The "Public Child" and the Reluctant State?

State Legal Responses to Historical Institutional Abuse:Shame, Sovereignty, and Epistemic Injustice* Máiréad Enright (bio) and Sinéad Ring (bio) The history of the Irish state is littered with shamed bodies. For decades the state collaborated with religious orders in incarcerating children and single women, who were shamed by authorities for their poverty, race, disability, or association with sexual transgression (Fischer, "Gender"; O'Sullivan and O'Donnell; Smith, Ireland's Magdalen Laundries; Buckley, Cruelty Man; Clough, Shame). Practices such as head shaving, name changing, identifying children by number, and flogging were used to punish and control (Arnold; Coleman 121; Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse [hereafter cited as CICA] vol. 1, ch. 8). Women and children in industrial or reformatory schools, psychiatric hospitals, county homes, and Magdalen laundries were burdened with a stigmatized identity that meant total exclusion from society (O'Sullivan and O'Donnell 257). By beginning to speak publicly about their experiences, victim-survivors have forced the state and Irish society to acknowledge this history. Their testimony of neglect, beatings, forced labor, sexual assault, and imprisonment is an indictment of the sovereign state's claim to protect its most vulnerable and to detect and punish crime within its territory. In response the state offers an architecture of apology, investigation, and redress. Scholars, however, have traced patterns of violation of domestic and international norms at the core of this framework (Gallen and Gleeson; O'Rourke, "Justice for Magdalenes Campaign"; Ring, "Victim of Historical Abuse"). This essay contributes to the literature exploring transitionaljustice processes by scrutinizing the Irish state's responses to historical [End Page 68] institutional abuse.1 Scholars can analyze state actions through the lens of truth-telling, accountability, redress and reparations, and guarantees of nonrecurrence—the key objectives of transitional justice. But such processes are themselves contingent and potentially oppressive, especially where suppressed and marginalized knowledges are omitted or excluded in the name of transitional justice (Mamdani; Van Marle; Koggel). This essay develops a theory of state shame that describes and explains the harms experienced by victimsurvivors of state institutions in their attempts to gain recognition and redress from the state. It demonstrates the relationship between the state's performance of this shame in these legal responses and its need to preserve its sovereignty, and it evaluates its professed singular competence to determine how painful national events are understood and resolved (Dean). We argue that the state uses discourses of its own shame to legitimate these flawed responses. We further show that in its legal responses the state benefits from a series of epistemic injustices against people who suffered institutional abuse in the past. We present our argument in four parts. First, we distinguish between true shame as an ideal type on the one hand and the Irish state's discourse of itself as shamed subject (state shame) on the other. We argue that true shame and state shame are very different modes of engagement with past wrongs. Whereas true shame involves a collapse of the sovereign self, state shame preserves the state from any loss of sovereignty. As we next show, a discourse of state shame has been employed to legitimate narrow legalist strategies such as limited inquiries, adversarial interrogation, adherence to fixed evidentiary standards, and a focus on monetary redress to the exclusion of other aspects of reparation. Examining the state's use of law and legalism to respond to the claims of victim-survivors of institutional child abuse and of the Magdalen laundries, we show how the state produces unitary official histories, monetizes and commodifies [End Page 69] harms raised in victim-survivors' testimony, and preserves old hierarchies of power between state, religious orders, and victim-survivors. In the third section we argue that in their encounters with these legal measures victim-survivors experience epistemic injustice. This term refers to forms of unfair treatment relating to issues of knowledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices (Kidd et al. 1). Feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker identifies two forms of epistemic injustice, testimonial and hermeneutical, both of which involve wronging someone in their capacity as a knower (Epistemic Justice 1). We suggest that the legal responses to victim-survivors enact a refusal to listen...

Industrial Schools formed part of a much wider network of penal institutions which included Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes and Reformatory Schools in Ireland. According to figures provided by the Ryan Report between 1936 and 1970, 170,000 children were incarcerated in 50 Industrial Schools. This chapter explores the Industrial School inmates’ life course during and after their incarceration, understanding the impact it had on them. Not only will the chapter give a brief historical outline of Industrial and Reformatory Schools in Ireland, but it will also describe the regime the children encountered, and it will explore the coping strategies they used, and how they survived the regime. This is based on 25 semi-structured interviews with male and female survivors.

"The Indispensable Informer":Daniel O'Sullivan Goula and the Phoenix Society, 1858-59 Padraic Kennedy (bio) As the weeklong treason-felony trial of accused Phoenix Society conspirator Daniel O'Sullivan neared its end on the evening of 12 March 1859, a visibly exhausted Thomas O'Hagan, Queen's Counsel, who had already spoken for nearly nine hours, closed his summation for the defense with a withering assault on the crown's most crucial evidence—the testimony of an informer named, coincidentally, Daniel O'Sullivan but called "Goula." 1 The renowned Belfast-born advocate implored the jury not to convict based on the lies of a triple traitor—to his sovereign, to his comrades, and again to his sovereign. . . . You cannot act on testimony so corrupt, sustained by circumstances so contemptible as have been paraded before you by the crown. You will acquit the prisoner, and in acquitting him, you will tell the world that you do not approve of practices which have consecrated to immortal infamy the memory of Armstrong and made the name of Reynolds a word of fear with which the Irish mother stills her froward child. 2 [End Page 147] Two of the jurors seemed swayed by O'Hagan's eloquence. Their refusal to vote for conviction led to the dismissal of the jury and a retrial two weeks later. 3 But in evoking the "hideous spectre" of traitors from the Rebellion of 1798, O'Hagan appealed to an Irish revulsion toward informers that was wider and deeper than the jurors' opinions of Goula. By 1859 informers were already well established as stock characters in the Irish national drama. 4 These folkloric villains manifested themselves in Irish legends as treacherous comrades who enabled the British to capture outlaw heroes; in broadside ballads, as the worst of all enemies of the Irish cause; in novels and short stories, as the scoundrels who entrapped and then betrayed peasants involved in agrarian secret societies; and in popular histories, as the turncoats primarily responsible for defeating the United Irishmen in the 1790s. 5 The occasional well-publicized [End Page 148] prosecutions of suspected Ribbonmen, which almost always seemed to feature one conspirator testifying against another, also kept informers in the public eye. 6 That the Irish particularly hated yet were particularly susceptible to becoming informers seemed self-evident when O'Hagan made his plea to the jury in 1859. This perception has remained. Despite a vigorous revision and reinterpretation of many other conventions of Irish history, scholars have largely accepted the oversized importance of informers without questioning or commenting on their significance or meaning. Even Stephen Greer's nuanced examination of the use of "supergrasses" during the recent conflict in Northern Ireland offered a far less critical interpretation of earlier informers, mentioning them mainly to establish the existence of a longstanding and dishonorable Irish tradition. 7 The few scholars who have tried to [End Page 149] explain the reasons behind Ireland's apparent preoccupation with informers have argued that it reflected a "constant resistance to a deeply resented colonial regime" and opposition to "the rule of English law." 8 But without directly addressing the role of informers, works examining agrarian crime, political violence, and nationalism in Ireland have suggested that the issue was too complex for such straightforward explanations. For instance, Robert J. Scally and W.E. Vaughan, among others, demonstrated the extent to which local or personal circumstances rather than hostility to authority might account for resistance to or cooperation with the forces of order. 9 Recently, some historians have directly questioned the importance of informers and their place within Irish nationalism. Thomas Bartlett suggested that the role played by turncoats and spies in undermining the 1798 rebellion has been exaggerated, in part because Catholic clergymen, Dublin Castle, and the rebels all saw advantages to highlighting these traitors. Oliver Knox focused on the exploits of informers in the 1790s but stressed the complexity of [End Page 150] their motives and the limits of their effectiveness. The most provocative reinterpretation came from Peter Hart in his study of the Cork IRA between 1916 and 1923. Hart contended that republicans exploited the "informer myth" in order to undermine their enemies within the...

Childhood studies is an emerging area of scholarship in Ireland and this volume makes a significant contribution to the field. It ambitiously brings together 21 interdisciplinary essays, dominated by literature and history, but including other areas such as social work. To assist the reader in navigating these diverse studies, Maria Luddy and James M. Smith have arranged the essays into five thematic sections, expertly woven together in their introduction. The first two sections consider ‘the child and history’ and ‘charity, welfare and childcare’. The Irish child was considered instrumental in societal reform and military strategy in Tudor and Stuart times according to Mary O'Dowd, with preoccupations about child welfare only emerging during the 17th century. From the mid-Victorian period, child poverty was a central concern and Gillian McIntosh provides insights into attitudes towards Edwardian street-trading children. Welfare was provided by workhouses, church-run institutions and philanthropic organisations. Luddy highlights the work of the Dublin branch of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in increasing the reporting of neglect and abuse. Virginia Crossman notes that, despite campaigns to increase boarding out, institutional care (particularly church-run) predominated into the late-20th century. Eoin O'Sullivan shows how the 1970 Kennedy Report prompted a gradual transfer of welfare services to state-run professionalised community-based services. As well as improvements in the care and welfare of the ‘public child’ such as increased foster care, Robbie Gilligan identifies a number of gaps in state provision, including monitoring, and allocation of social workers. Despite parents' constitutional rights in relation to their children's education, Mary E. Daly notes that for many years they were excluded from playing any formal role by church, state and the teaching profession. Section three focuses on ‘shaping childhood cultures’. Ríona Nic Congáil analyses the extent to which the Weekly Freeman's children's Fireside Club column influenced the Gaelic League, while Ciaran O'Neill demonstrates how concerns about the imperialistic influence of the British schoolboy novel led to its adaptation for an Irish nationalist audience. Three of the studies use autobiographies to explore individual experiences. Drawing on hitherto underexploited 20th century Irish-language autobiographies Máirín Nic Eoin examines the representation of adult-child relationships, while Barry Sloan uses literary autobiographies to explore mid-20th century boyhood. Focusing on writers, Claire Lynch demonstrates that reading was an apprenticeship for both life and authorship, helping them make sense of the world. The following six essays explore ‘literary imaginings’. Mary Shine Thompson considers early modern understandings of childhood through Jonathan Swift's writing, noting for instance that despite emerging concepts of bourgeois boyhood, little distinction was made between girlhood and womanhood. Brandon Jernigan's re-examination of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales positions them as a space where issues regarding Anglo-Irish participation in Irish nationalism could be addressed. In Irish literature, the child frequently represents post-independence Ireland, mirroring the ideals of the newly formed state. Leeann Lane demonstrates how by foregrounding family, home and rural life, the children's author Patricia Lynch created a sense of history for post-Independence Ireland. Conversely, Eibhear Walsh notes the tensions that exist between the new state's nationalist and patriarchal ideals and European female education as portrayed in Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices. The maturation narrative, key in Irish literary tradition, is dominated by masculine interpretations and Jane Elizabeth Dougherty argues that despite Ireland's coming of age, symbolised by Mary Robinson's presidency, a maturation narrative for the Irish female child was still not possible in the 1990s. Kelly J.S. McGovern explores the extent to which queer time and space in Eilís Ní Dhuibne's The dancers dancing expands the maturation narrative to encompass the female child. Section five, ‘cultural representations’, commences with Margot Backus's comparative study of the representation of children in nationalist journalism. During the Land War (1882), children were portrayed with little sentiment but by the Lockout (1913) poor children were depicted in emotional and symbolic terms, serving to unify a fragmented nationalist audience. In her analysis of Irish films, Ruth Barton demonstrates how magical realism has given way to social realism; being childlike and innocent is a disability in contemporary Ireland with its corrupting influences. Finally, Harry Hendrick highlights the need for a conceptual framework for researching and writing histories of children and childhood. This volume is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of Irish childhood studies. Although scholars will be drawn to particular topics, reading the volume in its entirety is recommended, providing fascinating insights into the changing relationships between child, family, state and church over time and across disciplines. It will also be of benefit to researchers undertaking comparative studies, providing them with perspectives on childhood as experienced in Ireland, as well as Irish scholarship in this field.

Udgivelsesdato: 2008-May

With Irish Independence being granted in1922, the Irish Catholic Hierarchy and the Irish Politicians with their new found power embarked on the complex and highly fraught project of forging a new Irish Nationalist identity. In the decades which followed, the officially named “Irish Freestate” became a nationwide network of asylums, reformatory schools, industrial schools, Magdalen Asylums and Mother and Baby homes. A mere two years after the declaration of Irish independence, it was reported that “there were more children in industrial schools in the twenty-six counties of Ireland than were in all the industrial schools in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together,” (Raftery, O'Sullivan: 1999: 69, 72). Likewise, Rafferty and O'Sullivan claim that between 1869 and 1969 approximately 105,000 children were committed to industrial schools and that at its peak, the system consisted of 71 such institutions (1999: 20). This paper will draw on the experiences of my younger brother and I as we spent a combined total of 18 years in four such institutions in the Republic of Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. In the terms of much of the current literature on what is sometimes referred to as “coercive confinement” (O'Sullivan & O'Donnell, 2008: 32) we are amongst thousands of survivors of a state-sponsored and Church-administered system that as An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern acknowledged in his ‘apology’ speech of 1999, all too often “denied children the care and security that they needed”, and worse still, perpetrated “grave wrongs”. With the recent conclusion of our 17 year legal battle with the Irish Catholic church and State and with research I am undertaking for my PhD project, “Remembering and (Re)Presenting Lives Within Care” I will recall the event where my brother and I were taken beneath the Four Courts in Dublin, an airless subterranean trap, and asked to trade away our voices. We have learned that in the face of the most insidious forms of State violence, one doesn't breathe to speak, one needs to speak to breathe. This is the story of our combat breathing.

Informed by Schlossberg’s transition theory and discourse analysis, this paper investigates the transitional experiences of adolescents who have resided at one residential youth care centre known as the School of Industry in South Africa. Residential youth care centres aim to empower and support youth to cope with social and scholastic challenges. Drawing from the lived experiences of care leavers, the paper interrogates a School of Industry’s delivery of this mandate. The study adopted qualitative methodologies and utilised individual interviews involving ten purposively selected female care leavers aged 21-32. Findings indicate that transition is a complex phenomenon influenced by complicated family dynamics, unpreparedness, and lack of skilled personnel, as well as unsupportive reintegration processes by the schools of industry and referring government departments. The study recommends that families, schools of industry, and government departments work collectively towards improved policy and practice to guide youth care services in South Africa.

National movement and local demands indicated the necessity of training programs for child care workers (herein referred to as CCW's) in Oregon. In 1966, the "First National Survey of Children's Residential Institution" was done by Pappenforst & Kilpatrick. This survey showed that the primary concern of directors of children's institution was the quality of CCW's. A national conference was held in Cleveland in 1967 to study the characteristics essential to excellent performance and make recommendations for training programs of CCW's in residential treatment for children.There have been numerous expressions of the demands for training programs in Oregon by directors of agenciesas well as the Oregon Association of Child Care Workers. (herein referred to as OACCW). The objective of this research was to study residential child care in Oregon as a service delivery system, and to study the manpower element of the system in relation to the development of a feasible training program for CCW's serving now or in the future in various private or public residential child care agencies in Oregon.

Reviewed by: Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home by Cathryn Hankla Emily Masters (bio) Cathryn Hankla. Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2018. 288 pages. Softcover. $20.00. In her essay collection Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home, Cathryn Hankla focuses on ways the concept of home manifests in various aspects of her life. Hankla is a poet, novelist, and has written a variety of essays including the ones gathered in Lost Places. Her previously published works include Fortune Teller Miracle Fish (2011), Great Bear (2016), and Galaxies (2017). In Lost Places, she takes readers on a journey to explore many of the places she has physically called home as well as the homes she finds in spiritual places and in other people. The collection includes previously published content, such as "Neighborhood of [End Page 109] Desire," "The Final Frontier," and "Natural Disasters," alongside fresh content for her readers including "God's Eyebrow," an essay examining Hankla's relationship to her mother; "Invisible Cities," a meditation on fighting fears far from home; and "The Indispensable Condition," which offers a place for Hankla to pause and question her beliefs. Themes in Hankla's essay collection include homesickness, staying versus leaving, heartbreak, solitude, loss, love, family, and spirituality. She confronts stereotypes about Appalachia by portraying a complex region throughout her essays, revealing a diversity of experiences. She also paints herself in a complex light, sharing with readers both her triumphs and pitfalls in her search for home. Hankla's writing evokes a wide range of emotional response. Often, readers will find themselves laughing out loud but then will find themselves biting back tears. Hankla uses humor to address moments in her life when she feels like she is losing her sense of self, turning many moments of reflection into chances to connect to readers using laughter. The humor in the collection is balanced by Hankla's ability to turn a phrase, to express descriptions poetically, making scenes come to life on the page and creating emotions readers will feel as if they are their own. In her essay, "Cleaning out the House," Hankla writes, "No substitute for the self, a house can still be a surrogate, experimental self, a personal cabinet of curiosities, an expression of one's tastes and travels, dreams, expectations—and neuroses." Throughout the collection, Hankla reveals herself through her definitions of home. Readers get a glimpse of who she is, of her failed relationships, of her triumphs, of her doubts and vulnerabilities, through a tour of her various homes, both ones in which she dwells like in "Dream House" and ones she returns to again and again like Hankla's writing community in "Scarlet Tanager." [End Page 110] In "Lost Places," the collection's title essay, Hankla characterizes Chaco Canyon in New Mexico as a place she travels for spiritual renewal and reconnection to herself. She is drawn to Chaco because of the mystery of the history, the hidden pieces she likes to imagine, just as she enjoys writing in these essays to uncover aspects of herself and those places which have affected her life. Like all the essays in the collection, the title essay is full of research and literary references Hankla uses to reinforce her themes of home and of self-examination. One of the best essays in the collection, "My Life in Snakes," traces the ways in which snakes have slithered into Hankla's life at seemingly every turn, a constant in a world where at times, her definition of home is forever shifting. The snakes are haunting, yet familiar, primordial. The shift from fear to familiarity shows how adaptable humans are to make any place their home, although some homes might call out to us more than others. Hankla's writing throughout the essays will be relatable to readers who have ever felt out of place, homesick, or found a fluidity to their definitions of home. While almost all of the essays in Lost Places fit in with themes of home, "Place as Language" sticks out like a sore thumb. It is more a meditation on novelist William Goyen's work than an examination on Hankla...

1 For the purposes of this paper, Reformatory, Industrial, Day Industrial, and Truant Schools will be referred to collectively as the ‘reformatory system’. Industrial Schools will be abbreviated to CIS, and Day Industrial Schools to DIS. It should also be noted that this paper will not concern itself with the role of religious orders in the schools. The research for this study was funded by the ESRC, with grants from Balliol College, Oxford. Manuscripts are quoted with the permission of the archivists of the named repositories.

The contours of the modern juvenile justice system were arguably fully formed by the early twentieth century (Garland, 1985: 2). The 1908 Children’s Act which established juvenile courts, and the approved school system of 1933, were points of formalisation in a system which had its roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thus in 1788, the Philanthropic Society was founded by Robert Young in London, and in its earliest prescriptions it developed the Reform for delinquent children, and the Manufactory for orphan children or children of convicted offenders (Carlebach, 1970: 4–15; Shore, 1999: 6, 99). The later fusing of state and voluntary sector approaches would see the division between the Reform and Manufactory reflected in the evolution of the industrial and reformatory schools. Thus vagrant, vulnerable and semi-delinquent children were to be sent to the industrial school, and children convicted of felony were to be sent to the reformatory school. A series of acts pushed the evolution of these institutions during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. However, evolutions are rarely straightforward, and testament to this is a continual debate about the issue of juvenile delinquency and the particular form that punishment should take throughout our period.

This article utilises the surviving working papers of the Irish, Inter-Departmental Committee on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders of 1962-3 (IDC) to critically evaluate its work on the industrial and reformatory schools. The industrial and reformatory schools were populated by vulnerable children, from largely poor backgrounds, who were not well regarded by Irish society. The work of the IDC in regard to adult prisoners is argued by academics and politicians to have been a turning point in Irish penal policy; representing the point at which a more enlightened approach to the treatment of offenders began to feed through into the penal system. This positive assessment of the IDC’s impact on adult penal policy is demonstrated to stand in stark contrast to its actions in regard to the children detained in the industrial and reformatory schools. Children, against whose interests, the IDC and its political masters chose to place economic expediency and the perceived interests of departmental and religio-political sensibilities. The actions of the IDC left these children exposed to the worst excesses of abusive institutions despite clear evidence of their plight. It was not until the years after the publication of the Kennedy Report in 1970 that the Irish State took it first hesitant steps in reforming the rotten and abusive system.

Over the past fifty years, public care for children in England has undergone a significant transformation moving almost exclusively towards foster care as the preferred mode of delivery. The most recent data from the Department for Education for the year ending 31 March 2018, reported that 73% of all Looked After Children (LAC) were placed in foster care with just 8% in residential placements. Compared to an almost even split of 45% of children in Foster Care (or ‘boarded out’) and 42% of children in residential care in 1966, the scale of this shift becomes apparent. This transformation has taken place in the context of a social policy discourse promoted by successive governments, which has privileged foster care as the most suitable place for children needing out-of-home public care. The main argument in this article is that the rationale for the state’s growing interest in children (in particular those children who are considered a social problem) and the emerging social policy solutions, i.e., foster care, are driven by particular political and economic agendas which have historically paid little attention to the needs of these children and young people. This article explores the relationship between the state, the child and their family and the drivers for this transformation in children’s public care making use of a genealogical approach to identify the key social, political and historical factors, which have provided the context for this change. It examines the increasing interest of the state in the lives of children and families and the associated motivation for the emerging objectification of children. The role of the state in locating the family as the ideal place for children’s socialisation and moral guidance will be explored, with a focus on the political and economic motivations for privileging foster care. Consideration will also be paid to the potential implications of this transformation for children and young people who require public care.

This paper will deal with the political and administrative involvement of Henry Parkes in the establishment of government Industrial and Reformatory Schools in New South Wales through the Industrial and Reformatory Acts of 1866. The 1866 legislation of the Martin-Parkes ministry had its origins in the various government enquiries into the problem of child destitution and delinquency during the 1850's. Parkes himself chaired one such enquiry (The Select Committee on the Proposed Nautical School, 1854) and was a persistent and enthusiastic advocate of the nautical training approach to the treatment of destitute and neglected boys. As Colonial Secretary in 1867 Parkes was responsible for both the establishment of the Nautical School Ship Vernon and the Girls' Industrial School, Newcastle. Parkes' role in providing patronage and constant political support for the N.S.W. Vernon as well as his relative neglect of the Girls' Industrial School will be examined in some detail. The influence of overseas theories, models and approaches on Parkes' ideas and thinking concerning child social welfare will be a consideration.

Guarding the British Bible from Rousseau:Sarah Trimmer, William Godwin, and the Pedagogical Periodical Donelle Ruwe (bio) Sarah Kirby Trimmer produced biblical and historical prints, educational tracts, children's books, textbooks, religious commentaries, numerous best-selling editions of the Bible, a spiritual autobiography, and two magazines.1 She founded Sunday schools and an industrial school. Her still-popular fable of Robin Redbreast defined the genre of the children's animal allegory and became the text with which all other animal fables contended. She knew Johnson, Hogarth, and Gainsborough2 and was among the privileged few to be mocked by Byron and damned by Charles Lamb. Always she wrote with an extraordinary self-confidence and even, at times, with what appears to be overconfidence. For example, included in the two-volume memoirs of her life is the following letter to "Mrs. S-": During my early years I relied upon the judgment, and took up the opinions of a parent, who had made Polemic Divinity his particular study, and who cautioned me against following his example in that particular, as he said it had at times greatly disturbed and perplexed his mind, though it ended at last in a firm belief of the doctrines of the Established Church. . . . Convinced that he had chosen the right way, [I] resolved to obey his injunctions, by avoiding those publications which he warned me against; and when I came to years of maturity, instead of giving up my mind to researches into the various opinions of human beings, [I] set myself seriously to examine the principles in which I had been educated, [End Page 1] by the Word of God. This I have repeatedly done with the most perfect satisfaction; and having no doubts, why should I seek to raise them? I have, it is true, read many books of divinity; but very few, that I can recollect, of a controversial nature. If I found it necessary to read one side of the argument, I should think it incumbent upon me to read the other; but surely what is requisite in merely worldly affairs, ought not to be extended to a subject in which we have an infallible guide—the word of God; on that word then, I choose to build my faith, in preference to any human authority whatever. (Some Account 1.91-92) This letter is indeed uncomfortable reading. Perhaps it, and countless other similar examples from Trimmer's writings, explains why scholars of British romanticism as well as feminists working to recuperate women writers have, in large measure, avoided Trimmer. It is difficult to praise Trimmer's scholarship and the theological rigor of her writings when she publicly professes never to have questioned her own beliefs. For feminists who dedicate limited time, energy, and other resources to the ongoing project of recovering women authors, there are more appealing women writers to recuperate. Indeed, in terms of our project of creating women's literary history, Trimmer can be read as a useful figure who allows us to examine the limits of our recovery efforts. As Margaret Ezell reminds us, Anglo-American feminism celebrates the authors who represent contemporary feminist values and overlooks others who are difficult to fit into our paradigms for reading women's texts.3 At the same time, Trimmer has fared little better in the historiography of children's literature: as Mitzi Myers and William McCarthy have compellingly documented, the story of how children's literature developed has been a "story almost Manichaean in its need to dichotomize, and then to extol or damn its dichotomized terms" (McCarthy 198). Authors who "instruct" children are aligned with an oppressive hegemony in contrast to an ongoing celebration of texts considered imaginative, pleasurable, delightful, or playful. In other words, fairy tales and nonsense rhymes are superior to textbooks no matter how innovative the textbook and how derivative the tale. Myers argues that this genre dichotomizing is also explicitly gendered. She traces the ongoing excoriation of pedagogical writings (and women pedagogues) to a reinscription of the romantic myth of the child of nature into our constructions of children's literature. The child, "trailing clouds [End Page 2] of glory," comes from God into nature but...