In the spring of 1957, journalist Sidney Katz wrote a story forMaclean's Magazineentitled “The Lost Children of British Columbia” which detailed the disturbing events leading up to the forcible removal of 100 Doukhobor children from their New Denver homes by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers. The children, all between the ages of seven and fourteen, were taken to the New Denver Dormitory, located approximately 260 miles northeast of Vancouver, British Columbia, where they remained until they reached the age of fifteen. They were not permitted to speak their native Russian, visit home (although parents were allowed brief, supervised visits to the dormitory), take holidays, or visit friends and relatives in the nearby town of New Denver.
Using adult memories of growing up in Canada, this study explores the role children's bodies and embodiment played in shaping private experience and historical change between 1930 and 1960. Attention is focussed on gender, race and sexuality as primary forces in the embodiment of children. During the period under study here, childhood was conceptualized as a time to inculcate particular attitudes towards gender, sexuality, race and class that would influence children's sense of self and, ultimately, serve the interests of the hegemonic social order — white, middle-class, patriarchal, herosexual. In adult memories of growing up, the body is remembered as the site through which acceptable self-identities and the priorities of the larger social order were mediated and negotiated. Although these two impulses were often at odds in childhood, the former was often conflated with the latter.
Highlighting how medical professionals in English Canada understood accidents in childhood, this article explores the emergence of the idea of a “public child” throughout the course of the twentieth century. It asks how shifts in attitudes toward public health, domesticity, race, and gender shaped ideas about children, their safety, and their protection. The medicalized construction of a public child helped foster a more recognizable sense of community responsibility for the wellbeing of particular children at the same time as it increased and deepened the surveillance of families and parents. Although the management of children has always been a task ascribed primarily to women, the early twentieth century witnessed a new interest in categorizing children, whether as infants, workers, or students, as public health and safety risks worthy of public attention.
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