| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest. By Pamela Riney-Kehrberg. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. xi + 300 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $34.95.)

When reformers in the early-twentieth century declared a "right to childhood," they focused on children's freedom to avoid manual labor and their freedom to enjoy individual rights to an education and an attention to their health and welfare. Yet as Pamela Riney-Kehrberg notes in this lively and richly illustrated study of rural childhood in the Midwest between 1870 and 1920, this declaration focused on the urban, industrial America and largely ignored—both rhetorically and legislatively—America's rural children, who dwelt in a fundamentally different world. Indeed, the child labor laws enacted in the early-twentieth century did not encompass the toil of children on family farms, even if 61 percent of working children aged ten to fifteen worked in agriculture (p. 16). If social reformers (and historians) have tended to ignore the child's life on the farm, Riney-Kehrberg uses the voices of children to tell a story of rural childhood as neither a wholesome experience of close families and healthful environments nor a life of toilsome labor.

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