Think and Feel like a Child

This chapter outlines some ways in which “child” and “consumer” came to be put into cultural conversation with one another in the 1900–1930 period. During this time, a convergence was evident of children’s rights, consumer psychology, and retail practice. Mirroring a general shift in parental governance away from punishment and toward reward, both the language of children’s rights and of the psychology of advertising at the turn of the twentieth century embraced a demeanor of ingratiation. In this mounting worldview, gaining the favor of the child, the consumer or, as we will see, the child-consumer required a tactical pursuit of the agreeable. Retail sales personnel were encouraged to study and know the child customers just as mothers of an earlier era were encouraged to do. The impetus to ingratiate the child or otherwise defer to children’s interests and pleasures positioned the young ones as a kind of authority over these interests and pleasures, leaving parents ever in danger of sliding into indulgence and positioning market actors as key figures in child guidance.

Conclusion

The conclusion connects themes woven through the previous chapters with the approaches and understandings of present-day children’s market researchers in order to argue that the dynamics of the moral project of childhood continue to inform contemporary understandings and approaches to the child. For one, the rise of the “creative child” in the post–World War II era repeats and extends the elements of taste central to nineteenth-century dynamics surrounding the production of the bourgeois child. As well, mothers continue to be implicated in the fabrication of children’s selves and interiorities largely through the work of provisioning of goods in ways that are responsive to children’s presumed and articulated subjectivities. The kind of child crafted out of an admixture of Christian conception, social class practice, and maternal accountability comprises the essential elements of a contemporary dominant, moral ideal. It is an approach that hopefully invites consideration of its ubiquity across domains rather than its exceptionality.

From Discipline to Reward

In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the issue of the discipline and punishment of children surfaced as an ongoing discussion and debate on the pages of periodicals devoted to mothers like Babyhood (1884–1909), the first national publication of its kind dedicated to the intersection of child development and children’s welfare. With the fading of the idea of child depravity, severe corporal punishment also gradually fell out of favor in Northern, white, bourgeois circles. It was by no means extinguished; rather, it came under scrutiny. This chapter inspects the public narratives and discourses of child punishment. These discussions and debates incorporated the presumed or imputed point of view of the “child” as evidence for the effectiveness of one method over another and as moral grounds for taking up or refraining from various kinds of punitive action. To consider the child’s view meant taking the child’s standpoint, something often undertaken in women’s writing, which invoked memories of their own experiences of punishment when a child. A new sensibility arose whereby seeking to please and reward the child in place of punishing began to gain favor, privileging the presumed wants and desires of the child.

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.

Simplicity, Money, and Property

This chapter examines the cultural-interpretive labor involved in defining right from wrong goods and activities and negotiating the place of possessions, money, and property in the instruction and rearing of children in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. It is a labor that fell to fathers as well as to mothers, particularly when money was involved. Under such an episteme, and with so much at stake, responses to materiality clustered around a didactic imperative—i.e., the necessity to turn all aspects of child’s life into an instructional course of action. Observers and commentators found virtue and invested in faith in the self-corrective characteristics of simple goods, money (especially in the form of allowances), and the working of notions of children’s property rights. In the process of coming to terms with a growing material-commercial culture and with the inescapable presence of money in middle-class children’s lives, observers, pundits, and advice-givers framed their responses around issues of justice and fairness whereby the child’s subjectivity, its personhood, appears as an increasingly intractable focal point with which to assess the morality of materiality.

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.