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Children’s Voices from the Past pp 1–25Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Hearing Children’s Voices: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood ((PSHC))

Abstract

This chapter analyses changing approaches to “hearing children’s voices” within the historiography of childhood, including interdisciplinary connections with anthropology, archaeology, geography, psychology and sociology. It examines theoretical shifts, such as the challenges poststructuralism posed to concepts of “experience” and “truth,” the ways in which the resulting focus on discourse threatened to obscure any possibility of uncovering children’s voices, and the consequent resurgence of survivor narratives revealing a range of institutional abuses suffered by children. The chapter argues that the rise of age as a category of analysis has intersected with other shifts within history, including investigations of gender, memory, space, mobility, emotion, religion, colonialism and transnationalism. Finally, the chapter considers the challenges of different sources, including institutional records, interviews, artwork, diaries, letters, memoirs and objects.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Phillipe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Knopf, 1962).

  2. 2.

    For chronological examples see Elizabeth Foyster and James Marten, eds., A Cultural History of Childhood and Family (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Paula Fass, ed., The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013); Peter Stearns, Growing Up the History of Childhood in a Global Context (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005). For cultural and geographical examples, see Simon Sleight and Shirleene Robinson, eds., Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); S.E. Duff, Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

  3. 3.

    Distinguished historian of childhood, Peter Stearns, also grappled with this very question in the inaugural issue of the Society for the History of Children and Youth’s journal: “Challenges in the History of Childhood,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 35–42. This chapter considers how scholars’ responses have developed over the decade since then.

  4. 4.

    Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life; Lloyd deMause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974); Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977).

  5. 5.

    deMause, The History of Childhood, 1.

  6. 6.

    Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent–Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, 2nd ed. (London: Pearson Education, 2005).

  7. 7.

    Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood Since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).

  8. 8.

    Heywood, A History of Childhood, 3.

  9. 9.

    Paula S. Fass, The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016), 183–194.

  10. 10.

    See, for example Allison James, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998); Allison James and Adrian James, Key Concepts in Childhood Studies (London: Sage, 2008).

  11. 11.

    Sarah L. Holloway and Gill Valentine, “Spatiality and the New Social Studies of Childhood,” Sociology 34, no. 4 (2000): 763–783; Heather Montgomery, “Children Within Anthropology: Lessons from the Past,” Childhood in the Past 2, no. 1 (2009): 3–14.

  12. 12.

    This literature is extensive. See, for example Allison James, “Giving Voice to Children’s Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials,” American Anthropologist 109, no. 2 (2007): 261–272; Melissa Freeman and Sandra Mathison, Researching Children’s Experiences (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 2009); Susan Groundwater-Smith, Sue Dockett, and Dorothy Bottrell, Participatory Research with Children and Young People (London: Sage, 2015).

  13. 13.

    Rachel Rosen and Katherine Twamley, eds., Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friend or Foes? (London: UCL Press, 2018); Isobelle Barrett-Meyering, “Liberating Children: The Australian Women’s Liberation Movement and Children’s Rights in the 1970s,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, no. 19 (2013): 60–74.

  14. 14.

    Paula Fass, “A Historical Context for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 633, no. 1 (2011): 17–29.

  15. 15.

    Pollock’s Forgotten Children was important in terms of asserting the importance of mother’s relationships with their children, but see also Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900–1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1980); Shurlee Swain, “The Poor People of Melbourne,” in The Outcasts of Melbourne: Essays in Social History, eds. Graeme Davison, David Dunstan, and Chris McConville (North Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 108–130.

  16. 16.

    Patrick Ryan, “How New Is the ‘New’ Social Study of Childhood?” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38, no. 4 (2008): 553–576; David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence; Boston, 1880–1960 (New York: Viking, 1988).

  17. 17.

    Linda Gordon and Joan W. Scott, “Book Reviews: Including Scott’s Review of Gordon’s Book, Gordon’s Response, Gordon’s Review of Scott’s Book, and Scott’s Response,” Signs 15, no. 5 (1990): 848–860.

  18. 18.

    Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–797.

  19. 19.

    For example see Franca Iacvoetta and Wendy Mitchinson, eds., On the Case: Explorations in Social History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 1998); George Kamberelis and Karla Danette Scott, “Other People’s Voices: The Coarticulation of Texts and Subjectivities,” Linguistics and Education 4, no. 3–4 (1992): 359–403.

  20. 20.

    For example see Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

  21. 21.

    Diana Gittins also made this point, see The Child in Question (London: Macmillan, 1998).

  22. 22.

    Miriam Forman-Brunell, “Foreword,” in Girlhood a Global History, eds. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen Vasconcellos (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), xi–xiii; bell hooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (New York: Holt, 1996).

  23. 23.

    See Chapters 7, 9 and 13.

  24. 24.

    Chris Brickell, Teenagers: The Rise of Youth Culture in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017); Isabel Hofmeyr, “Introduction: World Literature and the Imperial Textual Commons,” English Studies in Africa 57, no. 1 (2014): 1–8; Richard Ivan Jobs and David M. Pomfret, eds., Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Claire McLisky, Daniel Midena, and Karen A.A. Vallgårda, eds., Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Hugh Morrison and Mary Clare Martin, eds., Creating Religious Childhoods in Anglo-World and British Colonial Contexts, 1800–1950 (London and New York: Routledge, 2017); Stephanie Olsen, ed., Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); David M. Pomfret, Youth and Empire: Trans-colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).

  25. 25.

    Claudia Jarzebowski and Thomas Max Safley, “Introduction,” in Childhood and Emotion: Across Cultures 1450–1800, eds. Claudia Jarzebowski and Thomas Max Safley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 10.

  26. 26.

    Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen, “Against Agency,” Society for the History of Children and Youth Featured Commentaries, 23 October 2018, http://www.shcy.org/features/commentaries/against-agency/.

  27. 27.

    Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen, “Emotions and the Global Politics of Childhood,” in Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives, ed. Stephanie Olsen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 28–29.

  28. 28.

    “(Re)Examining Historical Childhoods: Literary, Cultural, Social,” Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia, 12–13 December 2016.

  29. 29.

    These include the “Speaking When They’re Spoken To? Re-Integrating the Experiences and Perspectives of Children into Historical Research,” Workshop at the University of Edinburgh, 6 June 2017 and the “Children’s Traces,” Colloquium at the Centre for the History of Childhood, University of Oxford, 29 June 2018.

  30. 30.

    Johanna Sköld and Shurlee Swain, eds., Apologies and the Legacy of Abuse of Children in ‘Care’: International Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

  31. 31.

    Joanna Penglase, Orphans of the Living: Growing Up in Care in Twentieth-Century Australia (Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books/Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005), 30–34.

  32. 32.

    For some of the most influential accounts of how the focus of oral history has shifted from the authenticity to the meaning of memory, see Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991). For authoritative collections of current debates in oral history and memory studies see Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2016); Donald A. Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  33. 33.

    Peter Read, “The Stolen Generations, the Historian and the Court Room,” Aboriginal History 26 (2002): 51–61; Berber Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice (New York: Routledge, 2012).

  34. 34.

    Kristine Alexander, “Can the Girl Guide Speak? The Perils and Pleasures of Looking for Children’s Voices in Archival Research,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 4, no. 1 (2012): 132–154.

  35. 35.

    Mona Gleason, “Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education,” History of Education 45, no. 4 (2016): 446–459.

  36. 36.

    Mary Jo Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History, Agency and Narratives of Childhood,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 114–124, 122.

  37. 37.

    Spyros Spyrou, “The Limits of Children’s Voices: From Authenticity to Critical, Reflexive Representation,” Childhood 18 no. 2 (2011): 151–165.

  38. 38.

    Alexander, “Can the Girl Guide Speak?” 142.

  39. 39.

    Nell Musgrove, The Scars Remain: A Long History of Forgotten Australians and Children’s Institutions (North Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013).

  40. 40.

    In this respect, the search for children’s voices has intersections with wider debates within history about whether the perspectives of subaltern or less powerful groups can ever be genuinely recovered. See, for example Claire McLisky and Karen A.A. Vallgårda, “Faith Through Feeling: An Introduction,” in Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives, eds. Claire McLisky, Daniel Midena, and Karen A.A. Vallgårda (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 10–13.

  41. 41.

    Gleason, “Avoiding the Agency Trap,” 458.

  42. 42.

    Anthony Geist and Peter Carroll, eds. They Still Draw Pictures: Children’s Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Nicholas Stargardt, “Children’s Art of the Holocaust,” Past and Present no. 161 (1998): 191–235.

  43. 43.

    Sara Elden, “Inviting the Messy: Drawing Methods and ‘Children’s Voices’,” Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research 20, no. 1 (2013): 66–81.

  44. 44.

    See, for example Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).

  45. 45.

    Emily C. Bruce, “‘Each Word Shows How You Love Me’: The Social Literacy Practice of Children’s Letter Writing (1780–1860),” Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 3 (2014): 247–264; Willemijn Ruberg, “Children’s Correspondence as a Pedagogical Tool in the Netherlands (1770–1850),” Paedagogica Historica 41, no. 3 (2005), 295–312.

  46. 46.

    Siân Pooley, “Children’s Writing and the Popular Press in England 1876–1914,” History Journal Workshop 80, no 1 (2015): 75–98.

  47. 47.

    T.J. Schlereth, “The Material Culture of Childhood: Research Problems and Possibilities,” in Cultural History and Material Culture: Everyday Life, Landscapes, Museums, ed., T.J. Schlereth (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1990); Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Joanna Sofaer Derevenski, ed., Children and Material Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

  48. 48.

    Alderbamm, B.169:1 to 4-2013; Angle, B.175:1 to 3-2013; Appalling, B.172:1 to 4-2013; Angus, B.174:1 to 6-2013; Anki B.170:1 to 3-2013; Africa B.173:1 to 5-2013; Ando B.171:1 to 3-2013; Apex B.42:1 to 4-2017. All objects are held at the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood, London.

  49. 49.

    Jane Eva Baxter, The Archaeology of Childhood: Children, Gender, and Material Culture (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2005); Judith Evans Grubbs, Tim Parkin, and Roslynne Bell, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  50. 50.

    Joanna Sofaer Derevenski, “Material Culture Shock: Confronting Expectations in the Material Culture of Children,” in Children and Material Culture, ed. Joanna Sofaer Derevenski (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 3–16; Jane Eva Baxter, “The Archaeology of Childhood,” Annual Review of Anthropology 37 (2008): 159–175.

  51. 51.

    Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith, eds., Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space and the Material Culture of Children (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Simon Sleight, Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 (London: Ashgate, 2013).

  52. 52.

    Kate Darian-Smith and Julie Willis, Designing Schools: Space, Place and Pedagogy (London and New York: Routledge, 2017); Nell Musgrove, “Locating Foster Care: Place and Space in Care Leavers’ Childhood Memories,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8, no. 1 (2015): 106–122.

  53. 53.

    Kim Rasmussen, “Places for Children—Children’s Places,” Childhood 11, no. 2 (2004): 155–173; Carla Pascoe, Spaces Imagined, Places Remembered: Childhood in 1950s Australia (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).

  54. 54.

    Roger Hart, Children’s Experience of Place (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1979); Kevin Lynch, ed., Growing Up in Cities: Studies of the Spatial Environment of Adolescence in Cracow, Melbourne, Mexico City, Salta, Toluca, and Warszawa (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977); Colin Ward, The Child in the City (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979).

  55. 55.

    Carla Pascoe, “City as Space, City as Place: Sources and the Urban Historian,” History Australia 7, no. 2 (2010): 30.1–30.18; Pascoe, Spaces Imagined, Places Remembered.

  56. 56.

    Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis.”

  57. 57.

    Carla Pascoe, “Silence and the History of Menstruation,” Oral History Association of Australia Journal, no. 29 (2007): 28–33.

  58. 58.

    Valerie Raleigh Yow, Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

  59. 59.

    Janis Wilton, “Imaging Family Memories: My Mum, Her Photographs, Our Memories,” in Oral History and Photography, eds. Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 61–76; Shelley Trower, Place, Writing and Voice in Oral History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Kerreen Reiger, “Telling Families and Locating Identity: Narratives of Late Modern Life,” Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2016): 58–74.

  60. 60.

    In making this argument, Douglas draws upon the work of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

  61. 61.

    For an excellent recent collection, see Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrycki, eds., Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Arts, Australian Catholic University, Fitzroy, VIC, Australia

    Nell Musgrove

  2. School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Carla Pascoe Leahy

  3. School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia

    Kristine Moruzi

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  1. Nell Musgrove
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  2. Carla Pascoe Leahy
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  3. Kristine Moruzi
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Correspondence to Kristine Moruzi .

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  1. Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia

    Kristine Moruzi

  2. Australian Catholic University, Fitzroy, VIC, Australia

    Nell Musgrove

  3. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Carla Pascoe Leahy

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Musgrove, N., Pascoe Leahy, C., Moruzi, K. (2019). Hearing Children’s Voices: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges. In: Moruzi, K., Musgrove, N., Pascoe Leahy, C. (eds) Children’s Voices from the Past. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11896-9_1

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