Viviana Zelizer : Giving Meaning to the History of Childhood

Abstract

wo books are foundational to the now burgeoning field of Childhood and Children's History. The first is Philippe Aries's provocative attempt to contrast childhood in the modern and the medieval periods, Centuries of Childhood. The other is Viviana Zelizer's Pricing the Priceless Child, a book that allowed historians to understand just what the modern conception of childhood was and shaped the direction of their work. 1 It would not be too much to say that Zelizer's thesis allowed historians to move forcefully toward a full exploration of why and how modern childhood was meaningful and important. Where Aries, drawing on the Annals School, placed childhood in the landscape of mentalities regarding age, privacy, and play, Zelizer defined the special appeal of modern children in the realm of social values. In so doing, she vastly sharpened our understanding of how exactly childhood came to be a special province of modern society. Everyone who grapples with the nature of childhood since the nineteenth century (and most of us now agree that what we know to be modern childhood begins to flourish only at that point) is deeply indebted to her articulation of the idea of sacralization. In defining and giving substance to this value, Viviana Zelizer laid out the terrain on which we all walk. So what exactly did she do? In a masterly stroke worthy of Max Weber, Viviana Zelizer placed childhood in a separate column of the ledger of values, apart from and substantially distinct from the dominant commercial values of capitalist society. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and developing strongly by the early twentieth century, children, according to Zelizer, were not evaluated in ordinary transactional terms, but existed in a realm of senti- ment and emotion that allowed society to view them in entirely different terms than it did houses and cars. Today, historians of childhood know that chil- dren's romantic appeal—cultivated in nineteenth-century culture by novelists,