 ), 13.
67. Joseph A. Kotarba, "The Postmodernization of Rock and Roll Music: The
Case of Metallica," in Epstein, Adolescents and Their Music, 141-164; Deena
Weinstein, "Expendable Youth: The Rise and Fall of Youth Culture," in ibid.,
68; Curtis, Rock Eras, 46.
68. Curtis, Rock Eras, 41, 43-44.
69. Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics, 81; Curtis, Rock Eras, 41-46.
70. Curtis, Rock Eras, 37-38.
71. Weinstein, "Rock," 20.
73. Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New
York: Free Press, 1988); Christopher Metress, The Lynching of Emmett Till
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002).
74. William Faulkner wrote, "If we in America have reached that point in our
desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason
or what color, we don't deserve to survive"; quoted in David Hinckley, "Till's
Story Lives On in Song," New York Daily News, August 24, 1995, 50.
75. Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dial, 1968), 125.
76. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice (New York: Knopf, 1976), 75-77; Morris
quoted in U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, "School De-
segregation in Public Education in the U.S.," 7, http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/
school. pdf.
77. Quoted in Washington Post, June 23, 1987, B3.
78. Quoted in "She Would Not Be Moved," The Guardian (London), December
16, 2000, 8.
79. Quoted in Bob Baker, "Complex Legacy of Little Rock," Los Angeles Times,
September 4, 1987, sec. 1, 3.
80. Heather Greewood, "Pioneering Black Student at Little Rock," Toronto Star,
March 30, 1997, E1; Ottawa Citizen, November 30, 1997, D3.
81. Quoted in Phillip Hoose, We Were There, Too! Young People in U.S. History
(New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001), 218-220.
82. Robert Coles, The Story of Ruby Bridges (New York: Scholastic, 1995);
Grant, World We Created at Hamilton High, 214.
American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), 200-201.
15. Youthquake
1. Phillip Hoose, We Were There, Too! Young People in U.S. History (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 220-224.
2. Ibid., 222-223.
3. Look, January 3, 1961, 17.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 19-20.
6. See Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Everybody Look What's Going Down," Washing-
ton Post, November 29, 1998, XS.
7. David Chalmers, And the Crooked Places Made Straight: The Struggle for So-
cia/ Change in the 1960s, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996), 81; Patricia Cohen, "New Slant on the 60's: The Past Made New; Ex-
perts Are Reassessing a Tumultuous Decade," New York Times, June 13,
1998, B7.
8. The number of those cohabitating outside of marriage increased sixfold be-
tween 1970 and 1998. Today, about half of those getting married have lived
in a cohabitating relationship.
9. Edward K. Spann, Democracy's Children: The Young Rebels of the 1960s and
the Power of Ideals (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2003 ).
10. Claudia Ann Miner, "What about the Children? Americans' Attitudes toward
Children and Childhood during the 1950s" (Ph.D. diss., Washington State
University, 1986), 83-84.
11. Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent (Boston: Beacon, 1959).
12. Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized
System (New York: Random House, 1960).
13. Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties
(Boston: Beacon, 1992), 29; Jules Henry, Culture against Man (New York:
Random House, 1963 ), 70; Carl Ratner, "Contributions of Sociohistorical
Psychology and Phenomenology to Research Methodology," in Recent Trends
in Theoretical Psychology, ed. Henderikus J. Starn, Leendert P. Mos, Warren
Thorngate, and Bernie Kaplan, vol. 3 (New York: Springer Verlag, 1993),
503-510.0
14. Kenneth Keniston, Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965); Edgar C. Friedenberg, "Kids with-
out a Country," New York Review of Books, January 6, 1966, http://
www.nybooks.com/articles/12626; Henry, Culture against Man, 70.
15. "Man of the Year: The Inheritor," Time, January 6, 1967, 18-23; Joseph
Adelson, "The Myth of the Generation Gap," New York Times, January 18,
1970, sec. 6, 10.
16. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular
Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Emily D. Ed-
wards, "Does Love Really Stink: The 'Mean World' of Love and Sex in Popu-
lar Music of the 1980s," in Adolescents and Their Music, ed. Jonathon S. Ep-
stein (New York: Garland, 1994), 229; Look, January 3, 1961, 60; Lawrence
Grossberg, "The Political Status of Youth and Youth Culture," in Epstein,
Adolescents and Their Music, 3 8.
17. Kim Masters, "Lunch Counter Revolution; 35 Years Ago, They Took Their
Seats and Found a Place in History," Washington Post, January 16, 1995, B1;
Peggy Brown, "When Lunch Could Change the World," Toronto Star, Febru-
ary 3, 1993, A15.
18. Jim Schlosser, "The Story of the Greensboro Sit-ins," (Greensboro, N.C.)
News and Record, February 1, 1998, A1.
19. Henry Jenkins, "'The All-American Handful': Dennis the Menace, Permissive
Childrearing and the Bad Boy Tradition," in The Revolution Wasn't Tele-
vised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, ed. Lynn Spigel and Mike Curtin
(New York: Routledge, 1997), 119-135.
20. Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dial, 1968).
21. Tamara K. Hareven, "Step-Children of the Dream," History of Education

Quarterly 9 (winter 1969), 505-514.
22. Harrell R. Rodgers Jr. and Charles S. Bullock III, "Political and Racial Atti-
tudes: Black versus White," Journal of Black Studies 4 (1974), 471-472.
23. At least a third of the activists in the Free Speech movement at the University
of California, Berkeley, in 1964 were of Jewish descent; Allen J. Matusow,
The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York:
Harper and Row, 1984), 309.
24. Peter T. Jones, History of U.S. National Student Association Relations with
the International Union of Students, 1945-1956 (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy
Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania).
25. Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Licter, Roots of Radicalism:]ews, Christians,
and the New Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Dominick Ca-
vallo, A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York: St.
Martin's, 1999).
26. Nathan Glazer, "Anger against the State," Atlantic Monthly 224 (July 1969),
43-53.
American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), 210-213.
28. Quoted by Mary McGrory, "Moynihan Was Right 21 Years Ago," Washing-
ton Post, January 26, 1986, B1.
29. "Freedom Is Not Enough," Washington Post, May 6, 1992, A29.
30. Shalom M. Fisch and Rosemarie T. Truglio, eds., ~'G" Is for "Growing":
Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street (Mahwah, N.J.:
Erlbaum, 2000); Peter B. Mann, ed., Sesame Street Research (New York:
Children's Television Workshop; Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service,
1990); Joan Ganz Cooney, The First Year of Sesame Street (New York:
Children's Television Workshop, 1970).
31. James Crawford, Bilingual Education: History, Politics, Theory, and Practice,
4th ed. (Los Angeles: Bilingual Educational Services, 1999).
32. Josue M. Gonzalez, Towards Quality in Bilingual Education: Bilingual Edu-
cation in the Integrated School (Rosslyn, Va.: National Clearinghouse for Bi-
lingual Education, 1979). In 1981, in Casteneda v. Pickard, the Supreme
Court adopted a three-pronged test for whether bilingual educational pro-
grams adequately met the needs of non-English-speaking students. The Court
required a pedagogically sound plan, with sufficient qualified teachers to im-
plement the program, and a system to evaluate the programs' effectiveness.
33. Mills v. Board of Education, DC, 348 F.Supp. 866 (D. D.C. 1972).
34. Matusow, Unraveling of America, 199-200.
35. Dolores Delgado Bernal, "Chicana School Resistance and Grassroots Leader-
ship: Providing an Alternative History of the 1968 East Los Angeles Blow-
outs" (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1997).
36. U.S. Office of Education, Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1966). McKissick
quoted in Baltimore Sun, April4, 1995, B2.
37. By the 1970s the South had the nation's most integrated schools. In 1976,
45.1 percent of the South's African-American students were attending major-
ity white schools, compared with just 27.5 percent in the Northeast and 29.7
percent in the Midwest. As early as 1971 only 18 percent of the public, ac-
cording to a Gallup poll, supported busing; blacks also opposed it, though by
a very slight margin. Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reac-
tion: The Impact of Race Rights and Taxes on American Politics (New York:
Norton, 1991 ), 89-90.
38. In 1989 the federal courts withdrew their oversight of the Boston public
schools.
39. Quoted in "Tough Times in Education Call for Tough Teachers," St. Peters-
burg Times, August 10, 1991, 2; Grossberg, "Political Status of Youth and
Youth Culture," 31.
40. Paul Goodman, "What Rights Should Children Have?" New York Review of
Books, September 23, 1971, 20-22.
41. Holt argued that learning was a natural, organic function, and therefore did-
n't need to be managed by adults; Look, November 19, 1963, 30.
42. Nat Hentoff, "Philadelphia, Miss., Revisited," Washington Post, July 9,
1988, A23.
43. In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled that constitutional due process did not re-
quire states to provide a jury trial in juvenile court.
44. As late as 1970, many public universities did not admit women. It was not un-
til1970 that a court ordered the College of Arts and Sciences at the University
of Virginia to admit its first woman student.
45. Morris v. Michigan State Bd. of Educ., 472 F.2d 1207 (6th Cir. 1973); Gilpin
v. Kansas High Sch. Activities Assn., 377 F.Supp. 1233 (D. Kan. 1973);
Clinton v. Nagy, 411 F. Supp. 1396 (N.D. Ohio 1974). Federal regulations is-
sued in 1979 stated that when there is no comparable sport for girls, girls
must be allowed to try out in all sports except contact sports. Under federal
regulations adopted during the 1970s, school districts cannot let outside sup-
porters provide perquisites to boy athletes that are denied to girl athletes. To
comply with Title IX, a school district must show that the ratio of girls to
boys in the sports program is "substantially similar" to that in the student
population; or that it is continually expanding athletic opportunities for girls;
or that it is meeting female athletes' interests and abilities fully.
46. Weber v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co., 406 U.S. 164 (1972); New Jersey Wel-
fare Rights Org. v. Cahill, 411 U.S. 619 (1973).
47. Alan Lawson, "The New Left and New Values," American Quarterly 28
(1976), 107-123.
16. Parental Panics and the Reshaping of Childhood

1. Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the
Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt (New York: Basic Books, 1995);
Paul and Shirley Eberle, The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool
Trial (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1993 ); Cynthia Gorney, "The Terrible Puzzle of
McMartin Preschool," Washington Post, May 17, 1988, B1.
2. Robert Reinhold, "The Longest Trial-A Post-Mortem," New York Times,
January 24, 1990, A1; Jay Mathews, "Child Molestation Case a Long Way
from Trial," Washington Post, May 10, 1985, E1; Anne C. Roark, "Sex Case
Spotlighted Problem of Proving Children Tell Truth," Toronto Star, January
31, 1990, A23.
3. Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in
Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Hillary Rodham
Clinton, It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1996); Mike A. Males, Scapegoat Generation: America's
War on Adolescents (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 1996), 30.
4. Alan Guttmacher Institute, 11 Million Teenagers: What Can Be Done about
the Epidemic of Adolescent Pregnancies in the United States (New York,
1976); Kristin Luker, Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Preg-
nancy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Maris A.
Vinovskis, An ''Epidemic" of Adolescent Pregnancy? (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988).
5. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, "Frequently Asked
Questions and Statistics," http://www.missingkids.org/.
6. James C. Howell, Juvenile Justice and Youth Violence (Thousand Oaks, Ca-
lif.: Sage, 1997), 115. A 1989 congressional study claimed that two Los An-
geles gangs, the Crips and Bloods, controlled 30 percent of the crack cocaine
market in the United States; ibid., 116, 131.
7. Ken Armstrong, Steve Mills, and Maurice Possley, "Coercive and Illegal Tac-
tics Torpedo Scores of Cook County Murder Cases," Chicago Tribune, De-
cember 16, 2001, 1.
8. William Finnegan, Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country (New
York: Random House, 1998).
9. In most cases, these men were only a year or two older than the mother.
10. Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in
Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
11. Males, Scapegoat Generation, 274-275.
12. Mike A. Males, Framing Youth: Ten Myths about the Next Generation (Mon-
roe, Maine: Common Courage, 1999), 338.
13. Divorce rates certainly increased, but the rise was much more gradual and less
disjunctive than many assumed and in part reflected a sharp decrease in mari-
tal separations; Karen S. Peterson, "Kids of Divorced Parents Straddle a Di-
vided World," USA Today, July 13, 2003.
14. One comprehensive study found that after six years, a quarter of the ex-
spouses had severe conflicts, a quarter of children saw their noncustodial fa-
ther once a year or less, and a significant number of stepfathers no longer at-
tempted to deal with resisting stepchildren after two years. Twenty years fol-
lowing the divorce, about two-thirds of sons and three-quarters of daughters
had poor relationships with their biological fathers, compared with 30 per-
cent of children from intact marriages. E. Mavis Hetherington found that up
to 25 percent of children with divorced parents "have serious social, emo-
tional or psychological problems" in the long term, compared with 10 percent
of children from intact families. See E. Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly,
For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered (New York: Norton, 2002).
15. How well children cope with the stresses of divorce is closely related to the
bitterness of the divorce proceedings. About a quarter of divorcing parents re-

sort to litigation, and up to 70 percent of these parents are unable to build a
cooperative relationship after the divorce is finalized. More than 350,000
children are kidnapped each year by disgruntled family members, usually
noncustodial fathers. Typically such kidnappings last only a few days but
leave a lasting legacy of distrust.
16. Nuclear families enjoy a median annual income of $48,000; stepfamilies aver-
age an income of $45,900; cohabiting couples $25,000; divorced or separated
families, $18,500; and never-married, single-parent families, $15,000; John E.
Murray Jr., "The Current State of Marriage and Family," http://www
.. dufi.duq.edu/family/csmf/children.html.
17. Timothy J. Owens and Sandra L. Hofferth, eds., Children at the Millennium
(Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 2001); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Do-
mestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York:
Free Press, 1988), 220; David Elkind, The Hurried Child (Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley, 1981).
18. Karin Lee Fishbeck Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of
Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992),
153; Marie Winn, Children without Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 1983).
19. Males, Scapegoat Generation, 186. In the 1960s the average age of initiation
into drinking was thirteen and a quarter of high school students reported get-
ting "high" from drinking at least once a week; Males, Scapegoat Generation,
193. The legal treatment of teen drinking has changed much more than the in-
cidence of drinking. In the late 1960s and early and mid-1970s, many states
liberalized their laws to allow older teens to drink. By 1978, twenty-eight
states allowed eighteen-year-olds to drink beer, and many allowed them to
drink hard liquor. Another twenty states enacted a nineteen- or twenty-year-
old drinking age. Between 1978 and 1989 all states raised the drinking age to
twenty-one. Males, Framing Youth, 146-147, 167; Males, Scapegoat Genera-
tion, 152, 177-178; National Center for Health Statistics, "Illegal Drug Use,"
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/druguse.htm.
20. "Juveniles Account for 1 in 8 Violent Crimes Cleared," http://www.ncjrs.org/
txtfiles/fs-9415.txt; Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention,
Statistical Briefing Book, http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/html/OFFENDERS
.html; Jeff Madrick, "A Rise in Child Poverty Rates Is at Risk in U.S.," New
York Times, June 13, 2002, C2.
21. William Feldman et al., "Is Childhood Sexual Abuse Really Increasing in
Prevalence?" Pediatrics 88 (July 1991), 29-34; Males, Framing Youth, 257. In
1998 government agencies substantiated over a million cases of child mal-
treatment, including approximately 101,000 cases of sexual abuse. About 51
percent of lifetime rapes occur before age eighteen, and 29 percent of lifetime
rapes occur before age twelve; Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention, Combating Violence And Delinquency: The Na-
tional Juvenile Justice Action Plan: Report (Washington, D.C., 1996), 75; Na-
tional Criminal Justice Reference Service, http://www.ncjrs.org/htmllojjdp/
action_plan_2001_10/page1.html. The 1994 Sex in America study of the sex
lives of 3,400 men and women reported that 17 percent of the women and 12
percent of the men reported childhood sexual abuse; Males, Scapegoat Gener-
ation, 74.
22. Males, Framing Youth; idem, Scapegoat Generation.
23. Males, Framing Youth, 275.
24. Stephen Robertson, "The Disappearance of Childhood," http://teaching
.arts.usyd.edu.au/history/2044/.
25. Eighty-one percent of teens have their own bedrooms and 63 percent their
own television set.
26. Bill Maxwell, "Child's Play: A Thing of the Past?" St. Petersburg Times, No-
vember 15, 1998, D1.
27. Christian Science Monitor, May 6, 2002, 1.
28. Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine, eds., Cool Places: Geographies of Youth
Cultures (London: Routledge, 1998); Herb Childress, Landscapes of Betrayal,
Landscapes of Joy (Albany: State University of Ne'v York Press, 2000).
29. Low-wage, low-skill adolescent employment can result in cynical attitudes to-
ward work, school absences, and increased alcohol and marijuana use, but
these negative effects disappear among those who work for fewer hours. Espe-
cially for girls and minority youth, work contributes to higher levels of self-
esteem and gains in skills and contacts that prove useful in later life. See Ellen
Greenberger and Laurence Steinberg, When Teenagers Work: The Psychologi-
cal and Social Costs of Adolescent Employment (New York: Basic Books,
1986).
30. Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys
Growing Up in the Other America (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
31. Ibid.; Michiko Kakutani, "Children without Childhood," New York Times,
July 11, 1997, C27.
32. "Children of the Shadows," New York Times, April 4 (sec. 1, 21), 6 (A1),
8 (A1), 11 (sec. 1, 1), 13 (A1), 15 (Al), 18 (sec. 1, 1), 20 (A1), 22 (A1), 25
(sec. 1, 46), 1993.
33. Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (Chi-
cago: Aldine, 1970).
34. "Children of the Shadows."
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.; Andrew Sum and Joe McLaughlin, "The National Economic Recession
and Its Impact on Employment among the Nation's Young Adults," Center
for Labor Markets, Northeastern University, 2002, http://www.nupr.neu.edu/
02-02/youth. pdf.
37. National Institute of Drug Abuse, "Epidemiology of Youth Drug Abuse-Re-
search Findings," May 2001, http://www.drugabuse.gov/ICAW/epidemiology/
epidemiologyfindings501.html; J. M. Wallace Jr. et al., "Gender and Ethnic
Differences in Smoking, Drinking and Illicit Drug Use among American
8th, 10th and 12th grade students, 1976-2000," Addiction 98 (2003), 225-
234.
38. Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican (Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley, 1993).
39. Irina Langer, "A Lesson in Turning Memories into Memoirs," New York
Times, April 2, 2000, WC15.
40. During the 1990s about a million documented immigrants entered the United
States each year, along with perhaps another 250,000 to 500,000 undocu-
mented immigrants; Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco,
Children of Immigration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2001), 31-32, 56.
41. Ibid., 6, 19, 66, 75.
42. Ibid., 73, 75-76, 79-81.
43. Ibid., 1, 2, 5, 46, 99, 107, 120.
44. Robert Pear, "Greasy Kid Stuff; Washington Kidnaps Dick and Jane," New
York Times, June 15, 1997, sec. 4, 1.
45. "Record Share of New Mothers in Labor Force," http://www.census.gov/
Press-Release/www/2000/cb00-175; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolu-
tions, 222.
47. Arnold A. Hutschnecker, "Nixon-Era Plan for Children Didn't Include Con-
centration Camps," New York Times, October 15, 1988, sec. 1, 30; "A Fair
Chance, Even before School," ibid., September 28, 1988, A26. Between 1991
and 1995 there was a 50 percent increase in prescriptions to treat ADHD and
other behavioral and psychiatric disorders, including depression, in children
aged two to four. On sex-offense-specific therapy, see Judith Levine, Harmful
to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2002).
48. Males, Scapegoat Generation, 149, 223.
49. Kevin Johnson, "2 Boys Held in Death of 5-Year-Old," USA Today, October
17, 1994, A3.
50. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, "Trying Juveniles as
Adults in Criminal Court: An Analysis of State Transfer Provisions," Decem-
ber 1998, http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/pubs/tryingjuvasadult/intro.html.
51. Maureen Dowd, "Liberties," New York Times, June 2, 1994, sec. 4, 15.
52. "Clinton Pledges New Measures to Restore Discipline in Schools," Toronto
Star, July 21, 1998, All. Five years after the V-Chip was required in all new
TV sets, a survey found that half of the purchasers didn't know that TVs in-
cluded the chips and of those who did, only a third ever used them; David
Broder, "Politics Collides with Culture Wars," Newsday, July 29, 2001, B6.
53. Earl Wysong, Richard Aniskiewicz, and David Wright, "Truth and DARE:
Tracking Drug Education to Graduation and as Symbolic Politics," Social
Problems 41 (August 1994 ), 448-4 72.
54. "Sex Education: Politicians, Parents, Teachers, and Teens," Guttmacher Re-
port 4 (February 2001 ), 9-12.
55. Males, Framing Youth, 155, 172.
56. Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 526 U.S. 629.
57. Shawn Hubler, "Our Next Moral Battleground: Potty Training," Los Angeles
Times, January 25, 1999, Bl. Cultural conflict has a long lineage in the na-
tion's history, as "provincials" and "progressives" have battled over such

issues as immigration, alcohol, and evolution. See James Davison Hunter,
Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books,
1992).
58. Lynn Rosellini, "When to Spank," U.S. News & World Report, April 13,
1998, 52-53.
59. There does not appear to have been much change in attitudes among parents,
65 percent of whom approved of spanking in 1997, only modestly less than
the 74 percent who did so in 1946. But this aggregate figure obscures class
differences. In a 1997 poll, 41 percent of college-educated Americans disap-
proved of spanking children, compared with only 20 percent of those who
hadn't completed high school. Rosellini, "When to Spank."
60. Rosellini, "When to Spank"; Ronald Hyman and Charles Rathbone, Corpo-
ral Punishment in Schools: Reading the Law (Dayton: Education Law Associ-
ation, 1993); American Academy of Pediatrics, "Corporal Punishment in
Schools (RE9754)," http://www.aap.org/policy/re9754.html. In the United
Kingdom, a European court ruling led Parliament to ban corporal punishment
in schools by one vote in 1986.
61. Peggy Orenstein, School Girls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the
Confidence Gap (New York: Anchor, 1995); Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia:
Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Putnam Book, 1994 ); Chris-
tina Hoff Sommers, The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is
Harming Our Young Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
62. William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood
(New York: Random House, 1998); James Garbarino, Lost Boys: Why Our
Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them (New York: Free Press,
1999).
63. Anthony Rotundo, "The War against Boys," Washington Post, July 2, 2000,
sec. 10, 1.
64. Eric Cohen, "A Cultural Stalemate," Los Angeles Times, February 4,
2001, M1.
65. "Senate Aims to Block Teaching about Gays," Cleveland Plain Dealer, August
2, 1994, A7.
66. Eden Ross Lipson, "Zena Sutherland," New York Times, June 15,2002, B18.
67. In John Dewey's classic formulation in Education and Experience (New York:
Macmillan, 1938), 5-6, progressive education is characterized by the "culti-
vation of individuality, free activity as opposed to external discipline, learning
from experience rather than from texts and teachers, acquiring skills that are
deemed relevant to the individual at the present time rather than preparing for
some unknown future, and becoming acquainted with the world rather than
learning through static aims and old materials."
68. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk.
69. In Montgomery County, Maryland, students currently must take fifty hours of
state testing each year, not including PSATs, SATs, or Advanced Placement
tests; Jay Mathews, "Parents' Push Gives Students More SAT Time," Wash-
ington Post, May 8, 2001, B1.
17. The Unfinished Century of the Child

1. Ellen Karolina Sofia Key, The Century of the Child (New York: G. P. Putnam,
1909).
2. Detailed government reports on the shootings at Columbine High School
are available online. The Jefferson County, Colorado, sheriff's report can be
found at http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/columbine.cd/frameset.exclude
.html. The Colorado Governor's Columbine Review Commission Report of
May 2001 is online at http://www.state.eo.us/columbine/. Also see Sam Howe
Verhovek, "2 Youths Wanted to 'Destroy the School,' Sheriff Says," New York
Times, April23, 1999, A1; Michael Janofsky, "Columbine Victims Were Killed
Minutes into Siege at Colorado School, Report Reveals," ibid., May 16,
2000, A1.
3. Paul Schwartzman, "A Lot of Signs Were Given-but Ignored," New York
Daily News, April 25, 1999, 4; Mitchell Zuckoff and Lynda Gorov, "Early
Signs of Trouble Seen," Boston Globe, April 25, 1999, A1; James Brooke, "A
New Hint of Missed Signals in Littleton," New York Times, May 5, 1999,
A18; Jodi Wilgoren and Dirk Johnson, "Sketch of Killers: Contradictions and
Confusion," ibid., April23, 1999, A1; Pam Belluck and Jodi Willgoren, "Car-
ing Parents, No Answers, in Columbine Killers' Pasts," ibid., June 29, 1999,
A1; Jeff Kass, "Portrait of Two Teens Reveals a Lot of Gray," ibid., May 3,
1999, 3; James Brooke, "Little Was Done on Complaints in Littleton File,"
ibid., May 1, 1999, A1; James Brooke, "Attack at School Planned a Year, Au-
thorities Say," ibid., April25, 1999, sec. 1, 1; Jodi Wilgoren and Dirk Johnson,
"Sketch of Killers: Contradictions and Confusion," ibid., April 23, 1999, A1.
4. Michael Janofsky, "The Columbine Killers' Tapes of Rage," New York Times,
A22; James Barron, "Warnings from a Student Turned Killer," ibid., May 1,
1999, A12; Dave Cullen, "Kill Mankind. No One Should Survive," Salon, Sep-
tember 23, 1999, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/09/23/journal/
index.html.
5. Bill Dedman, "Bullying, Tormenting Often Led to Revenge in Cases Studied,"
Chicago Sun-Times, October 15, 2000, 14; Gus Kelly, "Afterwards, No Tidy
Explanations," Rocky Mountain News, April25, 1999, A26.
6. Juvenile homicides declined 45 percent between 1994 and 1999; Sheryl Gay
Stolberg, "By the Numbers; Science Looks at Littleton, and Shrugs," New York
Times, May 9, 1999, sec. 4, 1.
7. USA Today, July 26, 2000, D9; Delbert S. Elliott, Beatrix A. Hamburg, and
Kirk R. Williams, eds., Violence in American Schools: A New Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Seymour B. Sarason, Ameri-
can Psychology and Schools: A Critique (Washington, D.C.: American Psycho-
logical Association; New York: Teachers College Press, 2001); Gregory K.
Moffatt, Blind-Sided: Homicide Where It Is Least Expected (Westport, Conn.:
Praeger, 2000 ); Mohammad Shafii and Sharon Lee Shafii, eds., School Vio-
lence: Assessment, Management, Prevention (Washington, D.C.: American Psy-
chiatric Publishing, 2001).
8. Alex Fryer, "School Violence Pervades Films, Books, and Music," Seattle
Times, April 25, 1999, A1.
9. Ibid.
10. Erica Goode, "Terror in Littleton: The Psychology; Deeper Truths Sought in
Violence by Youths," New York Times, May 4, 1999, A28; "The Gaming of
Violence," ibid., April 30, 1999, A30.
11. John Ritter, "Nobody Took Him Seriously: Oregon Student 'Joked' He
Would 'Get People," USA Today, May 22, 1998, A3; Carey Goldberg, "After
Girls Get the Attention, Focus Shifts to Boys' Woes," New York Times, April
23, 1998, A1; Sherry Stripling, "Boy Trouble," Seattle Times, April 30, 1999,
E1; Stephen S. Hall, "The Troubled Life of Boys," New York Times, VI, 31;
Barbara F. Meltz, "Boys and a Culture of Cruelty," Boston Globe, October
19, 2000, H3; Walt Belcher, "Myths of Manhood Make It Tough for Boys,"
Tampa Tribune, June 11, 2001, 1.
12. Peter Applebome, "Alma Maters; Two Words behind the Massacre," New
York Times, May 2, 1999, sec. 4, 1.
13. Donna Gaines, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1998); Applebome, "Alma Maters." In the 1950s a
sizable proportion of high school students felt like outsiders. According to one
survey, 22 percent of high school students felt out of things, 11 percent felt
different, 44 percent seldom had dates, 13 percent felt they were not wanted,
and 20 percent felt lonesome. See Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable:
Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 132-133.
14. Tom Mashburg, "Violence May Be Gender Issue," Boston Herald, May 23,
1999, 7; Carol Kreck, "Finding the Lost Boys: We Must Change the Way We
Treat Sons, Experts Say," Denver Post, May 9, 1999, E4; Nancy McCabe,
"Glory, Glory Hallelujah, Teacher Hit Me with a Ruler: Gender and Violence
in Subversive Children's Songs," Studies in Popular Culture 20 (1998), 71-82.
15. bell hooks, "Sexism and Misogyny: Who Takes the Rap?" Z Magazine, Feb-
ruary 1994, http://eserver.org/race/misogyny.html.
16. Mashburg, "Violence May Be Gender Issue."
17. Dale Russakoff, "Report Paints Brighter Picture of Children's Lives," Wash-
ington Post, July 14, 2000, A1; Peter Steinfels, "Formative Years; Seen,
Heard, Even Worried About," New York Times, December 27, 1992, sec. 4,
1; Mintz, "The Century of the Child: An Assessment," paper presented at the
Benton Foundation, Washington, D.C., June 2000; Linda Feldmann, "Surveys
Paint Portrait of Strained American Family," Christian Science Monitor, No-
vember 22, 1991, 6; "All for One: American Family Not Unraveling, Polls
Say," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 22, 1991, A16; R. A. Zaldivar and
Gregory Spears, "Children Worse Off than in 1970," Philadelphia Inquirer,
June 25, 1991, A3; National Commission on Children, Beyond Rhetoric: A
New American Agenda for Children and Families: Final Report of the Na-
tional Commission on Children (Washington, D.C., 1991).
18. U.S. Census Bureau, "Poverty: 1999 Highlights," http://www.census.gov/
hhes/poverty/poverty99/pov99hi.html. One influential study reported that the
436 Notes to Page 380
incidence of attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity increased from

1.4 percent to 9.2 percent of children, while emotional problems such as anxi-
ety and depression increased from negligible amounts to 3.6 percent. See
"Number of Troubled Children Increases," Washington Post, June 6, 2000,
All; Jordana Horn, "One Lesson from School: Survival of the Cruelest,"
Philadelphia Inquirer, April24, 1999, A17.
Index
Abbott, Jacob, 82 55, 71-72, 73-74; boy soldiers in, 62-

Abortion and contraception, 286, 331, 64; girls and, 64-65; African Americans
334,369 and, 66-68; disruption of age hierar-
Adams, Abigail, 64 chies, 68-69, 71
Adams, John, 55 American Student Union, 246, 24 7
Addams, Jane, 177, 179, 180, 206, 230 American Youth Congress, 245, 246, 24 7
Adolescence: invention of 3, 186, 196-197, Andersonville prison, 121, 124-125
198; among Puritans, 23-25; among Antin, Mary, 200-201
Eastern Indians, 36; antebellum, 76, 86, Apprenticeship: in Revolutionary era, 61,
88, 89; early 20th century, 229; in 62, 63; in antebellum era, 87, 137-140;
1950s,285,291-292,299-300 after slavery, 113-115
Adoption, 163-164 Archie comics, 252, 292, 302
African American children: under slavery, Armstrong, Louis, 116
41-47, 89, 94-113; postbellum, 113- Athletics: girls and, 193-194; and adult
117, 118; and movies, 229; during De- control, 198, 222, 226, 332-333
pression, 238, 239, 240, 245; and civil
rights struggle, 302-308, 310-311, 317, Babyboom,25~275,27~313,314,31~
318, 319, 325, 327; in inner cities, 350- 380
353 Baby-farming, 169
Agnew, Spiro, 318, 363 Baby Jessica, 368
Aid to Dependent Children, 159, 235, 243- Baby M, 368
244 Bacon's Rebellion, 39
Alcott, Bronson, 76 Baden-Powell, Robert, 193
Alcott, Louisa May, 129, 185, 218 Bailey v. Drexel, 183
Aldrich, C. Anderson, 192 Baker, Russell, 236, 23 7
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 185 Baker, Susie, 118
Alger, Horatio, Jr., 157, 185 Baldwin, James, 297
American Revolution: antiauthoritarian Ball, Charles, 46
ideology of, 54, 55-60, 73; family dis- Baptism, 15, 34
ruption and, 54, 65-66; impact on Barbie doll, 2 78, 348
childrearing and female education, 54- Bellamy, Edward, 127
438 Index
Belloti v. Baird, 369 of, 23-24; Romantic conception of, 76-

Bellow, Saul, 246 77, 79-80, 93; prepared, 343
Bergh, Henry, 167, 168 Child labor: in colonial era, 8, 23, 24, 33,
Bernard, Jessie, 284 34, 35, 75; under slavery, 42, 102-103;
"Best Interests of the Child" doctrine, 162, in factories, 133, 140-141; in house-
163 hold industries, 13 7; in domestic ser-
Bestor, Arthur, 288-289 vice, 141; in outwork, 141; in cities,
Bethune, Mary McLeod, 115 142, 180-181; in coalmines, 145-146;
Bettelheim, Bruno, 348 in rural areas, 15 0
Bibb, Henry, 106, 110 Child prostitution, 170
Bilingual education, 323-324 Childrearing: Puritans and, 11-12, 17-18,
Bird, Isabella, 150 19-21, 24-25; Eastern Indians and, 34-
Births: 17th-century New England, 13, 14- 36; in colonial Chesapeake, 39-40;
15; among Eastern Indians, 35; 19th- Lockean notions of, 58-59; post-
century decline, 77-78; baby boom, Revolutionary, 71-72; antebellum, 80-
276; recent decline, 341, 343 82; Evangelical, 81, 82; scientific, 190-
Boaz, Franz, 190 192; during 1950s, 279-282; among
Boston Massacre, 56, 62 urban poor, 351-352; contemporary,
Bourne, Randolph, 226-227, 231-232 381,383
Boyhood: among Eastern Indians, 34; in Children's Bureau, 180
Chesapeake colonies, 40; in antebellum Children's Defense Fund, 357
era, 82-84; cultural images of, 295, Children's literature: antebellum, 82; or-
341 phans in, 157; postbellum, 185-186;
Boys' Clubs, 187, 192 early 20th century, 214, 217-218; in
Boy Scouts, 89, 187, 192, 193, 199, 221, 1950s, 295-298; contemporary, 366
222,263,283,292 Children's rights, 54, 168, 328-333, 368-
Brace, Charles Loring, 164, 165, 166 370,-372, 373
Bradley v. Milliken, 327 Child-saving, 154-184; orphan asylums,
Bradstreet, Anne, 19 157-159; houses of refuge, 159-161;
Brazelton, T. Barry, 363 legal reforms, 162-164; orphan trains,
Breeching, 23 164-167; prevention of cruelty toward
Brown, Claude, 294 children, 167-169; acculturating Indi-
Brown, Linda, 304 ans, 171-172; public health reform,
Brown, William Wells, 103 173-174; Progressive educational re-
Brown v. Board of Education, 303, 304- forms, 174-176; juvenile court, 176-
305,308,326 178; eugenics, 178-179; mothers' pen-
Buck v. Bell, 178 sions, 179-180; child labor reform,
Burgess, Ernest, 216 180-183
Burnside v. Byars, 329 Child stars, 250, 251
Child Study movement, 189-190
Celia,94 Chinese immigrant children, 134, 202, 212
Chesapeake colonies: migration to, 37; Civilian Conservation Corps, 235, 243
mortality in, 37; compared to New Eng- Civil War: and slave system, 111-113; im-
land, 37, 40-41; indentured servitude pact on children, 118, 120, 125, 129;
in, 38; stabilization of family life in, 39 legacies, 120, 130-132; boy soldiers,
Child, Lydia Maria, 81, 86 120-125; girl soldiers, 121; effect on
Child development, 186, 187, 188-189, family, 129-130
218-221 Clark, Kenneth, 304
Child guidance clinics, 220, 221 Clemens, Sam (Mark Twain), 1, 2, 5, 140,
Childhood: myths about, 2, 3; premodern, 186,382,383
3; protected, 3, 4, 76, 93, 134, 152, Clinton, Bill, 361
276, 343, 372; modern, 3, 4, 76, 135, Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 336
383; postmodern, 4, 347, 383; stages Clinton v. Nagy, 332-333
Index 439
Coalmining children, 145-146 Donner party, 148

Cody, William ("Buffalo Bill"), 150 Douglass, Frederick, 95, 97, 102, 108, 109,
Cold War, 277, 282, 283, 308, 317, 340 110
Coleman, James S., 289, 325, 327 Drag racing, 29 3
Colleges: colonial, 59-60; during Depres- Dress codes, 357, 365
sion, 244, 248; in 1960s, 312, 317 Drew, Nancy, 195, 218, 302
Columbine High School, 371, 373, 374 Drinking, 344, 345
Colvin, Claudette, 305-306 Drugs,315,334,344,345,346,361-
Comic books: during Depression, 236, 362
248-249; during World War II, 252- Dubroff, Jessica, 370
253, 264; post-war controversies, 284,
292 Eckford, Elizabeth, 306, 307
Committee of Ten, 198 Edelman, Marian Wright, 357
Conant, James B., 290 Eliot, Charles, 19 8
Cooney, Joan Ganz, 322 Elkind, David, 343
Corporal punishment: and Puritans, 19; Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 75
and Eastern Indians, 35; and European England: 16th-century transformations, 10-
colonists, 35; postbellum, 169; in inner 11; conceptions of childhood, 11; fos-
cities, 351-352; and culture war, 363- tering out of children, 12
364 Eugenics, 178-179
Cotton, John, 24 Ex parte Crouse, 163
Crane, Stephen, 122
Crawling, 16, 80 Fair Labor Standards Act, 243
Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John, 46 Family: patriarchal, 12, 13, 27, 49; slave,
Crockett, Davy, 2 78, 309 45-47, 97-99; gentry, 48; farm and
Cugoano, Ottobah, 43 artisanal, 48-49; single-parent, 48, 142,
144-145, 334, 341; extended, 49; pri-
Dana, Richard Henry, 185 vate, 49-50; and American Revolution,
Darrow, Clarence, 213-214 54, 65-66; working-class, 136
Darwin, Charles, 188, 190 Fathers: in Puritan New England, 13, 15,
Dating, 197, 214, 227-229, 286, 349 21, 27-28; in colonial Chesapeake, 41;
Davis, David Brion, 25 5 in Middle colonies, 49-50; erosion of
Davis, Kingsley, 276 patriarchal authority, 51-52, 57, 58, 71;
Davis, LaShonda, 363 under slavery, 97-98; postbellum, 116,
Davis, W. Allison, 290 132, 157; during Civil War, 129-130;
Daycare and preschools, 322, 335-336, in immigrant families, 201; during
357-359 World War II, 255-256, 259, 262, 272-
Day nurseries, 173, 179 273, 274; in 1950s, 277, 298-299
Dead End Kids, 249, 252 Filmer, Robert, 58
Dean, James, 295, 297 Finn, Huckleberry, 1, 5, 83, 85, 157, 186,
DeBoer, Jan and Roberta, 368 249,382,383
Declaration of the Rights of American Flapper, 196
Youth, 245, 248 Flesch, Rudolf, 29 5
Dewey, John, 175 Florence Crittenton missions, 170
Dionne quintuplets, 233 Fortas, Abe, 330, 331
Disabilities, 322, 324 Forten, James, 53-54
Discipline: corporal punishment, 35, 169; Frank, Lawrence K., 219
zero-tolerance policies, 357, 361, 362; Franklin, Benjamin, 8, 24, 33, 68, 69, 73
curfews, 357, 361, 365; dress codes, Freud, Sigmund, 87, 186, 191-192, 279-
357, 365; spanking, 363 280
Divorce, 313, 334, 341-342 Friedenberg, Edgar Z., 315, 316, 359
Dobson, James, 363, 364 Froebel, Friedrich, 174-175
Dolls, 216, 217, 284, 304, 348 Frontier childhood, 148-152
440 Index
Games: among Puritans, 18-19; antebel- Half-Way Covenant, 26

lum, 83, 84, 85; under slavery, 104- Hall, G. Stanley, 187, 188-190, 196, 197,
105, 107-108; in 1950s, 277 219
Gangs, 89,139,293-295,337-338,352 Hamilton, Alexander, 68, 69
Garbarino, James, 365 Hammer v. Dagenhart, 183
Garfield, James, 129 Hammond, James H., 110
Garland, Hamlin, 132, 151 Hanson, Harriet, 141
Gault, Gerald, 329-330 Hardy, Andy, 251, 252, 253
Geisel, Theodore Seuss (Dr. Seuss), 296 Harris, Eric, 373-375, 377
George Youth Republic, 172-173 Harris, Ryan, 338
Gerry, Elbridge T., 169 Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Act, 354-
Gesell, Arnold, 219 355
Gibson, Charles Dana, 195 Havighurst, Robert J ., 290
Gidget, 285, 300 Hayakawa, S. 1., 317
Gilbert, Eugene, 268 Hayden, Tom, 313, 320
Gingrich, Newt, 159 Head Start, 322, 357, 358
Girl Groups, 285, 302 Helms, Jesse, 366
Girlhood: among Puritans, 22-23, 26-27; Henry, Jules, 315, 316
religious conversion and, 26-27, 88; Henson, Josiah, 103, 111
among Eastern Indians, 34-35; and Hicklin v. Queen, 169
American Revolution, 60, 61-62; ante- High school, 175, 186, 190, 197, 198, 199,
bellum, 82-83, 84-86, 87-88; 205; and Depression, 236, 239, 252;
postbellum, 193-196; immigrant, 210- post-World War II, 290, 291; cliques,
212; early 20th century, 215, 223-236; 378
in 1950s, 281, 283-285, 295; contem- Himes, Chester, 116
porary, 342, 351, 356, 364-365, 380 Hine, Lewis Wickes, 181
Girl Scouts, 187, 195, 196, 199, 263, 282 H.L. v. Matheson, 369
Glazer, Nathan, 320 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 130
Goldman, Emma, 206 Holt, John, 327, 328
Gollup, Rose, 180-181, 208 Holt, L. Emmett, 191
Gonzalez, Elian, 365 Homeless children, 234, 239-243
Goodman, Paul, 315, 316 Homestead Act, 152
Goodrich, Samuel, 82 Homosexuality, 282, 297
Gordon, Thomas, 363 Hoover, J. Edgar, 282, 301
Gorham, Deborah, 255-256, 272-273 Houses of Refuge, 159-160
Gorman, Margaret, 225 Human Comedy, 273-274
Goss v. Lopez, 331-332 Hunter, Evan, 289
Gramsci, Antonio, 232 Hurston, Zora Neale, 116
Gray, William S., 29 5 Huskanaw, 36
Great Awakening, 29-30, 50-51 Hutcheson, Francis, 56, 59
Great Depression: impact on children, 234- Hutschnecker, Arnold, 359
236; effects on family, 236-237;
influence on education, 238-239; im- Ikeda, Tsuguo, 269
pact on minorities, 23 9-241; homeless Illegitimacy, 163, 173, 286, 333
youth, 241-243; governmental re- Immigrant children: Chinese, 134, 202,
sponses, 243-245; youth movements, 212; Irish Catholics, 142-145; turn of
245-248; popular culture, 248-251; 20th century, 200-212; in contempo-
emergence of teenager, 251-253 rary United States, 212, 353-357
Great Society, 321 Impoverished children: in 19th century,
Greeley, Horace, 91 142, 154-155; in inner cities, 350-353
Greenberg, Joanne, 366 Indentured servitude, 32, 33, 38-39
Greene, Graham, 25 0 Indians: and child captives, 7, 8; and cor-
Growing Up Absurd, 315 poral punishment, 33, 35; childrearing
Index 441
customs, 34, 35; initiation rites, 34, 35, Kinsley, Gregory, 3 6 8

36; breastfeeding, 35; response to chil- Klaas, Polly, 339
dren's deaths, 35 Klebold, Dylan, 373-375, 377
Infancy, 3, 23, 79, 214 Kovic, Ron, 283
Infant depravity, 11, 15 Kozol, Jonathan, 327, 367
In re Gault, 329
Intelligence testing, 175, 198, 290-291 Lane, Lunsford, 9 5
Internment, Japanese-American, 269-271 Lang, Lucy Robbins, 212
Irish Catholic children, 142-145 Larcom, Lucy, 133, 140
Italian immigrant children, 203, 204, 205, Lathrop, Julia, 180
207,208,209,210 Le Conte, Emma, 129, 131
Leopold, Nathan, 213-214, 374
Jackson, Robert H., 263 Levy, David M., 220
Jacobi, Mary Putnam, 224 Levy v. Louisiana, 3 33
Jacobs, Harriet, 95, 105, 110 Life-Adjustment, 287-288
Japanese-American internment, 269-271 Lincoln, Abraham, 87
Jefferson, Thomas, 41, 68, 96, 103, 104 Lindbergh baby kidnapping, 234
Jehovah's Witnesses, 263 Lindsay, Ben B., 180, 229
Jen, Gish, 212 Literacy: and Puritans, 21, 22; under slav-
Jeremiad, 25 ery, 108, 109; whole word versus
Jews: criticism of orphan trains, 166; day phonics, 29 5, 296
nurseries, 179; immigrant children, Little, Malcolm (Malcolm X), 268
200-201, 202-203, 204-205; child la- Little Rascals, 249-250
bor, 207, 208; and Americanization, Little Rock school desegregation, 306-307
208-211; and anti-Semitism, 268-269; Little Women, 129, 185, 186
and gangs, 294; and New Left, 319-320 Locke,John,51,56,58-59, 76
Johnny Tremain, 55 Loeb, Richard, 213-214, 374
Johnson, Lyndon B., 294, 321 London, Jack, 242
Junior high school, 190, 291 Lovell, Mansfield, 13 0
Juvenile court, 176-178, 329, 330-331, Luddington, Sybil, 53
360-361
Juvenile delinquency: antebellum, 154-155; Macfadden, Bernard, 223
public response, 156, 159-162; and ju- Maddox, James, 101
venile court, 176-178; explanations, Madison, James, 6 8
214, post-World War II, 291-295, 297; Mad magazine, 296-297
trends, 344, in inner cities, 353 Makanaonalani, Dorinda, 254
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 215
Kanka, Megan Nicole, 339 Mannheim, Karl, 232
Kefauver, Estes, 292 Marryat, Frederick, 83
Kelley, Florence, 330 Martin, Joseph Plumb, 53
Kellogg, John Harvey, 223 Mary Ellen, 167-16 8
Kemble, Fanny, 96 Masturbation, 25
Keniston, Kenneth, 316 Mather, Cotton, 11, 16, 25
Kennedy, John F., 311 Mather, Increase, 25
Key, Ellen, 3 72 Mather, Richard, 30
Kidnapping, 167, 234 Mather, Samuel, 25
Kilbourne, Fannie, 227 Mays, Benjamin, 116
Kindergartens, 173, 174-175, 186, 190 McAleenan, Boots, 181
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 310, 321 McCain, Franklin, 317
King, Martin Luther, Sr., 117 McCullers, Carson, 297
King, Stephen, 376 McDonald's, 348
Kinkel, Kip land, 3 75, 3 77 McElvey, Alexander J., 182
Kinsey, Alfred, 222 McGuffey, William, 82
442 Index
McKinstry, Carolyn, 310, 311 Naming: among Puritans, 15-16; among

McMartin, Virginia, 335 slaves, 99-100; contemporary, 350
McNabb, Ann, 134, 144 National Center for Missing and Exploited
McNair, Denise, 311 Children, 3 3 7
McNeil, Joseph, 317, 318 National Child Labor Committee, 181,
Mead, Margaret, 189-190, 286 182
Melville, Herman, 75 National Student Association, 320
Menstruation, 35-36, 221 National Youth Administration, 244-245
Merriwell, Frank, 218 Neill, A. S., 328
Mexican Americans, 240-241, 268, 271- Newman, Leslea, 365
272,325 New York Children's Aid Society, 164, 165,
Middle colonies, 48-50 166
Middle Passage, 44, 47-50 New York City Draft Riots, 139
Middle school, 291, 3 78 Nixon, Richard, 358, 359
Miliauska, Joseph, 145 Northrup, Solomon, 105
Mills v. Board of Education, 324 Nursing: weaning, 16; wetnursing, 16;
Minehan, Thomas, 242 among Eastern Indians, 35
Mitchum, Robert, 242-243
Mittel berger, George, 4 7 Obscenity, 169-170
Montgomery, John, 223 Orenstein, Peggy, 364
Montgomery Bus Boycott, 305-306 Orphanages, 132, 157-159, 161-162,
Mood~Anne,303,318-319 173
Moral panics, 14, 339-341; over abuse in Orphans, 32; in Chesapeake colonies, 37,
preschools, 335-337; over teenage preg- 38; and Revolution, 66; and Civil War,
nancy, 337; over stranger abductions, 131-132; in children's literature, 157,
337; over youth violence, 337-338 186
More, Hannah, 54 Orphan trains, 164-167
Morse, Eric, 360 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 232
Mortality: maternal, 14; infant and child, Our Movie-Made Children, 230
14-15, 37, 78-79; parental reaction to Overland trails, 14 7-148
child, 15, 35; under slavery, 96; and Owens, Dedrick, 3 70
Progressive reformers, 173, 176
Mothers: and literacy, 21; expanding Pachuco/Pachuquita, 268, 272
childrearing responsibilities, 27, 54, 71, Paine, Thomas, 52, 56
72, 76, 81; and Child Study movement, Parens patriae doctrine, 162, 163
189, 190; and scientific mothering, 191, Parham v. J.R., 369
192; anxieties about faulty mothering, Parker, Francis W., 174
191, 260-263, 276; relations with chil- Parks, Rosa, 305
dren, 223-224, 226; during 1950s, 276, Patriarchy: among Puritans, 12, 13, 27, 49;
277, 280, 281, 282, 315; working, 334; erosion in New England, 13-14, 27-28,
in inner cities, 351, 353 51-52
Mothers' pensions, 179-180, 244 Patz, Etan, 337
Movies: impact, 229, 230-231; Progressive Payne Fund, 230
era controversies, 229-230; during De- Peabody, Elizabeth, 174-175
pression, 236, 249-252; during World Peale, Norman Vincent, 297, 318
War II, 264; during 1950s, 299-300; Pediatrics, 188
representations of contemporary youth, Pennington, James W. C., 98, 108
346; depiction of schools, 367 Pennsylvania Association for Retarded
Moy, Jack, 202 Children v. Commonwealth of Pennsyl-
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 321 vania, 324
Murphy, Lois Barclay, 218 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 174
Murray, Judith Sargent, 73 Peterson, Frederick, 230
Murray, Pauli, 116 Pipher, Mary, 364
Index 443
Planned Parenthood Association v. Mathe- Richmond, David, 317

son, 331 Rickover, Hyman, 289
Planned Parenthood of Missouri v. Riis, Jacob, 179
Danforth, 369 Rivers, Lafeyette, 350, 351
Play: and Puritans, 10, 11, 18-19; slave Rivers, Pharoah, 350
children and, 104-105, 107-108; dur- Roberts, Sarah, 303
ing Civil War, 126-129; class differ- Rock and roll: in 1950s, 300-302; in
ences, 136; during World War II, 265; 1960s, 317
in 1950s, 283, 284; contemporary, 347, Rolland, Kayla, 370
348 Rooney, Mickey, 236, 250, 251, 252
Playgrounds, 173, 179, 348 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 238, 243
Polacheck, Hilda Satt, 210 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 243, 251, 269
Polio,278 Roosevelt, James, 25 6
Pollack, William, 365 Roosevelt, Theodore, 126, 192
Polovchak, Walter, 365 Rosemond, John, 363, 364
Posture, 16-17, 68, 79 Ross, Charley, 167
Prather v. Prather, 163 Rossa, Diarmuid O'Donovan, 142-143
Pratt, Richard H., 171 Roth, Philip, 268
Precocity, 87-88, 89, 90, 92 Rountree, John and Margaret, 328
Preston, Margaret Junkin, 128 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 37, 51, 76, 196,
Previte, Jonathan, 362-363 199,383
Prosser, Charles A., 288 Rowson, Susanna, 72
Puberty, 139, 190, 193 Rush, Benjamin, 71, 72
Public vendue, 66, 157 Ruth, George Herman ("Babe"), 157
Puerto Rican children, 323, 353, 354
Puritans: conception of childhood, 8, 10, Salem witch scare, 22-23
11, 16-17, 19; motives for migrating, Santiago, Esmeralda, 353-354
10-11; and play, 10, 11, 18-19; preoc- Saroyan, William, 273, 274
cupation with childrearing and peda- Scavenging, 142, 154
gogy, 10, 12, 17-18, 30-31; rejection of Scholastic Aptitude Test, 290-291
English customs, 11, 13, 28; misconcep- Schools: in colonial New England, 21-22,
tions about, 11-12; condemnation of 27; American Revolution and, 72, 73;
wetnursing, 12, 16; patriarchal family Sunday schools, 90, 282; antebellum,
life, 12-13, 19; childrearing methods, 90-92; postbellum, 115, 135; Progres-
17-18, 19-21; and education, 21, 22; sive, 174, 175; immigrants and, 203-
Salem witch scare, 22-23; selection of a 205, 356; racial integration, 306-
vocation, 24; religious conversion, 25, 308
26-27, 29-30; youth culture, 28-29 School shootings, 373-377
Scientific childrearing, 186, 187
Quakers, 4 7, 48, 49, 50, 77 Scottsboro boys, 241
Sears, Ellen, 162
Rainwater, Lee, 351 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 85
Ramsay, Martha Laurens, 81 Sendak, Maurice, 366
Ramsey, JonBenet, 370 Sesame Street, 323
Rap,379 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 19 3
Rape,65,297,345 Settlement houses, 205-206
Reagan, Nancy, 361 Seventeen magazine, 267-268, 302
Red diaper babies, 319 Sewall, Samuel, 14, 19, 20
Reform school, 160-162 Sex: ignorance, 86, 221-222; sex educa-
Religious conversion: Puritans and, 25, 26- tion, 221-222, 362; in 1950s, 286;
27, 29-30; antebellum, 88 abuse, 344-345; harassment, 363
Rice, Joseph Mayer, 174 Shapiro, Elliot, 328
Richardson, Samuel, 51 Shaw, Anna, 126
444 Index
Shepard, Thomas, 24 Kleen Teens, 251, 266-267, 268, 299;

Shippen, Nancy, 72-73 in 1950s, 285-286, 309
Shirelles, 283, 284 Television: impact on children, 283, 298-
Sibling relations: in Chesapeake colonies, 299; educational, 322, 323
40; antebellum, 86-87 Temple, Shirley, 236, 250-251
Sinatra, Frank, 265-266 "Tender Years" doctrine, 162, 163
Sinclair, May, 226 Terman, Lewis M., 223
Sinclair, Upton, 246 Thorpe, Jim, 171
Slavery: colonial, 33, 39, 41-47; enslave- Till, Emmett, 302-303
ment, 43-44; Middle Passage, 44; ante- Tinker v. Des Moines, 329, 331
bellum, 94-114; psychological impact, Tocqueville, Alexis de, 84, 87
95, 103-105; diet, 96, 101-102; mor- Toys: in early 20th century, 214, 216-217;
tality rate, 96-97; family life, 97-99; in Depression, 236; in 1950s, 277-278;
clothing, 100-101; child labor, 102- contemporary purchasing patterns, 343
103; play, 104-105, 107-108; folktales, Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A, 273, 274
106-107; literacy, 108-110; sexual ex- Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 181
ploitation, 110-111; religion, 111; Tuthill, RichardS., 176
emancipation, 111-113 Twain, Mark, 5, 186, 382, 383
Sleepy Lagoon, 2 71, 2 72
Smith, AI, 144 United Daughters of the Confederacy, 120,
Smith, Betty, 2 73 131
Smoking, 344, 345
Sons of Liberty, 61 Valentine, Helen, 267
Sons of the Confederacy, 120, 131 Video games, 3 77
Spock, Benjamin, 192, 279-280, 343 Vietnam War, 314, 320, 321
Spur Posse, 338, 339 Voting rights, 333-334
Sputnik, 287, 288, 289, 295
Statutory rape, 170, 212 Wallace, Michelle, 302
Stern, William and Elizabeth, 368 Waller, Willard, 228
Stevens, John Paul, 331 Walsh, Adam, 33 7
Stillman, Samuel, 72 Warner, Susan, 157, 185
Stockwell, Elisha, Jr., 121-122 Warren, Mercy Otis, 71
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 75, 103 Washington, Booker T., 101, 102, 111-
Stratemeyer, Edward, 218 112, 115
Straus, Nathan, 176 Washington, George, 38, 65, 68, 69
Strauss, Murray A., 364 Watson, John B., 191, 192
Strecker, Edward A., 262 Webster, Noah, 72
Stroyer, Jacob, 103 Wertham, Frederic, 292
Student League for Industrial Democracy, West, Diana, 26 8
247,248 West Virginia State Board of Education v.
Students for a Democratic Society, 313, Barnette, 263
320 Wetnursing, 12, 16
Sullivan, Anne, 145 Wheatley, Phillis, 66-67
Swaddling, 17 Wheeler, Etta Angell, 167, 168
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of White, Byron R., 370
Education, 32 7 Whitehead, Mary Beth, 368
Whitney, Eli, 87
Tarkington, Booth, 185, 297 Why Johnny Can't Read, 29 5-296
Teddy Bear, 216 Whyte, William H., 277
Teenage employment, 343, 348-349, 352. Widows, 66, 142, 144
See also Child labor Wiggin, Kate Douglas, 183, 185
Teenage pregnancy, 337, 345, 352, 353 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 148-149
Teenager: emergence of, 236, 251-253; Wilkinson, Eliza, 73
Index 445
Willard, Frances, 85-86 Wright, Richard, 116

Williams, Eunice, 7, 8 Wylie, Philip, 262
Williamson, Peter, 32-33
Witherspoon, John, 71 Yardley, Jonathan, 25 6
Woodcraft Indians, 193 Young Men's Christian Association, 89,
Wordsworth, William, 76 192
World War II: children's reaction to, 254- Youth organizations: colonial, 29, 30; ante-
256; effect on families, 256-258, 272- bellum, 88-89; postbellum, 89, 192-
2 73; children's wartime contributions, 193, 195; adult control, 198-199
258-259; relaxation of social con- Youth Pilgrimage for Jobs and Education,
straints, 259; public anxieties, 259-260, 248
262-263; childcare, 260-262; schools,
263-264; popular culture, 264-265; Zeisberger, David, 34, 35, 36
teenagers, 265-268; ethnic and racial Zitkala -Sa, 172
tensions, 268-269, 271-272; Japanese- Zoot suit, 266, 268
American internment, 269-271 Zoot Suit Riots, 271-272
BLANK PAGE
"Huck's Raft is a major reinterpretation of the entire sweep of American nistory as seen
through the eyes and experiences of children and adolescents. From rhe sin-obsessed
Puritan households co che children of Indians and black slaves; from young and bartered
indentured servants ro juvenile coal miners and girls in factories or selling fruit and matcnes
on street corners; from the impact of wars and the 'science of child-raising' ro juvenile
delinquents and the .ideal of 'sheltered' middle-class childhood; from Columbine High
School to No Child Left Behind, Steven Minrz has written one of the very best books
I've read in the last decade, a highly original masrerpiece which combines immense breadth
wirh the often painful and complex specificity of 'growing up in America."'
- David Brion Davis, aurhor of Challenging the Boundaries ofSlavery
"Huck's Raft is a rich and fascinating study of the realities of children's lives-and adults' ideas
abour children and our responsibiliries towards chem-chroughour our nation's history."
-Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children's Defense Fund
"Huck's Raft is simply che best overview of che history of childhood in che U.S. Through
masterful scholarship and lively writing, it persuasively exposes some widespread myths
abour family history, while telling fascinating scodes about children's lives past and present.
Minrz's work shows chat historical understanding can guide our responses to che problems
of children today."
-Linda Gordon, author of The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction
"Sreven Minrz's Huck's Raft is the most comprehensive, culturally sensitive history of
American childhood ever wrinen. lr illuminates in fascinating detail che variegated experi-
ence of the nation's children, but ir is equally successful in revealing the mentalities of the
adulrs who have shaped childhood over rime. This book is sure to become the standard in
the field. "
- John R. Gillis, author of A World ofTheir Own Making:
Myth, Rit-ual, and the Quest for Family Values
"At last, a synthesis of the scanered research on the history of youth. Meticulously researched
and engagingly written, Mintz's book is sure to become a classic."
-Srephanie Coonrz, auchor of The Way we Never Wi-re:
American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

Steven Mintz - Huck's Raft - A History of American Childhood-Belknap Press (2004)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Steven Mintz - Huck's Raft - A History of American Childhood-Belknap Press (2004)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

'

AHistmy of Amertcan (hildhood

Title page illustration: Photograph of Charles Lindbergh

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mintz, Steven, 1953-

Designed by Gwen Nefsky Frankfeldt

FoR MORE THAN three centuries Americans have believed that

bined to make geographical subcultures the most significant markers of

dependence has shifted over time and provides a signifier of childhood

HIS BOOK is a work of synthesis and interpretation, and my

vealing window onto the landscape of historical change. I benefited

NOWHERE is it easier to romanticize childhood than in

Clemens himself experienced the death of two siblings. Although he was

childhood to an end and replace it with something quite different, a new

Children of the Covenant

IN THE PREDAWN darkness of February 29, 1704, 48 French sol-

We do not know why Eunice decided to remain with the Kahnawake,

A fourteen-year-old named James McCullough, who lived with the Indi-

BLOCKED IMAGE AT THE

Benjamin West, "The Indians Delivering Up the English Captives to Colo-

Puritans did not sentimentalize childhood; they regarded even newborn

ment as live-in servants or independent wage earners. A resulting problem

made marriage a virtually universal institution. Because women typically

teens to attend school, undertake an apprenticeship, or perform seasonal

Wooden rods were sometimes placed along children's spines to promote

BLOCKED IMAGE AT THE

The Mason Children: David, ] oanna, and Abigail, by the Freake-Gibbs

ceiving of children's socialization in religious terms, Puritan parents sur-

was apprehended by all to be Nigh, often in my mind repeating the Psalm-

During the seventeenth century, a growing perception that parents were

HE NEW ENGLAND Puritans demarcated the stages of growing up

the western world to attack adolescent masturbation, condemning the "li-

"days to meet on, to smoke, to carouse, to swagger and dishonor God

catechetical exercises, lectures, and covenant renewals, in which groups

Red, White, and Black

His BOYHOOD served as an inspiration for Kidnapped, Rob-

sent to America. "Commiserating my condition," Peter recalled, "he took

What we unfortunate English People suffer here is beyond the probability of

Nine-year-old Sally Dawson had no say in her future service. In 1793

well into the eighteenth century, childhood in the Chesapeake colonies of

latter to hold the provisions." Zeisberger was especially intrigued by the

the distinctiveness of their own customs. Practices that Europeans had

colony. Servant unrest culminated in Bacon's Rebellion, a power struggle

largely nonexistent. In the absence of strong religious influences, parents

returning the land at their death, if they died childless, to a nephew or

Their labor played an indispensable role in the settlement and develop-

BLOCKED IMAGE AT THE

De Peyster Boy, with a

pattern of childhood arose in the Middle Colonies, decisively different

household-was a unit of production that included not only a husband,

young people-boy and girl-were words also applied to servants, re-

Sons and Daughters of Liberty

NOT ALL of those who participated in the American Revolu-

abolitionist Anthony Benezet. In a naval engagement with the British ship

Thus maternal nurture had to be supplemented with an expanded system

BLOCKED IMAGE AT THE'

ered arbitrary, demeaning, or constraining of their opportunities to exer-

poral punishment, he favored psychological manipulation of a child's

the great Mogul." Meanwhile college authorities were extremely sensitive

Boston to quell disorders produced by the imposition of customs duties

after mending, spinning, milking, and performing various other chores,

fifteen. Privateers actively sought recruits among disgruntled teenaged ap-

All you that have bad masters,