Introduction:The Child in the Marketplace Judith Plotz (bio) This issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly is devoted to CHILDREN AND MONEY, a theme both inevitable and uncomfortable. On the one hand, no topic could be more in tune with our current idolatry of acquisition and consumption. (A new Website that allows girls to design their own dolls "choosing facial features, clothes, and accessories in any of 69 billion possible combinations" is called, perhaps ironically, "iDolls" [Kotkin]). To an extent unprecedented in history, American children are no longer children but what trade professionals call a "market": consumers with money to spend and the will and the authority to spend it (Kline 164). According to a recent NPR report on the Kaiser Family Foundation's Kids & Media @ the New Millennium children now constitute the fastest growing consumer market in the United States and "influence half a TRILLION dollars in consumer spending a year." Even two-year-olds can be trained by artful advertising to recognize brand logos; even two-year-olds can activate the "Nag Factor" and do their bit for the economy. The New York Times reports the "increasingly expensive and sophisticated drive to tap a market that is growing in numbers and buying potential: girls 8 to 12 years old," a "target" group that already is a "$5 billion-a-year market" for clothing (Kotkin). This new consumer child, clearly here to stay, has been glorified as reveling in empowering choices, lamented as withering in consumer alienation in such incisive studies as Gary Cross's Kids' Stuff, Stephen Kline's Out of the Garden, and Ellen Setter's Sold Separately. But on the other hand, the consumer child, credit card in hand, is not the whole story. The market terms are not the only ones in which readers of ChLAQ —generally more mindful of child readers than child shoppers—are accustomed to consider children. The distinctly anti-commercial flagrantly unglossy format of this journal—gray, frugal, void of advertising, a Dream Child on its cover—is an outward sign of the longstanding resistance by children's literature scholars to Pricing the Priceless Child (to cite Viviana Zelizer's brilliant title), to the general commercializing of childhood. Our very austerity of form, a necessary byproduct of the tight budget common to most children's organizations, is itself a useful reminder of the vexed relationship between the world of children and the world of getting and spending: just why is it natural that an organization devoted to children's literature should be poor? Hugh Cunningham's indispensable Children of the Poor has made a powerful case that the establishment around 1890 of "childhood" as a value applicable to all children was a crucial weapon in the struggle against child labor. To guarantee a childhood to every child no matter how poor meant wresting that child away from the site of labor and installing her in a garden or at least a kindergarten. By the late nineteenth century, Cunningham writes, gainful "child labor was in decline," and by the early twentieth century children were so precious that they were worthless; that is, they "no longer had any conceivable economic value" (167). Not only had the fight to end child labor and to institutionalize "childhood" as an entitlement of all young persons deliberately severed the economic realm from the realms of school, garden, and nursery, but these childish realms increasingly became ideologically necessary to high capitalism as safety valves. It is notable that Georg Simmel's great Philosophy of Money (1900) depicts the emergent money culture as the antithesis of the culture of childhood: where money is, childhood is not. The three major qualities Simmel imputes to the money culture—impersonality, abstractness, and fungibility ("the interchangeability [Fungibilität] of things personified" [Poggi 134])—could be neutralized within the domestic sphere by the antithetical qualities found in the new Romantic Child with his priceless and redemptive qualities of a loving heart, bodily energy, spontaneity of consciousness, imagination, originality, uniqueness. Hence the new child could be at once economically worthless and socially indispensable. In the four papers gathered for this issue, the writers explore the four different intersections of childhood and the economic...