Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood. Steven Mintz

Abstract

Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood. Steven Mintz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2004. 445 pp. ISBN 0-6740-1508-8. $29.95 (cloth). Steven Mintz's sweeping history of American childhood, covering the 400-year span from the colonial era to the present, synthesizes a vast and sometimes fragmentary literature into an engaging and coherent narrative. Historians of childhood have produced synthetic treatments of particular eras-the Twayne's History of American Childhood Series an excellent example-but Mintz's ambitious undertaking represents the first comprehensive treatment to grapple with nearly four decades of research. result testifies to both the richness of the field and Mintz's talents as a writer and a historian. Full of fascinating details, Huck's Raft will captivate lay audiences while giving specialists much to ponder. Mintz breaks the history of childhood into three overlapping phases. His first two and a half chapters focus on premodern childhoods in the colonial era, when children were conceived as adults in training, and his final two analyze postmodern childhood, which was shaped in the last quarter of the 20th century by an increasingly intrusive consumer culture and by upheavals in gender roles, family life, and sexual mores. In the 12 intervening chapters, Mintz documents the emergence of modern childhood-the conception of childhood as a prolonged and protected period of dependency-and traces how these middle-class norms clashed with the realities of child labor and inspired reforms that sought to universalize a sheltered childhood. 1950s and 1960s mark the end of Mintz's expansive second phase because only then did a majority of children experience a sheltered childhood. Rife with contradictions, postmodern childhood embodies aspects of the two earlier phases. Americans still cling to the protected childhood ideal even as consumerism and sexual knowledge intrude on children at ever-younger ages. The result, Mintz observes, is a deepening contradiction between the child as dependent juvenile and the child as incipient adult (p. 383). In beautiful prose, Mintz interweaves children's voices and perspectives as he develops several recurring themes: the diversity of childhood; the recurrence of moral panics over children's welfare; the contested meanings of childhood; the impact of war, economic change, and public policy on childhood; the shifting power relationships between parents and children; and the shifting balance of autonomy and regulation in children's lives. Mintz has a shrewd eye for paradox and writes sensitively about how the experiences of minority, immigrant, and working-class children have often diverged sharply from those of their middle-class counterparts. Though critical of the racial and class biases that guided Progressive Era child-saving reformers, Mintz contends that Americans today would do well to embrace Progressives' passionate commitment to protecting children's health and welfare. …