Editor's Introduction
As the first issue of 2024 goes to print, readers are thinking about the millions of children around the world caught in armed conflict zones and detention centres. Children's aid agencies urgently remind us of the children and young adults who continue to be the first victims of conflict, climate change, COVID-19, and food, fuel, and housing insecurity. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (JHCY) explores the development of childhood and youth cultures and the experiences of young people across diverse times and places. JHCY embraces a wide range of historical methodologies as well as scholarship in other disciplines that share a historical focus. The Journal publishes original articles based on empirical research and essays that place contemporary issues of childhood and youth in a historical context. We are looking for articles; please consider us for your next publications.
The articles in this issue look at marginalized, racialized, and medicalized children, young people at risk, and early encounters with incarceration via the family court. Adriana Benzaquén's article, "'These Small Sumptomes of My Obediense': Negotiating Father-Son Conflict through Letter-Writing in Early Modern England," explores the fraught relationship between an English adolescent, Edward Clarke, and his father through analysis of close to two hundred letters written between 1667 and 1672, while Edward—who would grow up to be John Locke's closest friend and a Whig MP—was a student at Oxford and the Inner Temple. Benzaquén focuses on money and health, the two topics that preoccupied Edward and his father the most, to show how they negotiated the terms of their relationship and grappled with issues of authority, status, duty and obligation, affection, and trust as the son shifted gradually from dependence toward independence.
The next two articles look at young people at risk and early encounters with incarceration, via child-saving rhetoric, in institutions for care, surveillance, and control. Jeffery P. Dennis's article, "Bridewells, Beterhuizen, and the Ozpizio: Making Men during the Age of Reason," details facilities for housing delinquent [End Page 1] and at-risk youth beginning in the eighteenth century. Dennis argues that Bride-wells in England, Beterhuizen in the Netherlands, and the Hospice of St. Michael in Italy were sites for producing and policing middle-class masculinity. He Illustrates the three cardinal sins of Enlightenment "gentlemen"—idleness, refusing marriage, and refusing homosocial comrades—and how this resulted in a policing of same-sex behavior and placement in the homoerotic underground. Gerald Thomson's article, "'We Are Making Good under the Honor System': The Social Rehabilitation of Juvenile Males through Militarism, Moral Reform, and Enforced Work Routines at the British Columbia Boy's Industrial School, 1919–1934," also looks at education in state agencies for young offenders. In this case, industrial schools for children were associated with the juvenile courts and social work agencies. Thomson sees these institutions as the dominant mechanisms for the social rehabilitation of wayward juveniles in North America from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. The British Columbia Boy's Industrial School ran from 1919 to 1934 under David Blackwood Brankin, whose "honor system" combined discipline, strict work routines, regimented leisure, and a minimum of compulsory schooling. Brankin's background in missionary work and military career shaped his vision of juvenile social rehabilitation until his retirement in 1934. Girls were taught domestic skills and boys were trained in trades such as agriculture. Corporal punishment and forced labor were seen not as punishment but as moral uplift for troubled youth.
How did schools deal with children identified as coming from marginalized and disadvantaged communities? Thom Axelsson's article, "From Discipline Power to Pastoral Care: 'Tattare,' 'Gypsies,' and Education in Sweden, 1923–1960," discusses the shift from what was often called "the Tattare problem" to, later, "the Gypsy question." In the context of compulsory schooling in Sweden, Axelsson frames the discussion with reference to Michel Foucault and his concepts of discipline power and pastoral power. Children, especially their care and handling, were an important focus of welfare politics in Sweden. This meant that childhood was a significant field of governance, which became obvious in schools' work with "Tattare" and "Gypsy" children. This article highlights how the tone toward these groups changed, especially in the 1940s. Over time, these students were seen as more malleable by institutions and their agents, which exerted pastoral power by guiding and leading them, attempting to shape the minds of these future citizens.
Over the thirty years of the British Mandatory government in Palestine, thousands of young people were arrested and tried as juvenile delinquents. Julia Shatz's "The Makings and Meanings of Childhood: Parents and the Juvenile Justice System in Interwar Palestine" shifts the focus from schools to [End Page 2] families. Shatz explores how the parents and families of those "young offenders" confronted the logics of the colonial criminal justice system and argued for their own understandings of the law and their children's places in Palestine's social and political landscape. Studying parental petitions to the government reveals that different groups made fragmented and multidirectional claims on the category of childhood. Shatz argues that in interwar Palestine, childhood was the political capital through which colonial power was both constructed and contested. In doing so, she also illuminates the roles that ordinary families and communities played in daily governance in a twentieth-century developmentalist colonial state.
In the case of medicalization, Patrick J. Ryan's article, "Eugenic Continuities: Youth, Sex, Disability, and the Rise of Liberal Eugenics in the Late Twentieth Century," challenges conventional periodization and understandings of eugenics, drawing attention to the formation of "liberal" eugenics in the late twentieth century. Ryan situates the landmark 1986 Supreme Court of Canada decision E. (Mrs.) v. Eve within its avowedly anti-eugenic context. Then it compares the trial record and appellate documents of Eve to the notorious 1927 American case Buck v. Bell. It outlines the legal reasoning of the Eve decision, its reception, and the different trajectories of law in the US, the UK, and Australia. These multiple points of historical comparison expose a series of unresolved eugenic continuities in the politics of youth, sex, and disability. Finally. W. Chris Johnson's article, "The Self-Education of Rae Spiegel (Raya Dunayevskaya): Child Radicalism and Abolitionist Pedagogies at the Crossroads of Great Migrations," explores pedagogies of abolition in the wake of World War I through the intellectual biography of Rae Spiegel, the child revolutionary who became economist, feminist, and Marxist-Humanist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya. Anchoring her work in the tradition of nineteenth-century abolitionists, Dunayevskaya co-constructed schools of insurgency and outlets for the creative expression of subjugated peoples, including youth. This study locates the roots of Dunayevskaya's sixty-year career in abolitionist pedagogies in Black study, cross-racial and cross-generational collaborations, and "Baby Red" revolts against schooling across two empires. [End Page 3]
