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For those interested in exploring childhood studies, there is no better place to start than Anna Mae Duane's introduction to the The Children's Table. In lucid and concise prose, Duane argues that studying children forces a reassessment of the central subject of most humanistic scholarship: the liberal individual. Because “very young children are not autonomous nor should they be,” studying young people requires an awareness that authority is not always “inherently oppressive,” and caution that not all self-assertions are “unqualified positives” (7). In other words, childhood studies demands “a radically altered approach to the questions of what constitutes knowledge and what animates the work of power and resistance” (1). Scholars have been debating these questions for several decades, but Duane contends these conversations have so far remained at a metaphoric “children's table” of childhood studies conferences, journals, and listservs. It is time, she argues, for the grown-ups to come over and listen.

In subsequent chapters, childhood studies scholars from a variety of fields—including history, literature, law, and philosophy—explain what their particular research offers for the study of the humanities more broadly. Those interested in the history of ideas will find particularly thought-provoking Karen Sánchez-Eppler's meditation on the deep connections between archival preservation and nostalgia for childhood. Sánchez-Eppler points out that just as historians of childhood acknowledge the difficulty of accessing children's voices unmediated by adult concerns, so scholars fueling the “archival turn” in the humanities draw attention to the power dynamics inherent in any archive. By exploring “the extent to which similar motivations of nostalgia, desire, fantasy, and power underlie” both childhood studies and archival practice, Sánchez-Eppler pushes us to recognize that we can never fully understand the intentions of those who produced archival objects (216). The archive, like childhood itself, is not innocent, but the production of adults’ intense desire to preserve an elusive past. For intellectual historians who seek to understand the origins and development of ideas, this consideration of the mediation and power imbalances inherent in archival practice is salutary.Footnote ⁴

From a more practical than theoretical perspective, James Marten offers the advice that the voices of children are most likely to be preserved by adults during times of crisis, particularly war. His own study of children's participation in the US Civil War demonstrates that the family separations and disruptions inherent in the conflict inspired children to generate and adults to treasure letters, diaries, and ephemera. Often packed with quotidian details of daily life, these documents catch children's perspective on their culture. Marten also reminds us that children made up the majority of the US population in the mid-nineteenth century and that we therefore cannot understand how Americans understood the Civil War without listening to children's voices and opinions.Footnote ⁵

In the inaugural issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, the eminent historian of childhood Peter Stearns observed that much of “what passes for the history of childhood. . .really turns out, on examination, to be mainly centered on what adults were doing or saying about this or that aspect of children's lives.”Footnote ⁶ This remains true of many of the essays included in Duane's volume. But what sets these articles apart from earlier work—and makes them particularly relevant for intellectual historians—is their insistence on interrogating how adult concerns about childhood are often broader meditations on the workings of power and dependency that implicate people of all ages. For example, Lesley Ginsberg points out that many nineteenth-century American writers produced both children's and adult literature, understood authorship as serving a pedagogical function for readers of all ages, and used the figure of the child to explore the workings of inequality in American culture.Footnote ⁷ Rather then seeing adults as autonomous subjects and children as objects of socialization, the contributors to Duane's volume recognize that many of the adults in charge of children—particularly mothers, teachers, and social workers—themselves lived within relations of dependency and disenfranchisement. As Duane writes, rather than assigning “partial, dependent, mediated subjectivity only to childhood,” these scholars push historians to recognize the degree to which all people are interdependent and all voices mediated (6, original emphasis). Ostensibly a study of childhood, this volume ultimately encourages a reconsideration of personhood.

Courtney Weikle-Mills pushes these insights even further in her creative study of “imaginary citizenship” in early America. Other scholars (myself included) have argued that metaphors of childhood excluded many adults from active citizenship in early America.Footnote ⁸ In contrast, Weikle-Mills contends that democracy required understanding children as citizens. Social-contract theory, after all, insisted that children are born with rights but are not yet capable of exercising those rights. Thinking about children as “imaginary citizens,” she argues, helps fill this gap between free birth and adult political standing. Imaginary, she points out, does not mean pretend. In the same way that Benedict Anderson defines nations as “imagined communities,” Weilke-Mills analyzes the fantasies that underlay democratic citizenship in early America when the majority of the population was aged under twenty-one and many over that age lacked formal political and legal rights.Footnote ⁹ Because even fully enfranchised citizens cannot consent to every law that governs them, all citizenship is in some sense imaginary, she argues. Like the contributors to The Children's Table, Weikle-Mills uses the study of childhood to reveal the illusions inherent in conceptions of adult autonomy, but she does so through a detailed analysis of how books—including novels, alphabet primers, and natural-history texts—invited children to imagine themselves as citizens.

Weilke-Mills's central contribution is to show that even as legal definitions of citizenship disqualified people under twenty-one from political participation, fiction elaborated tales of politicized children. As such, she helps to close a divide between historians of Anglo-American law—such as Holly Brewer and Michael Grossberg—who stress the legal disabilities of children, and literary scholars—including Jay Fliegelman and Gillian Brown—who analyze novels of youthful rebellion and consent.Footnote ¹⁰ Imaginary citizenship, Weikle-Mills contends, was what connected law and literature.

Weikle-Mills analyzes literary stories that describe children making contracts, debating issues, and engaging in mock elections. Rather than focusing solely on representations of children, however, she tries to understand what books encouraged child readers to imagine. She pays careful attention to the ways in which authors “addressed implied readers and represented ideal (or not so ideal) readers within their pages” (23, original emphasis). To reconstruct how young people actually responded, she studies the few extant diaries and letters that record children's experiences of reading. This approach leads to radically new insights about the centrality of child readers and authorial concerns about childhood to the development of American literature. For example, literary critics have long noted that early American authors dedicated the nation's first novels to young people—William Hill Brown addresses The Power of Sympathy (1789) to “the young ladies of Columbia,” and Susanna Rowson identifies the readers of Charlotte Temple (1794) as “dear girls”—but Weikle-Mills is the first to fully explore what these addresses to young readers invited actual girls to think and to do (100). Her argument is that authors self-consciously encouraged young people without political rights to become better citizens while also exploring the extent to which fully enfranchised adult men retained childish qualities such as dependence on external authority and imaginary bonds to the nation state.

In her most interesting and theoretically sophisticated chapter, Weikle-Mills analyzes stories that encouraged young children to love their books as a means of learning to eventually love the law. Such stories, she argues, taught that childish affection was as important a component of citizenship as mature consent. Americans emphasized affection for books and for the law, Weikle-Mills argues, as a way “to reconcile new notions of the citizen's freedom and independence with their necessary limitations, making the child an apt representation of the citizen, even though children were not afforded the legal rights of citizenship” (64).

In her last chapter, she offers a broad context for understanding both the potential and the limitations of the Fourteenth Amendment. This amendment purported to resolve the issue of children's citizenship by clarifying that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States. . .are citizens of the United States” (169). The amendment did not, however, establish any new mechanism by which children could exercise their citizenship rights. Weikle-Mills analyzes conceptions of natural citizenship from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as the natural-history textbooks that surged in popularity during the mid-nineteenth century, in order to demonstrate that every effort to base citizenship on nature ended up acknowledging that artifice is necessary to the establishment of human law. Natural citizenship, in short, is just as artificial and imaginary as citizenship based on mature consent.

Like Duane, Weikle-Mills looks past the binary distinction between childhood and adulthood to identify the childish qualities of adults, but she also calls much more directly for innovating theories and practices that would grant children legal and social recognition as active, if imperfect, citizens in the present. “Rather than seeing dependence, imagination, and inadequacy as external to citizenship,” she suggests, “it is important to see these features as always internal to the problem of citizenship and to consider how they might be incorporated into responsible forms of citizenship” (215). For intellectual historians, her work offers the possibility of understanding how authors invite disenfranchised groups of people to understand themselves as participants in politics and contributors to the nation, even as they lack political rights and legal standing. Apart from the few direct accounts of reading left in children's diaries or adult memoirs, however, she cannot prove what ordinary children actually thought about their books. The importance of her study for intellectual historians is the creative way in which she unsettles simplistic distinctions between children's culture and mainstream culture by urging us to pay greater attention to the ways in which authors, via books, addressed children and young people as active citizens.

Robin Bernstein draws on performance theory to argue that we can also interpret what ordinary objects invited children to do and consequently to believe. By redefining artifacts of material culture such as dolls and handkerchiefs as “scriptive things,” Bernstein offers the most influential formulation to date for understanding how children contribute to ideas about childhood and indeed to other social categories such as race. Since Ariès first convinced people that childhood changed over time, historians have spent a great deal of time debating the distinction between childhood, as a social construction, and children, as historical actors. As Bernstein points out, this debate has resulted in an “unsatisfying detente with a model in which ‘imagined’ childhood shapes the lived experience of ‘real’ juveniles, who respond by unevenly colluding or resisting their construction as ‘children’” (22). Bernstein finds this model disappointing because it fails to fully account for the ways in which children and childhood “give body to each other” (22). In terms of intellectual history, this opposition between ideas of childhood and actual children functions to erase the work that children do as thinkers in their own right.

Bernstein offers a way out by pointing to performance as the means whereby children enact a repertoire of childhood, modifying and improvising as they go. Through an act of “surrogation,” each child takes on childhood roles others have already outgrown and in the process revises the scripts (22). Some of these performances are professional, as when child actresses from Shirley Temple to Dakota Fanning publicly stage the part of adorable innocent. Most are private and ephemeral, as when an ordinary girl picks up a doll and considers what she is “supposed” to do with it. In order to recover the ephemeral, everyday performances through which children embodied childhood in the past, Bernstein looks to the evidence preserved in “scriptive things” (71, 199).

By “scriptive things,” she means the invitations and prohibitions to action embedded in the materiality of and traditions surrounding particular objects. For example, porcelain dolls invite gentle play and shatter if treated roughly. India rubber dolls, in contrast, withstand being thrown, beaten, or dragged about. Through stories about dolls and advertisements for doll products, adults make such scripts explicit. Finally, the few diaries and memoirs extant in archives provide direct evidence for how a select few children reacted to these scripts and crafted new versions of them. This method opens new sources for intellectual as well as cultural historians by recovering the ideas built into the design of objects and the meanings communicated by their use. Bernstein argues that the “act of scripting” embedded in objects, this issuing of a culturally specific invitation, is itself a historical event—one that can be recovered and then analyzed as a fresh source of evidence” (11). As Bernstein acknowledges, the analysis of scriptive things and the context surrounding them will not typically divulge what any individual child actually did at a particular time—and especially not how he or she might have improvised new ideas—but it does reveal evidence about what a class of objects invited its users to do and what these uses meant to adults and children. As historians, we can recover those scripts and understand how they change over time.

Bernstein's particular focus is on understanding how children performed ideas about racial innocence; that is, the conception of white children not just as innocent but as the embodiment of innocence itself, and black juveniles as both not innocent and not fully children. Through an analysis of professional child actresses and the everyday performances of ordinary girls, Bernstein recovers how children variously perpetuated, modified, and challenged the understanding of white girls as innocent. In the process, she innovatively demonstrates “the centrality of girls and girlhood to U.S. racial formation” (19).

Beginning with one of the most iconic works of nineteenth-century American literature, Bernstein argues that Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was neither just a book nor a unified cultural phenomenon, but rather a “repertoire” of scripts embedded in things that gained meaning through shifting performances (14). For example, she shows that Hammatt Billings's 1852 illustrations of Little Eva and Uncle Tom inspired the wildly popular stage performances of child actress Cordelia Howard, whose image, in turn, appeared on collectible figurines that audiences could display in their parlors. Howard's enactments and her porcelain effigies “moved” audiences to weep, thus performing the sentiment scripted by Stowe. The meaning of those tears, however, shifted over time. After the Civil War, Bernstein argues, Tom shows became spectacles that glorified the lost beauty of the Old South, particularly the special relationship between Eva and Tom. Audiences still wept, though the tears they shed were no longer a protest against slavery but a nostalgic longing for it. By the 1880s, the writer Joel Chandler Harris could appropriate the figures of innocent white child and enslaved man, turning Eva and Tom into an unnamed boy and Uncle Remus, in order to portray slavery not as a sin but as a particularly beautiful form of love. Bernstein is able to map this complex story of intellectual influence because she views the characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin not as a fixed representation in a book, but as a script for a repertoire of ephemeral performances staged most directly by professional actors, but also by audiences who cried at stage performances and ordinary families who restaged scenes from the book in their homes. As Bernstein writes, “Eva, Topsy, and other characters, uncontained by Stowe's abolitionist novel, traveled through the popular imginary—from which they were appropriated by proslavery writers such as Joel Chandler Harris” (21). Eva and Topsy made this journey not as abstract ideas, but as scripts embodied by people playing the role of child.

In the end, Bernstein's method reveals more about the roles adults scripted for children than the novel ideas developed by children themselves. Children function in her account of racial formation to perpetuate racist ideas long after they have disappeared from adult culture. For example, she argues that Tom shows first popularized the racist libel that black children are not children and do not feel pain by casting adult actors in blackface as Topsy. These performers encouraged audiences to laugh at Topsy's suffering before they cried at Eva's death. In the mid-twentieth century, as black civil rights activists and their white allies successfully campaigned to end minstrel shows, the repertoire of blackface comedy reappeared in a new form targeted at children: Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse cartoons. When a cigar explodes in Mickey's face, and we laugh at his imperviousness to pain, we are enjoying the racist tradition of blackface performance under the cover of childish fun. As Bernstein argues, “the idea of childhood innocence and the bodies of living children have historically mystified racial ideology by hiding it in plain sight” (18).

But if most children happily enact racist scripts embedded in the artifacts of children's culture while adults recognize only innocence in these performances, Bernstein also suggests that some children and adults have historically joined forces to demand racial justice. In Bernstein's concluding chapter, she considers how white and black children have variously perpetuated or challenged racist ideas through doll play. She shows that doll manufacturers long produced and marketed black dolls as objects suitable for violent play. For example, an 1893 advertisement proclaimed, “What child in America does not at some time want a cloth ‘Nigger’ dollie—one that can be petted or thrown about without harm” (52). Such a doll, in Bernstein's words, “allows or even instructs a presumably white child to play violently,” thus enabling young white children, particularly girls, to learn, participate in, and perpetuate the culture of racialized violence that sustained peak rates of lynching and segregation (52). But some children always resisted such scripts, treasuring their black dolls, though documentary evidence of such practices is scant. And in the early twentieth century, New Negro adults explicitly manufactured fragile black dolls that in Bernstein's words “choreographed new practices of play” (196). These porcelain black dolls encouraged girls to play in ways that emphasized black bodies’ need for protection and care.

In the 1930s, the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark intervened in these various traditions of doll play with experiments designed to publicize the idea that black children could feel pain and were therefore deserving of the same treatment as white children. Most historians have understood these tests, in which the Clarks measured children's perceptions of race by studying their preferences for white or black dolls, as revealing evidence of black children's internalized racism, the same interpretation employed by Supreme Court justices when they used the tests in Brown v. Board of Education to explain the need for school desegregation. Bernstein returns to the Clarks’ original reports on their experiments to recover the way in which they scripted a particular performance by their black child subjects. The key to Bernstein's reading is the way in which she recognizes children's expertise as performers of normative notions of childhood. When given a black or white doll, she argues, children understood the script for what they were supposed to do—play gently with the white doll, violently with the black doll. The Clarks self-consciously tapped this expertise, Bernstein argues, to encourage their child subjects to first recognize that the black doll should be played with violently as a “bad” doll. By then asking the child to “give me the doll that looks like you,” the Clarks provoked the children to recognize that they too were vulnerable to being judged bad (236). Most responded with tears, and by crying stopped the experiment, which, Bernstein argues, was precisely what the Clarks wanted. “The Clarks,” she writes, “could have altered their experiments to avoid these responses. . .The fact that they did not do so shows that the Clarks viewed tears as a desirable result of the doll tests” (239). Bernstein reads these tears as “intellectual” content powerfully, if inarticulately, communicating the idea that black children suffered. The performances of these tears were carefully scripted by the Clarks, but “simultaneously agential, because by crying, children halted a painful experiment” (240). The case proves Bernstein's central argument, which is that people, especially children, can resist scripts, but resistance can also emerge through scripting.

The doll tests serve as powerful evidence for Bernstein because the Clarks meticulously recorded both the script of questions they designed and the children's individual responses. As a case study, this reveals how adults and children can collaborate to shift the embodied performance of childhood, and more broadly points to ways in which we can more subtly interpret the complex relationship between adult power and children's agency. Adults, Bernstein suggests, depend upon children to enact ideas about childhood. This provides children with limited room to assert their own ideas. Their responses might be inarticulate—as when breaking down in tears—but are nonetheless intelligent and meaningful.

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The problem remains of how to access and reconstruct a wider range of performances. Where can we find the documentary evidence to better understand how children asserted their agency through performances that by their nature were ephemeral and rarely recorded? What other evidence can we use to recover how children thought about and embodied childhood? Two new books by Lakisha Simmons and Marcia Chatelain offer some promising avenues of archival research, at least for the case of older adolescents in the twentieth century. Both books break new ground by recovering the subjectivity of black girls navigating Jim Crow segregation and demands for respectability in twentieth-century New Orleans and Chicago respectively. By focusing on black girls in one region, Simmons and Chatelain are able to creatively combine the tools of social and cultural history to assemble scraps of archival evidence into a compelling narrative of black girls’ self understandings.

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Simmons argues that much can be learned by using the tools of cultural geography to reconstruct how black girls navigated the city. Through maps, demographic data, street photography, and memoirs of growing up in Jim Crow New Orleans, she discovers how black girls thought about particular places as areas of danger, harassment, or safety, and how their embodied experience shifted as they moved through the city. She is particularly concerned with recovering evidence for how black girls created cultures of pleasure and intimacy. Much of the literature on African American girlhood stresses the pervasive danger of racial violence and the constraining pressures to achieve respectability, both of which Simmons acknowledges. But she also shows how black girls successfully carved out spaces for fun and romance. In African American newspapers, she finds a wealth of romantic fiction written by black girls. Through reading and writing, these young women not only presented themselves as nascent intellectuals, but found happiness in literary culture. Simmons also mines the evidence in photographs of youth theatrical performances and social dances at local youth organizations. While often preserved in the archive without any surrounding texts to explain the meaning of the images, the photographs themselves, in Simmons's able hands, reveal powerful evidence of how black girls staged performances marked by joy and self-assertion. The dresses, poses, and expressions all capture evidence for how black girls embodied their own ideas about girlhood. Where Bernstein focuses on the scripts embedded in things, Simmons is much more interested in finding evidence for how black girls themselves understood and performed their subjectivities. She shows that we can and should pay attention to black girls’ own ideas about violence, respectability, and, most importantly, pleasure.

Chatelain also finds new evidence for black girls’ contributions to urban culture in her study of Chicago during the Great Migration. Engaging in extensive archival research, she proves that though black girls’ perspectives rarely appear in other migration histories, “they left behind powerful stories of hope, anticipation, and disappointment” (4). As with Bernstein's use of the Clarks’ doll tests, Chatelain finds a rich trove of evidence preserved in the original research notes of early twentieth-century social scientists working at the University of Chicago. “African American girls’ voices are ‘buried’ in larger studies” published by professional sociologists, and also recorded in the dairies and notes of social-work graduate students (6). For example, by returning to the original interview transcripts for E. Franklin Frazier's The Negro Family in Chicago (1932), Chatelain finds the voices of black girls talking about “sex, dating, family dynamics, and their impressions of Chicago” (131). This evidence enables Chatelain “to highlight how these girls claimed their own rights as child citizens. In telling their stories, they expressed the way they reasoned and understood their choices, dealt with their marginalization, and critiqued the failure of adults to parent and guide them” (132). Chatelain offers us new evidence for what Weikle-Mills could only postulate: how young, disenfranchised people understood themselves as citizens.

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Simmons and Chatelain ably demonstrate what childhood studies has to offer intellectual history—evidence that those often denied a voice because of their race and age nonetheless generated their own ideas, navigated and challenged adult opinion, and built cultural spaces in which they could assert their own subjectivity. Specific evidence for this, however, comes from older children living in the twentieth century. The question that remains for intellectual historians is how to recover the ideas of younger children and those who lived in earlier periods. The contributors to Duane's volume argue for understanding the intellectual contributions of children to the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century culture, but they struggle to find evidence for what children thought. Bernstein's method of analyzing scripted things offers some promise for interpreting the material culture of childhood in earlier periods. Her focus on doll play also opens possibilities for understanding the ideas of younger children. Whether or not intellectual historians interested in earlier periods and younger ages can find enough evidence to recapture and make sense of children's ideas remains an open question. What the new history of childhood does make abundantly clear is that children should count not just as future adults or objects of education, but as intellectuals in their own right. Further, binary distinctions between independent-minded adults and malleable children are more illusory than real. In the end, the books under review here prompt us to reconsider not only the ideas of children, but the mediated and interdependent nature of adult intellectual projects as well.