"The Right Kind of Children": Childhood, Gender and "Race" in Canadian Postwar Political Discourse

Abstract

Anthropology has a long tradition of contributing cross-cultural cases to the literature on and socialization but a renewed anthropology of childhood is beginning to augment studies of child development in different settings with analyses of the cultural of childhood in the context of national and global arenas.(1) In this paper I show why part of this project must involve critical attention to how various are produced within and are central to political discourse. Using a single set of data: postwar Canadian federal parliamentary debates of 1945-55, I demonstrate how constructions of universalized, gendered and racialized were linked to nation-building in diverse and unequal ways.The newer work on the politics of childhood, has drawn in part upon feminist research for inspiration and direction. In the pioneering collections, Children and the Politics of Culture (Stephens, 1995) and Small Wars: the Cultural Politics of Childhood (Scheper-Hughes and Sargent, 1998), the respective editors note parallels between the experiences of women and children and draw attention to the utility of the analytical models provided by feminist writing for research. In so doing they echo earlier articles by sociologists who also explicitly linked feminism and research (e.g., Alanen, 1994; Oakley, 1994; Thorne, 1987).(2)Child research stands to gain from feminist work that directs attention to the production of gendered childhoods, for example, girlhoods and boyhoods, within wider systems of power. It can also benefit a great deal from the feminist insight that gendered categories are in turn structured by such variables as nationality, class, race/ethnicity, sexuality, disability and generation in ways that challenge the privileging of woman as an ontological category (see Marshall, 2000).Greater attention to diverse and unequal childhoods is an important part of a more general challenge to constructions of childhood as a still often-naturalized category. A reluctance to engage more fully with both the diversities and inequalities of childhood may reflect the relative mutedness of children and childhood in anthropology (Caputo, 1995; Gottlieb, 1998) and/or a strategic essentialism deployed to establish the legitimacy of research. Here too, however, there are useful warnings from feminist work on the limitations of such a strategy. This paper builds upon feminist insights by paying explicit attention to both gender and racism in its analysis of constructions of childhood in Canadian political discourse.In this study the Hansard index was used to locate all debates where children or childhood might be directly or indirectly discussed during the time period of 1945-55. Using a deliberately wide scope, each itemized debate was then read through for references to boys, girls, juveniles, young people, and/or related institutions such as schools, and families. Key debates of the period included those dealing with family allowances, education, citizenship and immigration, and Indian affairs. Pages containing such references were photocopied and filed by year. From these files more specific references to universalized, gendered and/or racialized children were identified.While recognizing that there was no straightforward link between parliamentary discourse and the experiences of variously constructed children of the time, I suggest that the political talk of the powerful provided a context within which diverse and unequal childhoods were understood and lived. In the particular historical context of postwar Canada, the constructions of childhood in political discourse moreover illuminate tensions and contradictions in the project of nation-building at this time. Notably, while the ostensible needs and rights of Canadian children as a universalized collectivity were made discursively central to various political projects, constructions of more specifically gendered and racialized children, were distanced from or located outside of these same projects. …