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Seminar 8

Seminar 8: Growing Up There were changing ideas about childhood during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The state was increasingly getting involved. Children’s working hours had been curtailed with the Factory Act of 1833 and by the 1880 Education Act attendance at school was compulsory. The health and welfare of children was the focus of increasing concern with a number of campaigns to promote their well-being being launched. In this seminar we will examine how the lives of children were changing, what continuities remained, and what children themselves thought about the transformations that their lives were witnessing.Seminar/Essay Questions:
  1. How and where do children learn?
  2. Is gender, class or ethnicity in shaping children’s experiences of growing up?
  3. How were ideas of childhood changing over the period 1860-2000?
  4. Is childhood a modern construction?
Seminar Reading: H. Cunningham, ‘The employment and unemployment of children in England c. 1680–1851’ Past and Present 126 (1990) 115–50. L. G. Gurjeva, ‘Child Health, Commerce and Family Values: The Domestic Production of the Middle Class in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Britain’ in M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and H. Marland, Cultures of Child Health in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century (2003) 103-125. S. Horrell and Jane Humphries, ‘The Exploitation of Little Children’: Child Labor and the Family Economy in the Industrial Revolution’ Explorations in Economic History, 32 (1995) 485-516. J. Pilcher, ‘Bodywork. Childhood, Gender and School Health Education in England, 1870-1977’ Childhood 14 (2007) 215-233.

T.M. Proctor, ‘(Uni)Forming Youth - Girls Guides and Boy Scouts in Britain, 1908-39’ History Workshop Journal 45 (1998) 103-145.

Additional Reading: K. Boyd, Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper’ Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940 (2003). J. Burnett (ed.), Destiny Obscure, Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (1982). M. Collins, The Essential Daughter: Changing Expectations for Girls at Home, 1797 to the Present (2002). H. Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (2005). A. Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870-1914 (1996). C. Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (1981). J.R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770-Present (1981). B. Goldson, ‘Childhood’: An Introduction to Historical and Theoretical Analyses’ in P. Scraton (ed), “Childhood” in “Crisis”? (1997) 1-27. H. Hendrick, Child Welfare. England 1872–1989 (1994). C. Heywood, A History of Childhood (2001). A. Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (1998). R. Hoggart, ‘Scholarship Boy’ in R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957). S. Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth 1889-1939 (1981). P. Jephcott, Girls Growing Up (1942). G. Lewis, ‘From deepest Kilburn’ in L. Heron (ed.), Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties (1985). J. McCrindle and S. Rowbotham (eds), Dutiful Daughters: Women Talk about Their Lives (1977). H. S. Mizra, Young, Female and Black (1992). B. Osgerby, Youth in Britain since 1945 (1998). L. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (1987). R. Roberts, The Classic Slum (1971), ch. 7. C. Smart, B. Neale, and A. Wade, The Changing Experience of Childhood: Families and Divorce (2001). J Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society - British Youth Movements 1883-1940 (1971). C. Steedman, C. Urwin and V. Walkerdine, Language, Gender and Childhood (1985). T. Thompson, Edwardian Childhoods (1982). P. Tinkler, ‘Girlhood and Growing Up’, in I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (2001). C. Steedman, ‘Bodies, Figures and Physiology: Margaret McMillan and the Late Nineteenth Century Remaking of Working-class Childhood’ in R. Cooter (ed.), In the Name of the Child: Health and Welfare, 1880–1940 (1992) 19-44. M. Winstanley (ed.), Working Children in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (1995).