19. Defiant Daughters and the Emancipation of Minors in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Sloan, Kathryn A.

doi:10.36019/9780813549460-027

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“…40 As Kathryn A. Sloan has shown, 'minor' teenage girls in the nineteenth-century Mexican state of Oaxaca used institutional structures to gain emancipation from their families, relying on sympathetic judges to allow them to marry without parental consent. 41 Children's willing performance of childhood further contributes to the construction of age. 42 Pande and Sandin, amongst others, point out that employing modern developmental models of childhood has led to the assumption that children are simply incapable of being agentic, and questioning these models helps to reveal children's agency.…”

Section: IIImentioning

confidence: 99%

State of the Field: The Modern History of Childhood

Tisdall

2022

History

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This state of the field article presents three questions for students and scholars of childhood: first, who is included in the history of childhood? Second, why does the history of childhood matter? Third, how should we do the history of childhood? It argues that all historians of childhood need to reflect upon modern developmental concepts of childhood which purport to tell us what children of different chronological ages can think, understand and feel. These limiting concepts of childhood originate from eighteenth-century Anglo-American concepts of liberal personhood that position children as non-people due to their lack of reason and their dependence on others. However, as 'childhood studies' scholars have shown, they still govern many of our instincts and assumptions about childhood today. Historians of childhood will have most to offer once we have interrogated our own concepts of childhood, but also when we fully consider how childhood has been historically constructed in relation to adulthood. I'The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken,' wrote Lloyd deMause in 1974. 1 DeMause was suggesting that premodern childhoods were marked by suffering, abuse and pain, and that only modern Western ideas about child welfare could save children from this horror. Despite the huge strides that historians of childhood have made over the last fifty years, this kind of assertion -that there is a 'right' kind of childhood that all children ought to experience -has been remarkably persistent. Paula Fass argued in 2013 that modern childhood is 'a privileged state' and that all children across the globe should have equal access to this model of protected innocence confined safely within the private sphere. 2 This ideal is relatively new. Late eighteenth-century Anglo-American classical liberalism introduced new dividing lines between childhood and adulthood, based on children's supposed lack of 'reason', and, in the Global North, this led to the development of ideas about the necessity of childhood 'freedom' from 1 Lloyd deMause (ed.), The History of Childhood (New York, 1974), p. 1. 2 Paula Fass (ed.), The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (Oxon, 2013), p. 2.

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Section: IIImentioning

confidence: 99%

State of the Field: The Modern History of Childhood

Tisdall

2022

History

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19. Defiant Daughters and the Emancipation of Minors in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

State of the Field: The Modern History of Childhood

State of the Field: The Modern History of Childhood

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