A Message from SHCY President Kriste Lindenmeyer

“Pushing the Baby Carriage” On Behalf of the History of Children and Youth

I recently attended the American Historical Association’s meeting. The AHA is the premier scholarly organization for historians in the United States. It attracts more than 2500 attendees annually and runs 3.5 days of panels and other presentations. It was nice to see that things seemed more upbeat than usual. Perhaps the fact that the job market in academic history has opened a little contributed to the more optimistic atmosphere.  Still, I was struck by the limited attention paid to children’s and youth history by the association and historians in general. Oh, it was there, if you looked for it. The book exhibit reflected some of the exciting new research being done in the field. Nonetheless, a look at the indexes in most new works not specifically focused on children or youth showed how far we still have to go. Few scholars bothered to include terms like children, childhood, teens, adolescence, etc. in their indexes, and I suspect, in their text. None of the academic employer conducting interviews at the meeting advertised for historians of children and youth.

Thinking about the situation on my flight home, I was reminded of a speech Grace Abbott gave in 1931 when she was chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau. It seems that the metaphors she used to describe her feelings about working for child welfare policy amid a federal bureaucracy also apply to the situation for scholars interested in children’s and youth history.

Sometimes when I get home at night in Washington I feel as though I had been in a great traffic jam. The jam is moving toward the Capitol where Congress sits in judgment on all administrative agencies of the Government. In that traffic jam there are all kinds of vehicles, for example, that the Army can put into the streets---tanks, gun cartridges, trucks, the dancing horses of officers, and others which I have even the vocabulary to describe. They all finally reach the Hill and they make a plea that is a very old plea---one which I find in spite of the reputation for courage that they bear, men respond to rather promptly. The Army says to them, “Give, lest you perish”; and fear as a motive is still producing results on a scale which leave the rest of us feeling very anxious of the kind of eloquence the Army and Navy can command. But there are other kinds of vehicles in this traffic jam---great numbers of them which, coming from Nebraska as I do, do not seem to me to get the attention they should s they move down the street. There are the hayricks and the binders and ploughs and all the other things that they Department of Agriculture manages to put in the streets. But when the drivers get to the hill they have an argument which Congressmen understand. They say to them when they ask for appropriations for research in animal husbandry, in the chemistry of soils, or in the agricultural economies, “Dollars invested on this side of the ledger will bring dollars in the geometrical or arithmetical progression…on the other side….”

Then there are other vehicles. The handsome limousines in which the Department of Commerce rides…the barouches in which the Department of State rides with such dignity…the noisy patrols in which the Department of Justice officials sometimes appear….I stand on the sidewalk watching it become more congested and more difficult, and then because the responsibility is mine and I must, I take a very firm hold on the handles of the baby carriage and I wheel it into the traffic. There are some people who think it does not belong there at all, there are some who wonder how I got there with it and what I think I am going to be able to do, and there are some who think the baby carriage is a symbol of bolshevism instead of a symbol of the home and the future of America.

Of course many scholars complain that their field of research does not receive the attention it deserves. Instead of condemning our colleagues for not embracing our interests, I urge historians of children and youth to think about ways to better integrate the history of young people into the mainstream. In other words, what strategies can be used to bring children’s history into topics that are already generally defined as essential for understanding the human experience? Children’s lives and shifts in the social construction of childhood reflect important transformations. Like the proverbial canary in the mine, including the experiences of a society’s children and youth helps to provide new insights about the past that are obvious when focused only on adults. In my own work, looking at the history of children and adolescents in the United States’ Great Depression helped to explain why some New Deal policies contributed to shaping new social and familial patterns in the United States long after the economic crisis ended. The experiences of young Americans also highlighted the dramatic social costs of the Great Depression and the resiliency of youthful optimism.

I am personally very optimistic that the upcoming 2007 SHCY conference (June 27-30) in Sweden will help to further promote the history of children and youth as an part essential element for understanding the past. Please join us for a very exciting and historic meeting. The program committee received more than 170 paper proposals. They have put together what promises to be an exceptional program that includes scholars from many parts of the world. For more information go to the SHCY conference website at: http://www.liu.se/shcy2007/. Early registration ends April 1st.  See you in Norrköping!