AMERICAN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AS A SOURCE OF GENDER IDENTITY FORMATION

Abstract Children’s literature, conceptualized as a means of enculturation, is a vehicle for transmitting a society’s or community’s shared values, and is designed to mould children’s behaviour according to what is thought appropriate. As such, it is a powerful cultural agent and consequently a valuable source in the historical study of emotions. This article sets out to explore what can be gained from looking at literature designed for the religious education of Jewish children as sources that shed light on the role of emotions in the process of religious modernization in Judaism. Based on the assumption that feelings are to be viewed as a form of knowledge which is transmitted, acquired, and acted out in specific cultural contexts, several criteria for analysing the verbalization, representation, and use of emotions in Jewish children’s literature are outlined by focusing on the subgenre of Jewish children’s bibles. This analysis allows us to explore how emotions unfolded in educational literature, and how they became an integral and transformative part of religious knowledge, self-assertion, (re)definition, and identity formation at a time of tremendous change for Judaism.

Download Full-text

'When Children Are Not Glad'

The AnaChronisT ◽

10.53720/hhlj3406 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 14 ◽

Author(s):

Robyn Russo

Keyword(s):

Children's Literature ◽

Gender Identity ◽

Children’S Literature ◽

Safe Space ◽

Slave System ◽

Domestic Sphere ◽

Progressive Change ◽

Female Authors ◽

Persuasive Argument ◽

American Society

In antebellum American society, neither women nor children were seen as full citizens, and neither group possessed any direct political power, consigned as they were to the private, domestic sphere. And yet, many women produced stories ostensibly written for children that packed a quite radical political argument: abolitionism. This essay hopes to add to existing work on abolitionist women's writing by exploring how the literature abolitionist women wrote expressly for child readers provided a unique opportunity for both the writer and the reader to advance the abolitionist cause. This literature became a device for women to teach their children about slavery, as well as a forum for speaking to each other, even across racial divides, about the abolitionist cause. This essay will pay special attention to how female authors of abolitionist children's literature performed a conservative notion of their gender identity - mother and moral teacher - in order to call for progressive change. Additionally, the focus these women placed on young enslaved characters forces readers to recognize how slavery prohibited the newly-formed, but deeply important, nineteenth-century ideals of childhood and the performance of this identity. Thus, abolitionist children's literature had a twofold power: it used the unique features of the child's identity to elicit sympathy and make a persuasive argument against the slave system, both of which provided a "safe" space for women to contribute their political expression.

Download Full-text