Children and Youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Extract

Nearly fifty years ago Robert Wiebe observed, “If humanitarian progressivism had a central theme, it was the child” (The Search for Order, 1967, p. 169). As James Marten explains in the introduction to his edited volume Children and Youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Wiebe's book has “provided the lens through which two generations of historians have viewed the period” (p. 2). Marten divides the book's eleven essays into two separate but overlapping parts. The first focuses on adults and institutions attempting to mold youth and the second analyzes efforts by young people to mold themselves and their world. An enticing foreword by Paula Fass, a selection of primary documents, and helpful discussion questions all make this book well suited for classroom adoption.

Whereas Wiebe was primarily interested in the role that child protection played in modernizing American governance, the interdisciplinary contributors to this collection are more interested in children as historical actors who clashed with Wiebe's middle-class reformers in the new spaces and institutions designed to regulate young people, such as a playground in Philadelphia, a company school in Colorado, the kindergarten on Ellis Island, and a gymnasium at a theological seminary in Chicago. The case studies thus provide a kaleidoscopic view of youthful experiences. These include Mary Linehan's study of self-described “bad girls” having sex and abortions, James D. Schmidt's remarkable legal history of children (and their parents) resisting school-administered corporal punishment, Nicholas L. Syrett's provocative analysis of child marriages, and Anya Jabour's fascinating account of the future reformer Sophonisba Breckinridge's coming of age at Wellesley College. Essays by Sarah E. Clere and John James and Tom Ue that focus on popular literature from the period, specifically Annie Fellows Johnston's Little Colonel series of books and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) complement the social histories of growing up in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.