| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 55

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America's Young in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003)

IN THE HISTORY of democratic governments, children have often served as symbols for hopes that had little to do with them directly, or, as this important study demonstrates, as cloaks for realignments of political forces.

In this remarkable study of one century of child policy in the US, Judith Sealander asks why programs for the young have failed to fulfil the high ambitions that successive governments have characteristically attached to them. She addresses all domains of young people's lives in an integrated fashion, from welfare to health, work to education. Well-studied programs, such as compulsory secondary education, vaccination, or state aid to poor families, are studied together with lesser known measures, such as preschool education, physical fitness, youth labour camps, and recent laws governing child abuse, whose meaning she finds to be surprisingly wide. Of reforms affecting disabled children, for instance, she writes that "No other group of policies illustrates the high aspirations and serious failures of the 'Century of the Child.'"(260) Her search for explanations is open and the period of her survey long.

Unexpected realms of public life have determined the evolution of programs for children and, chief amongst them, is the legal process. Until the 1960s, for instance, the idealist notion that young people could commit no crime relegated the realm of "juvenile delinquency" to the sidelines of lawyers' discussions. Then, changes in the due process of law, and an unprecedented increase of practitioners in the legal profession, brought the rights of children to the fore. The number of court cases grew, and an increasing similarity between adult and youth trials ensued. However, legislation failed to alter the perennial problem of low status and heavy workload for probation officers. Overall, strained circumstances aggravated existing "(p)erceptions that the rehabilitative ideal had failed..."(31) In the same period, the augmentation of litigation cases jeopardized the commercial production of vaccines, and, however unintentionally, pitted rich parents' efforts on behalf of disabled children against the struggles of the poor.

An important focus of The Failed Century of the Child is the history of knowledge about the young. Sealander reconstructs the "chain of convection between social theory and social policy"(222) to catalogue instances of "pervasive misunderstanding of social science theory"(114) among politicians, academics, and the public alike. She shows how, in the mid-century campaign against polio, the pressure of philanthropic foundations via "massive publicity campaigns" led researchers to work too rapidly. She also proposes that the recent disclosure of the extent of child abuse is the rediscovery of a phenomenon underlined by romantic child philanthropists and municipal politicians at the turn of the last century. These Progressives' concerns, linked too closely with a focus on immigrant families, faded from public life when immigration quotas lessened the anxiety about the social impact of newcomers, only to be revived in the late 1960s by social activists equipped with better medical tools of investigation.

Sealander underlines the role of a "politics of emotion"(138) in matters of childhood. Her examination of the failure of the late 19th-century German-inspired kindergarten movement is an example of her subtle handling of the variety of public attitudes: images of innocent children being saved from their parents coexisted with images of children educated at home which, in the end, prevailed. Elsewhere, she shows that the same idealized notion of an innocence of youth that underlay early juvenile delinquency laws, fostered an inability, at times an unwillingness, to discuss the brutality of children which, in turn, paved the way for the exaggerated idea of male teenage violence of current years. Armed teenage boys, she argues, have become the symbols of adults' fears in the face of a general recrudescence of murders.(51) The story of the Progressive reformers' disregard for the material vulnerability of working-class families follows the same pattern: projects of "effective work training" suffered from their concentration on laws prohibiting child labour. Craft apprenticeships were not, as in Europe, made available to the young. Instead, secondary education became compulsory. After World War I, burdened with the problem of keeping teenagers in school, policy makers welcomed proposals of intelligence testing already rejected by the army for their unreliability, "condemn(ing) millions of American teenagers to several years of meaningless schooling."(207) The rhetoric of training for citizenship of the early part of the century, and the drives for "excellence" and for "life adjustment" that have followed more recently often helped to delay acknowledgments of these failures. The integration of the schooling of disabled children provides another instance of "good intentions gone awry."(290)

Similarly, at the turn of the 1960s, social scientists who suggested that poverty itself could encourage habits of passivity provided the intellectual justification for a considerable extension of the scope of the rehabilitative features in the federal program for dependent children enacted during the Depression. In the meantime, the proportion of eligible families was also increasing thanks to lawyers defending the equitable treatment of the large number of black families moving from southern farms to northern cities. The result was the "welfare explosion" of the 1970s. Together with conceptions of cultures and cycles of poverty, the behavioural theory of "cultural deprivation" of children, and the social propositions of "community action" and "opportunity theory" of deprived citizens were at the intellectual origins of the Head Start initiatives of the 1960s directed at the young children of the poor. The popularity of quantitative research to evaluate programs may have served to mask the possibility that Head Start "helped control minorities socially and politically" (250) to the extent that it became "politically invulnerable."(237)

To go back to transformation of the Aid to Dependent Children program in the 1960s, the campaign of civil servants already attached to the program to increase the scope of federal authority had a profound influence. Debate about this sort of centralism represents the third most important feature of American child policy of the last century. By requiring that married women work to benefit from the program, President Reagan wished to put an end to the "welfare explosion." The budget of the program shrank, Sealander shows, not because "workfare" made mothers more independent, but largely as the effect of the President's ambition to restrain the social and economic responsibility of the central administration. The same had been true of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921, which was abandoned after five years, and of the unsuccessful campaign of the same period for a Child Labour Amendment to the Constitution. The fate of both seems to be best understood as a conflict between those who "wanted a dramatically increased federal role in social policy" and those who saw it as a threat "to put public officials in control of American child rearing."(231)

In the 1980s, demanding that beneficiaries of welfare work, says Sealander, constituted an answer to "simmering public anger."(122) "Most people never thought a poor woman had a 'right' to demand the state subsidize her decision to stay home with young children." (125) In her quest for what she calls "deep movements," the author alludes to a "public opinion" of "ordinary Americans." But her examination of the nature of the "popular groundswells" is uneven, and that may be the weakest point of the study. For example, it is not clear how beneficiaries of Aid to Dependent Children themselves came to think of the programs that recognized their rights, and how their conceptions clashed with those of "most people," who "venerated work."(129) Too often, changes in family structures, such as the rise in the number of two-income families, are taken for granted, whereas features uncovered by historians of families may help to place the role of parents in various circumstances within context of other pressures on the state. Why, for instance, did the support of newly enfranchised women that had scared opponents of the Sheppard-Towner Bill in 1921 into supporting the measure not materialize? Only Sealander's analysis of middle-class activism and success in the campaigns on behalf of disabled children addresses in depth the nature of "the power of parents."(273)

In a systematic effort to point to lessons from the past, the author scrutinizes the unusual cases in the prevalent history of failures. Chief among them is the Civilian Conservation Corps' success in training young people. Her review of enthusiastic testimonies of young recruits, and of the thorough regulations, and the comparison with the Job Corps of the turn of the 1960s, all point at the clarity of purpose, the concrete nature of the work accomplished by the young, and to the "discipline" and "psychology" of the army (the intellectual assumptions and references of military planners, however, are not analysed with the same scrutiny as those of bureaucrats and politicians). In contrast, the logic of "profit statements"of later programs, and the wish to "avoid the potentially explosive issue of race" (171) led to wasteful budgets and corruption.

Thanks to a thorough reading of primary documents, in national, state, philanthropic, and professional archives, and to extensive summaries of secondary sources in numerous fields, this exceptional book offers a remedy to what Sealander deplores as one of the recurring features of child policy: the absence of awareness of past experiences.


Dominique Marshall Carleton University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.