Class Notes: 9/4/12

Readings: Barrie Thorne, "Re-Visioning Women and Social Change" and "'Childhood': Changing and Dissonant Meanings"

Goals:

• Using the OED definitions we looked up ("girl," "boy," "adolescent," "teenager") and Thorne's "Dissonant Meanings," explore more deeply the history of the idea of "childhood." How has gender played a role in its history?
• Explain Thorne's claim that "childhood is constituted as both a set of institutional arrangements and a powerful and emotionally charged set of ideas."
• Using "Re-Visioning Women," draw connections between the feminist fight for female equality and the way we perceive children in society.

OED Definitions

Boy: male child; immature male; derogatory term for "servant"

- Notes: There was no mention of women in any of the definitions; the origins and definitions of the word weighted heavily on social status and class

Girl: young, unmarried woman; maidservant

- Notes: Marital status plays a big role in the idea of a "girl." As Katie asked, does this mean that being unmarried is immature? There were always many mentions of men (in relation to women) in the definitions.

Adolescent: one going through puberty

- Notes: The word comes from the Spanish verb doler, meaning "to hurt."

Teen: one whose age ends in "-teen"

- Notes: This is a very new word, being coined in the 1940s. The first recorded use of the word was in Popular Science magazine.

Things to think about:

• According to "Dissonant Meanings," the first instance of "childhood" being recognized as a stage were only applied to aristocratic boys. The distinction arose when education and schooling became available to the upper classes.
• Many adolescents and teens are seen as needing to be "protected" from the inherit pain of their age group.

A Close Reading of "Dissonant Meanings"

Introduction

• Childhood was once thought of as a "bounded state," something which could be "taken away"
• Thinking of childhood as "a thing you own" leads to "dichotomous thinking and glosses ambiguity, ideological struggle, cultural variation, and historical transformation" (p.19)

The Shifting and Ambiguous Terrain of Age Categories

• The Industrial Revolution led to an increased need for literacy, which led to the increase in education; age-segregated schools, therefore, became a main factor in establishing "childhood"
• A few decades later, the Progressive Period saw the idea of childhood becoming more pronounced
• Viviana Zelizer described this movement as the change from an "economically useful" to an "economically useless, but emotionally priceless child"
• Today, "childhood" is still debated and inconsistent
• The United Nations Convention on the Right of the Child officially states anyone from birth to age 18 is a child; however, there are discrepancies: the states of Arizona now insists that life (and therefore childhood) begins two weeks before conception, while children as young as 13 can be tried as adults in a court of law

Learning, Media, and the Contested Meanings of "Childhood"

• There is a general idea that children are "losing their childhoods," yet these notions presuppose that there was at one time such a thing as the "perfect childhood"
• Marketing uses age compression to expand their demographic, hence the idea of "tweens" and children generally "growing up to fast"

Media Threats to the Boundaries of Childhood

• There is always a "new evil" in the media that is "threatening" children (comic books to hippie culture to the internet)
• Thorne says, "The expansion of children's social relations into virtual space has taken place during a period when the embodied spatial range of children has dramatically contracted."
• As Kate questioned, does this mean that the media and "virtual space" is the new way of gaining autonomy (whereas before it may have been found in the "spatial range" children were once able to explore)?

Reworking the Meanings of "Child" and "Childhood"

• Tobias Hecht stated that claimed that impoverished children were not "without a childhood," simply that they had a different kind of childhood (such as Cat's example of the children growing up in Mexico)
• The UNCRC's official negotiation (signed by every country except Somalia and the United States) stated that all children have a right to protection, provision, and participation

Conclusion

• We must resist binary thinking and consider the assumptions that can be drawn from the language used to describe childhood
• Childhood is nostalgia; we never truly have childhood when we are children because we cannot comprehend and understand it

"Re-Visioning Women"

Overview

• Men have used a "childish" view of women to subvert them over the years
• Today, women are no longer seen as being in a separate sphere, so why do we still view children as being the same way?