AHR Exchange

Is the History of Childhood Ready for the World?

A Response to “The Kids Aren’t All Right”

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ISHITA PANDE

When we were young the future was so bright

The old neighborhood was so alive
And every kid on the whole damn street
Was gonna make it big and not be beat.
Now the neighborhood’s cracked and torn,
The kids are grown up but their lives are worn.1
IN INTRODUCING READERS TO A FIELD “always on the rise and yet not quite risen,” Sarah
Maza’s “The Kids Aren’t All Right” seeks to diagnose the failure of the history of
childhood to take on the world. While other categories of analysis such as gender and
race have succeeded in permeating and recasting “normal” history, the author suggests,
childhood has not. The field’s minority is evidenced by the fact that departments
“never” conduct searches for historians of childhood. A general disregard for the field’s
growth is evidenced by repeat references to Philippe Ariès Centuries of Childhood
(1960), which continues to “stand for” the field sixty years after its publication.2 All
historians should be interested in the scrutiny of children, the author contends, because
“childhood is, along with death, one of the two universal human experiences,” and a
relative disregard for them is symptomatic of “our discipline’s overall neglect of a cate-
gory coterminous with humanity itself.” While we must study children because
they help us rethink key questions “on the nature of historical actors and agency”—
questions that concern all historians—we must forego the obsessive quest for “child-
generated sources [to] recapture the agency of the very young” that is responsible for
the field’s stagnation. The path forward—as the best work in the field has shown—lies
not in pursuing children as agents but in writing history through children.
While there is much here I agree with, the bold claim that childhood is “cotermi-
nous with humanity itself” must surely be a slip of the tongue. That children as we per-
ceive them today did not exist in all times and places, that they are social, cultural, and
1
“The Kids Aren’t All Right,” track 5 on the Offspring, Americana, Columbia Records, 1998. The title
of the song is supposed to be a play on “The Kids Are Alright” (1965) by the British band the Who. In
urging a “turn” to childhood for historians at large, the title also echoes James W. Cook, “The Kids Are
All Right: On the ‘Turning’ of Cultural History,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012):
746–771, with the “history of childhood” featuring as the “kid” who’s beat.
2
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New
York, 1962). The politics of citation is a separate, and important, point and one that could fruitfully be
considered by historians of childhood.

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1300
 Is the History of Childhood Ready for the World? 1301

political constructs, is the first principle of the history of childhood. And yet, a tension
between the understanding of children as creatures of biology and as subjects of history
persists in the field. For instance, a pioneer of the field, Paula Fass, suggests that even
while acknowledging the historicity of children, we must not abandon “the drive to in-
quire about how children resemble each other as biological beings and as the subjects
of cultural self-reflection.”3 Fass evokes biology to suggest that “a serious engagement

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with the history of children can begin to heal some of the rifts that have shaken up the
profession over the last thirty to forty years, as race, ethnicity, class, and gender and
sexuality became part of our inquiries.” While on first glance Maza’s review essay
appears to propose the opposite, inasmuch as it suggests that we might better compre-
hend the history of race, nation, culture, class, and other big questions through a focus
on children, the essay remains haunted by Fass’s sense that “everyone has a childhood,
and childhood is the protean state where identities are formed and the destinies of
nations and peoples defined.”4 Both essays implicitly naturalize their object of inquiry.
What if it is precisely this faith in the epistemic universality—even the biological basis—of
childhood that is keeping the field from becoming relevant for the wider world?
And what if this paradoxical understanding of childhood as “naturally and developmen-
tally given” even among the most astute historians of childhood is what muddies the quest
for children’s agency?5 In discussing methods for seeking out children’s agency in archives
largely created by adults, historians of children and childhood have echoed questions that
have been asked (and variously answered) with regards to other marginalized groups. While
citing the wide-ranging scholarship on the question of agency, the author falls back on the
biological reality of childhood to claim that agency “is a more problematic concept for the
young than for any other category of human actors because . . . children are incommensura-
ble with other marginalized and voiceless groups.”6 Doubling down on childhood’s nature,
the author explains this incommensurability thus: “Unlike any other category of human
identity, childhood is a vanishing act.” The understanding of childhood as a “vanishing
act”—as a shared past annihilated by the inevitability of adulthood—relies on an under-
standing of time as homogeneous, linear, and progressive, which postcolonial, queer, and
critical race theorists have debunked in recent decades.7 But instead of understanding child-
hood as a condition shared by humanity, and therefore incommensurable with the forms of
difference theorized by scholars of colonialism, race, and gender, we could use their insights
to ask critical questions about our archival methods and analytical categories.
3
Paula Fass, “The World Is at Our Door: Why Historians of Children and Childhood Should Open
Up,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 11–31, here 13. To be fair, the essay
simultaneously calls for historians to learn from interdisciplinary childhood studies; inquires into what
childhoods around the world can teach historians of Western Europe and America; and concludes that
such efforts might help “stanch our own undeserved and unthinking hubris” when it comes to “our” hor-
ror at the state of children around the world.
4
Fass, “The World Is at Our Door,” 13.
5
The phrase is drawn from Liisa Malkki, “Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace,” in
Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, eds., In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care
(Durham, N.C., 2010), 58–85, here 60.
6
For a comprehensive account of critiques of agency that is also cited by the author, see Lynn M. Thomas,
“Historicising Agency,” Gender & History 28, no. 2 (2016): 324–339. For “agency“ and the history of child-
hood, see also Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen, “Against Agency,” Society for the
History of Children and Youth, October 28, 2018, http://www.shcy.org/features/commentaries/against-agency/.
7
For a well-known summary and reiteration of the point, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Eu-
rope: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000).

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1302 Ishita Pande

After all, “Can the child speak/act?” is not simply a question about the limitations
of the “official” archive with regards to subaltern speech, but primarily one about self-
reflexivity in scholarly practice.8 Beyond the fetishistic hunt for children’s own scrib-
bles to get to their authentic voice—a quest that the author is dismissive of—historians
could draw on insights on the colonial archive to read mediated records against the
grain to recuperate the faintest of whispers. Or we could go further to take up the call to

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abandon additive and recuperative models of history writing that lead us toward “exca-
vating [the archive] in order to posit a history of presence,” and instead embrace “a the-
ory of reading that moves away from the notion that discovering an object will some-
how lead to a formulation of subjectivity.”9 In other words, we might use postcolonial,
feminist, and queer approaches to ask whether the (im)possibility of the injunction to
“listen to the child” (or to retrieve their agency) lies in the limits to the critical imagina-
tion posed by childhood as a normative category.10 It is, after all, a normative under-
standing of childhood that informs the author’s suggestion that the teenagers in Robert
Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre” or the New York newsies striking against a news-
paper price hike were not truly children. The normative idea of childhood makes the
“child agent” a contradiction in terms.
The author goes on to clarify that “truly autonomous young rebels and activists do
exist, of course, but usually when their age or situation renders the ‘child’ label ques-
tionable” (my emphasis). Does the child vanish with the onset of agency? And does
everybody acquire agency at a precise, uniformly measurable moment in time? At a
universally accepted chronological age? What are the grounds for the historian in the
present to decide which historical actors wore the “child” label more comfortably and
at what ages in the past? An understanding of childhood as a biological category slides
by degrees into a juridical understanding of childhood rooted in a liberal legal discourse
that posits an absolute relationship between chronological age and agency. Historians
of childhood have long suggested that the chronological ages that indicate the borders
of (juridical) childhood have shifted over time; recent scholarship also contends that
chronological age itself was not a stable quantity until as recently as the nineteenth cen-
tury, even in the United States.11 Scholars working outside of Euro-American contexts
have further contended that the very relationship between chronological age and agency
8
I am referring here to Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Lawrence Gross-
berg and Cary Nelson, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, Ill., 1988), 271–313. In
general, the scholarship produced under the rubric of subaltern studies, generated by scholars of colonial-
ism in South Asia, provides a long line of such interrogation of archival reading practices and the politics
of the retrieval of subaltern speech, which reflects (and preempts) many of the questions now raised about
children’s voices.
9
Anjali Arondekar, “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive,” Journal of the History of
Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 (2005): 10–27, here 21–22.
10
For normative limitations to “listening” to the child, see Michel Foucault, “Sexual Morality and the
Law,” in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and
Other Writings (New York, 1988), 271–285. For a longer bibliography on “the child” and historical meth-
ods in the South Asian context, see Ishita Pande, “Listen to the Child: Law, Sex, and the Child Wife in In-
dian Historiography,” History Compass 11, no. 9 (2013): 687–701.
11
Including several works cited in the review essay, such as Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Chil-
dren, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005). For chronological
age as a category of analysis, the arbitrary borders of childhood, and the intersection of age with other cat-
egories of identity, see Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett, eds., Age in America: The Colonial Era
to the Present (New York, 2015); see also the articles included in the AHR Roundtable “Chronological
Age: A Useful Category of Analysis,” American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (2020).

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 Is the History of Childhood Ready for the World? 1303

is rooted in a liberal legal discourse in which “children become agents when they attain
adulthood, [whereas] in tenets of Islam agency is not defined by age.”12 These alterna-
tive understandings of legal personhood allow for a more capacious understanding of
agency, not just “as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capac-
ity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create.”13
Has the notion of “agency” circumscribed by modern Western law overdetermined our

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comprehension of the child as an object of historical inquiry?14
The obscured distinction between chronological age and childhood rises to the sur-
face in the call to historians to use childhood—not age—as a category of analysis. Dis-
missing efforts that are merely additive inasmuch as they allow us to see what children
did at a certain time in history but tell us little about how they made a difference to this
history, the author evokes Joan Wallach Scott in a call to go beyond “descriptive
approaches that do not address dominant disciplinary concepts, or at least that do not
address these concepts in terms that can shake their power and transform them.”15 But
surely such a radical project would fracture the very subject of our inquiry—“the
child.” The category of analysis analogous to Scott’s “gender” would be “age” (not
“the child”), and could well shake and transform the understanding of agency, consent,
and minority for all historians.
While the author suggests we sidestep the issue of agency by writing histories
through children, I would contend that in order to undertake such a project, we need to
step into the world and outside of the limited Euro-American context that gave rise to
the “history of children and childhood,” and which continues to constrain the field.16
Stepping into the world entails a greater openness to theory, to critique, and to differ-
ence. It requires a radical abandonment of a belief in children’s nature, which, as the
wisdom of postcolonial, queer, and feminist theory has shown, is grounded in Western
12
Purnima Mankekar, “‘To Whom Does Ameena Belong?’ Towards a Feminist Analysis of Childhood
and Nationhood in Contemporary India,” Feminist Review, no. 56 (1997): 26–60, here 54. For further
thoughts on consent (and agency) without chronological age, see Ishita Pande, “Power, Knowledge, and
the Epistemic Contract on Age: The Case of Colonial India,” American Historical Review 125, no. 2
(2020): 407–417.
13
Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the
Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 202–236, here 203. For the manifes-
tation of “childhood agency” not in the resistance but in a seeming embrace of hierarchical power rela-
tions, see Nicholas L. Syrett, American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United
States (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016).
14
For an analogous argument regarding the “family” as a analytical category that is “implicitly bor-
rowed from colonial Western law in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” see Indrani Chatterjee,
Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick, N.J., 2004), 9.
15
Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Re-
view 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–1075, here 1055.
16
The author suggests the history of childhood is neglected because of the predominance of female
scholars in the field; “of the 169 program members of the conference of the Society for the History of
Children and Youth held at Rutgers University in June 2017, around 32—names make it sometimes hard
to tell—were male, or slightly less than 20 percent.” It is also true that two-thirds of the eighteen-member
editorial board of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth are women, as is the editor. But
what if we inquire into how many of the eighteen editorial members (or even how many of the members
of the Society for the History of Children and Youth [SHCY]) study the “world” outside of Europe and
the Americas? The SHCY itself carried out a survey of its membership to inquire into the latter question;
56 percent of the 229 self-identified historians of childhood who completed the survey are based in Can-
ada and the United States. Patrick J. Ryan, “SHCY Survey Report—March 2018,” Society for the History
of Children and Youth, October 18, 2018, https://www.shcy.org/features/commentaries/2017-shcy-survey-
report/.

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1304 Ishita Pande

epistemologies, especially in the discourses of biology and evolution, and which has
been used to rationalize colonial, racial, and heteronormative ideologies in the modern
world. In looking for children outside of the contexts that gave rise to them, we might
encounter creatures that act in unfamiliar and unpredictable ways; these creatures might
introduce us to the strangeness of our present categories.17
Even as the review essay appears to reject an understanding of childhood as the

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common ground to heal the rifts caused by the analysis of race, class, and gender, in
reaffirming a faith in childhood’s nature, the essay itself ultimately fails “to completely
slough off the Eurocentric modernization template that drove the work of pioneers.”
The pop-cultural references evoked in the essay’s title—“The Kids Are Alright / Aren’t
All Right”—not only hint at the field’s genesis in a particular location, but also replicate
the understanding of time as linear and progressive that is naturalized by the under-
standing of children as a symbol of a shared (if inevitably vanishing) past, and the re-
pository of a desirable (if ultimately unrealized) future. It nods toward postcolonial and
queer history, but stops short of noting their assaults on the nature of childhood and, re-
latedly, the straightness of time. This essay’s copious references both reflect the domi-
nant status of Europe and the Americas within the field and shore up a provincial under-
standing of childhood. Even as the essay comments on the difficulties of producing
global histories of childhood, it makes little effort to comprehend how or why a global
lens might fracture the very notion of childhood as humanity’s “shared past.”
Instead of comprehending the history of childhood as a means to heal the rifts
revealed by a focus on race or class, or even writing histories (say, of race) through
children, we could allow (postcolonial, queer, critical race) theory to radically contami-
nate the field in order to go further still; we could acknowledge that the use of child-
hood as a category of analysis must begin with an understanding of the history of colo-
nialism and race.18 It is our reluctance to understand the child as a creature of
Enlightenment (and race) science, of liberal jurisprudence, and of normative sexuality
that explains why childhood, unlike race, class, or gender, is yet to catch fire as an ana-
lytical category. The author’s prescription is that we can rejuvenate our discipline “not
by bounding across oceans” but by understanding how childhood has offered “a pletho-
ra of strategies and justifications for the building of national, social, racial, and cultural
hierarchies.” Indeed. But it is not the distraction of global history that ails the field, but
a lingering blindness to it. What makes children worthy of historical scrutiny is not the
fact that we all inhabited something called childhood in the past, but that some were
and are considered incapable of outgrowing childhood.19 What makes children a pow-
17
I am borrowing from the proposition that the effect of “discovering” the history of sexuality “is to
call into question the very naturalness of what we currently take to be essential to our individual natures.”
David M. Halperin, “Is There a History of Sexuality?,” History and Theory 28, no. 3 (1989): 257–274,
here, 273.
18
This means understanding the degrees of difference between acknowledging, for instance, that
“childhood innocence” is in itself a (post-Enlightenment) historical construct, that it is not the equal prop-
erty of all children in modern times, and that it is a foundational part of a history of white supremacy.
While Robin Bernstein is a recurring reference to talk about agency, childhood, and race in the review es-
say, I think a fundamental point about the construction of childhood innocence is missed here. Robin
Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York,
2011).
19
I am thinking of the large body of scholarship on the use of the childhood metaphor to describe the
colonized, and to rationalize empire in the liberal idiom, as discussed, for instance, in Uday Singh Mehta,
Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999).

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 Is the History of Childhood Ready for the World? 1305

erful tool of critique and analysis is that there is also a politics to refusing to leave it
behind.20 It is only in acknowledging and foregrounding difference and power, instead
of sameness and healing, and in leaving behind the Euro-American contexts that gave
rise to it, that the history of childhood will be ready for the world.
20
I have in mind queer critiques both of childhood as a sign of futurity and of the metaphor of growing
“up,” as discussed, among others, in Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Dur-

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ham, N.C., 2004); Carolyn Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2–3 (2007): 177–195; and Kathryn Bond Stockton,
The Queer Child; or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C., 2009).

Ishita Pande is Associate Professor of History and Chair of Graduate Studies at

Queen’s University, Ontario. She is the author of Medicine, Race and Liberalism
in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (Routledge, 2010) and Sex, Law and the
Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1890–1937 (Cambridge University
Press, 2020). She has published on the entwined histories of childhood, sexuality,
race, and age, in a number of venues including the American Historical Review,
Gender and History, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Law and
History Review, and South Asian History and Culture, and contributed to several
edited volumes on the global histories of sexuality, marriage, and childhood. She
is currently at work on a monograph on the history of the sexual sciences in India
in the twentieth century, and she continues to write about childhood and “age”
across discrete legal regimes.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020