History of Childhood

Abstract

History of Childhood Julius A. Elias (bio) The History of Childhood, edited by Lloyd deMause. New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1974. $12.50. This fascinating collection of chronologically ordered essays offers some extraordinary facts about the history of childhood, afflicted by a theory. The "psychogenic" theory of history, largely shaped by Mr. deMause in his introductory material and the first essay (and largely ignored by the other contributors), is explained (pp. 3, 51-54) and pictured (p. 53) in a graph reminiscent of Condorcet's philosophy of history. It suggests a steady improvement in the attitude toward children from utter beastliness in Roman times (the "abandoning" mode) to enlightenment in 1974 ("helping"). Vestiges of the earlier modes survive to account for battered and starving children in 1974; but there is no provision (despite a good deal of evidence to the contrary) for anyone to have been nice to children in earlier days—it's all Astyanax dashed upon the rocks, unless not so fortunate and preserved for a fate worse than death. It is hard to know how much to fuss about deMause's insistence on his historiographic principles. Many examples, internal to the book, come to mind. One of them is found in his own treatment. He cites Giovanni Dominici (1405) in opposition to sexual abuse of children, requiring that children be so clothed as to inhibit abuse (p. 48). But Dominici, as quoted, himself finds authority in antiquity for these restraints; deMause passes in silence over the implication that antiquity was more enlightened than the fifteenth century. Of course, Dominici's may merely be a rival Renaissance view that looked to antiquity as a Golden Age and model for imitation superior to current practices. The historiographer, however, should be as critical of Golden Age as of millennial preconceptions. It is left to some of the other essayists to provide correctives based on more modest historical objectives. Richard B. Lyman, Jr., for example, in a word on method (pp. 76-80) warns against the use of "isolated sources," "rare and bestial attitudes," on the one hand, and against "idealized patterns" on the other. Mary Martin McLaughlin notes the specialized audience and ideology which some of her materials served (p. 109). But these and other reasonable cautions are recklessly disregarded by the editor. [End Page 247] Another major objection is the misnomer "The History of Childhood"; it's not even A History. Selected Aspects of Western Childhood would more accurately describe the book. There is nothing on Asia, Africa, nor even a systematic treatment of classical antiquity (where is Werner Jaeger? where is Pauly-Wissowa?); no examination of contemporary child-rearing practices in India, China, or Latin America; no use of the considerable body of work on children in kibbutzim, such as that by Bettelheim, little on developmental theories, say, of Erik Erikson (some use is made by Patrick Dunn, but another Erikson is confused with Erik by the indexer in n. 121 on p. 348). There is no reference to Dickens, nor, if that should seem tendentious, to the Sadler Report (1832) with its grueling accounts of child labor: children have been vulnerable economically as well as in the ways deMause chooses to dwell on. The editorial hand rests all too lightly in some ways. The apparatus of scholarly literature is formidable for most of the essays, but what is merely a collection of journal articles has scarcely been welded into a book. There is no systematic bibliography and the index is far from comprehensive. Among several others McLaughlin is surely right to find wet-nursing pretty much limited to the noble and prosperous (p. 115), while the editor apparently expands the practice to most mothers, depending how far one goes back (p. 34). DeMause believes "the further back in history one goes, the more filicidal impulses are acted out by parents," and implies that this is due to a brutal spirit that condones such atrocities (pp. 25ff.). Yet Lyman cites legislation of Theodosius around A.D. 320 the tone of which stronglyy suggests horror at infanticide, even if on account of extreme poverty (p. 84). At page 90 he cites an "admonition of Barnabas (ca. 130)" against infanticide...