Introduction

The Introduction lays out the conceptual and epistemological terrain of the problems at hand: the idea of the moral project of childhood, the definition of moral architecture, and the notion of a pre-capitalist child. The main argument is that fundamental problems stemming from a growing acceptance of children’s moral, spiritual, intellectual, and behavioral pliability drive the assembly of a contemporary “moral architecture” of childhood from extensive maternal responsibility coupled with the increasingly hegemonic presence and existence of child subjecthood. It presents and justifies the methodological approach of examining women’s periodicals and summarizes the coming chapters.

Productive Materialities

This chapter examines mid- to late-nineteenth-century Victorian middle-class concerns with taste—the child’s taste in particular—and how this notion drew on and wrestled with virtually the same constellation of tensions evident in the struggles with depravity and salvation regarding the Protestant child. Ever-present and ever-looming child malleability imperilled social reproduction and implicated mothers as those responsible not only for the material well-being of children but, more importantly, for their appropriate disposition toward things and the world of things. Both cases, in this sense, worked toward fashioning a moral architecture whereby the making of social persons, and of consequent subjectivities, guided the counsel imparted on the pages of periodicals. By examining discourses regarding children and taste—particularly, but not exclusive, girls’ taste—it is argued that taste operated in a pedagogical register thought to educate and direct the child toward proper objects and a proper relationship to objects. In this way, taste emplaced materiality directly into the moral education of bourgeois children and offered another way to theorize or otherwise configure the interiority of the child—i.e., to discern and determine the shape and consequences of their wants and desires.

A Moral Architecture

This chapter traces the interminglings of Lockean with Protestant conceptions of child malleability and innateness and their implications for the mother-child nexus in the nineteenth century. It revisits the key question of predestination posed by sociologist Max Weber and examines changing notions of innate depravity through the lens of Christian motherhood as found in an early Evangelical mothers’ periodical written by women, many of whom were mothers. The experiences and concerns of mothers and the ever-present problem of child malleability combined to undergird a new kind of understanding of the child—one that considers and perhaps enables the privileging of the child’s subjectivity as consequential for this-worldly action in the form of mothering practices and ideologies. In the process, the duty of knowing, intuiting, and imputing the actions, motivations, and responses of and to children devolved to white, Christian mothers. The “Liberal Protestantism,” exemplified and brought forth in the writings of Horace Bushnell in mid-century, enacted something beyond a “feminization” of religion through sentiment and affect. It also indispensably assisted in ushering the “child” to the forefront of consideration in ways consequential to the subsequent rise and cultural predominance of a “modern,” consumerist child subjectivity.

The Moral Project of Childhood

The Moral Project of Childhood argues and demonstrates that fundamental problems stemming from a growing acceptance of children’s moral, spiritual, intellectual, and behavioral pliability drive the assembly of a contemporary “moral architecture” of childhood from extensive maternal responsibility coupled with the increasingly hegemonic presence and existence of child subjecthood. Drawing on materials published in periodicals intended for women and mothers from the 1830s to the 1930s, the book examines how mothers—and, later, commercial actors—found themselves compelled to consider children’s interiorities: their perspectives, needs, wants, pleasures, and pains. In this process, the child’s subjectivity progressively, albeit unevenly, arises as a form of authority in a variety of contexts, including discourses about Christian motherhood, the elements of cultural taste, and the discipline and punishment of children, as well as in machinations about play and toys, questions of children’s property rights, and the uses of money by and for children. The book considers the Protestant origins of the child consumer—a somewhat unlikely pairing—and makes visible and relevant the prefigurative elements and rhetorics from which the child consumer emerges as a contemporary, dominant, and normative ideal.

‘As syllable from sound’: the sonic dimensions of confinement at the State Hospital for the Insane at Worcester, Massachusetts

As the first state hospital in the USA, the Worcester State Hospital for the Insane at Worcester, Massachusetts (est. 1833), set a precedent for asylum design and administration that would be replicated across the country. Because the senses were believed to provide a direct conduit into a person’s mental state, the intended therapeutic force of the Worcester State Hospital resided in its particular command over sensory experience. In this paper, I examine how aurality was used as an instrument in the moral architecture of the asylum; how the sonic design of the asylum collided with the day-to-day logistics of institutional management; and the way that patients experienced and engaged with the resultant patterns of sound and silence.