Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Editor's Introduction Linda Mahood Welcome to the first issue of the sixteenth volume of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Please allow me to thank book review editors Adriana Benzaquen and Hugh Morrison for the additional work they have done to keep the books moving during the restrictions of the pandemic. Reviewing new research on the changing conceptions of children over place and time is important work for the JHCY. In this issue, in very different ways, the articles examine expert intervention in childhood and family life through various techniques of power, institutional intervention, health and welfare policy, and how children experience the processes that govern their lives. In "Caring for Children with Infectious Diseases: Children's Experiences of Fever Hospitals and Sanatoria in Scotland," Andrew Kendrick recalls that diseases were a significant cause of death in infants and children until the early decades of the twentieth century. Smallpox, tuberculosis, typhus, whooping cough, cholera, and measles were rife and epidemics continued to be a regular occurrence. Without effective treatments, infant and child mortality rates were high. According to Kendrick, despite attention to the medical care of children, there was limited concern for their wider social, emotional, and educational needs in Scottish specialty hospitals, sanatoria, convalescent homes for children with disabilities, and lock hospitals for girls with syphilis. Some young patients had very happy memories of their time in hospital, while others had difficult and tragic memories, and still others were lonely for their parents and siblings and found the regimes of hospitals harsh and rigid. Historians of carceral institutions for children note the link between physical and moral contagions. In "Survived and Punished: Incest Victims' Treatment in Progressive-Era Chicago," Grace Argo argues that progressive reformers' treatment of incest victims shows how the child protection systems removed incest survivors from abusive homes and classified them as "sex delinquent" or "feebleminded." Argo argues that incest survivors were victimized twice—first by the crime and second by institutionalization in a girl's reformatory. Viewing [End Page 1] incest survivors as morally and mentally deficient enabled caseworkers to differentiate "redeemable" incest victims from "irredeemable" ones. Argo uses Nirmala Erevelles's theory of the co-construction of deviance and disability to argue that girls were pathologized by the school's doctors, psychologists, administrators, and staff. This framework helps us understand how incest victims came to be understood as both mentally and morally defective by the adults responsible for their protection, as well as to appreciate the impact this pathologizing had on abused girls' lives. The regulation of children's bodies has long been a feature of the history of childhood. In "Athlete and Auxologist: James Tanner's Interest in Physique and his Role in Establishing the Short Stature of Children as a Medical Classification," Aishwarya Ramachandran and Patricia Vertinsky look at the work of James Tanner, who was a central figure in the twentieth century in measuring and treating children considered shorter than optimal for a satisfactory life. The attitudes of medical professionals affirmed and promoted conceptions of "normal" and "abnormal" childhood development. The authors contend that Tanner's studies and charts of children's growth and the quest for the perfect physique was behind his early involvement in promoting human growth hormone for small, non-athletic children. The socialization of children and youth to be bearers of community values has preoccupied of adults in positions of authority. In "Empire, Colonialism, and Place-Attachment in Young Minds: Quebec Students' Imaginative Travels in the Age of the New Imperialism," Catherine Larochelle argues that pre-World War I students in Quebec schools were provided with the geographic knowledge and emotional place-attachment necessary to promote and consolidate settler-colonialism. Larochelle shows how geography lessons imparted imperial, missionary, and literary knowledge to young people, who integrated and appropriated this geographical imagination. Through the voices of Quebec students, Larochelle shows how an attachment to the territory legitimized settler colonialism and imaginary voyages that (re)produced empire and its hierarchies. In "Teenagers in Development: The Economic and Cultural Power of Brazilian Youth in the 1950s and '60s," Anne M. Daniels argues that Brazil experienced rapid economic growth and modernization under a policy of "developmentalism" that...