The Moral Project of Childhood

Motherhood, Material Life, and Early Children's Consumer Culture

Daniel Thomas Cook

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781479838707
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Examines the Protestant origins of motherhood and the child consumer

Throughout history, the responsibility for children’s moral well-being has fallen into the laps of mothers. In The Moral Project of Childhood, the noted childhood studies scholar Daniel Thomas Cook illustrates how mothers in the nineteenth-century United States meticulously managed their children’s needs and wants, pleasures and pains, through the material world so as to produce the “child” as a moral project.

Drawing on a century of religiously-oriented child care advice in women’s periodicals, he examines how children ultimately came to be understood by mothers—and later, by commercial actors—as consumers. From concerns about taste, to forms of discipline and punishment, to play and toys, Cook delves into the social politics of motherhood, historical anxieties about childhood, and early children’s consumer culture.

An engaging read, The Moral Project of Childhood provides a rich cultural history of childhood.

1

A Moral Architecture

Protestant Salvation and the Mother-Child Nexus

If the mother is their oracle in all matters of right and wrong; if she is their umpire in all their differences; if she is their comforter in all their trials, and their chosen confidant, into whose ear they may whisper all their secret griefs, she possesses every desirable advantage for doing them good. She may almost entirely counteract the influence of every other person, and thus secure her children from the debasing influence of immorality with which they must necessarily come in contact.

—“Maternal Authority,” The Mother’s Magazine, March 1844¹

Questions regarding the moral constitution of children pressed on many Americans living in the Northeastern US during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Long-held, albeit changing, doctrines of Protestant Calvinism and Evangelical Christianity were encountering emergent Enlightenment and Romantic ideas of childhood education and of the primacy of grace and innocence.² At the crux of these encounters was the problem of the nature of children’s moral character—i.e., the extent to which it was fixed or malleable, innate or learned, divinely formed or a product of human intervention. At base, the tensions at issue can be represented, on one hand, by a strict view—held in various intensities of belief and practice—whereby children were thought depraved, perhaps evil, at birth and their fate in terms of ultimate salvation was both divinely predetermined and unknown by anyone except the Creator. Over and against this view arose the didactic perspective expressed by John Locke (1632–1704) in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), where he put forward a conception that young children could be directed or molded by early impressions and thereby guided, though in limited means, by education.³

Ruminations about the degree of children’s spiritual elasticity had inched toward the center of theological-philosophical concern among Protestant theologians over the decades prior to the nineteenth century. Historians Moran and Vinovskis note the extent to which parents ignored or understated the seventeenth-century Puritan ideology of infant damnation,⁴ gradually accepting the idea of infant regeneration (i.e., early conversion to Christianity). As well, the Lockean notion of the intellectually malleable child encouraged faith in the ability of education to affect attitudes and practices. The English middle class of the eighteenth century seemed to embrace schooling as a form of class mobility,⁵ while in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England, the Puritan avoidance of early childhood schooling, coupled with their aversion to fiction, poetry, and other forms of reading that were not “factual” and not directed toward knowing the teachings of the Bible, speaks to a different view of the child.⁶ Didacticism in children’s books and in the newly minted children’s periodicals⁷ increasingly resembled forms of play and amusement⁸ and helped instantiate the educable child in and for the rising middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic before the onset of widespread, common schooling.⁹

Awash in a sea of (pre–psychological science) developmental practices, materials, and forms of knowledge,¹⁰ Evangelical Protestantism found itself, in a way, philosophically cornered—caught between its own determinism of fate for the child’s soul and the relative open-endedness of the impact of early childhood influence.¹¹ An intellectually malleable child also intimates a morally pliable one and thus poses a problem of existential proportions for the faith. If children moved toward or away from God differently than had been suggested by and since John Calvin’s (1509–1564) influential theology, then significant swaths of teachings would be called into question, in particular the notions of predestination, depravity, and election.

The Evangelical Protestant response in the first half of the nineteenth century centered on theorizing the subjectivity of the young, preliterate child in relation to an already overdetermined, “extensive” conception of domestic motherhood. This response represented a shift from a dominant patriarchal mode whereby the spiritual life of a child, on arrival at the “age of reason,” was often left to the male head of household, male preacher, and theologian.¹² Into a mother’s lap landed the providence of the faith and indeed the reproduction and survival of the faith community itself in the person of an infant. As the “child” came to be seen as something that can be saved—or, at least, guided toward salvation—and yet unable to save itself, the burden of interlocution with the divine increasingly fell into maternal hands in the domestic sphere, rather than on clergy in the space of the church.¹³ It was up to women, particularly mothers, to “curb the will” of the child before the onset of reason so as to effect a long-lasting redemption.¹⁴ Hence, problems concerning who the child is, what it thinks, how it knows and, how it changes—issues of epistemology, ontology, and ontogeny—also became enfolded into the Protestant mother’s charge.

In this chapter, I trace interminglings of Lockean with Protestant conceptions of child malleability and innateness and their implications for the mother-child nexus in the nineteenth century. I do so by revisiting the key questions of predestination—famously theorized by Max Weber as generative of a capitalist spirit—and of changing notions of innate depravity through the lens of Christian motherhood as discussed in an early Evangelical magazine directed toward and often written by women, many of whom were mothers. Unconsidered by Weber, the experiences and concerns of mothers and the incessant problem of child malleability combined to undergird a new kind of understanding of the child—one which ponders, and perhaps enables, the privileging of the child’s subjecthood as consequential for this-worldly action in the form of mothering practices and ideologies.

The rise to prominence of a particular bourgeois, modern child subject and subjectivity, I argue, came about by and through the actions of mothers, who increasingly incurred the charge to contemplate and theorize the child’s “interiority,” as Carolyn Steedman has put it.¹⁵ The duty of knowing, intuiting, and imputing the actions, motivations, and responses of her children devolved to white, Christian mothers, largely taking the form of measures to counteract the uncertainties posed by ambiguities regarding depravity, sin, and election. The “Liberal Protestantism,” exemplified and brought forth in the writings of Horace Bushnell¹⁶ in mid-century, enacted something beyond a “feminization” of religion through sentiment and affect, as Ann Douglas¹⁷ has argued; it also indispensably assisted in ushering the “child” to the forefront of consideration in ways consequential to the subsequent rise and cultural predominance of a “modern,” consumerist child subjectivity.

I argue that these dynamics blended to form the basis for a moral architecture that made the twentieth-century “child consumer” a possible, permissible, and viable cultural persona and subject, one that preceded and underlay large-scale early child psychological science. Like all architecture, it is an architecture of relations, not things—of stress points, balances, and structural pressures—the result of which is an apparent stability made possible by an often unseen dynamism. The dynamism here resides at the interface of children’s subjectivity and mothers’ interlocutions. In the main, the legacy of the struggle of late Calvinism and Evangelicalism with the world of their time is neither a pious child nor an irreverent one, neither depraved nor innocent, but rather it is the very tensions forming their interrelations and co-constructions. The opposing terms remain locked to each other, informing each other of possible re-formations—angel or devil, exploited or empowered—which neither side completely “wins.” This child represents, in other words, an active, ongoing compromise formed about the problem posed by a presumed underlying pliability of character and being.

The Protestant Ethic and the Problem of Consumption

Sociologist Max Weber theorized how a capitalist “spirit,” which favors and indeed celebrates material accumulation, somewhat paradoxically arose out of central aspects of Protestantism that denounced this-worldly preoccupation with possessions and self-adornment.¹⁸ He argued that the response to the contradictions posed by the doctrine of predestination (see below) channeled energy and effort into the sphere of economic production as a “calling,” thereby making capitalist pursuit something of a blessed endeavor. Weber, however, could not quite put his finger on how the Calvinist-inspired dynamics he analyzed made for a rising culture of consumption at the time of his writing in 1905. Asceticism may have underpinned the motivation of the entrepreneur in diverting excess money away from personal use and into productive operations, thereby enabling a key dynamic of capital creation. But the turn toward self-indulgence and socially sanctioned pleasure-seeking, evident in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is not in accord with Weber’s analysis. At the conclusion of his text, he sounds an ominous note:

Material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history … In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.¹⁹

Weber invokes the metaphor of an “iron cage” to refer not to overweening bureaucratic rationality, as is often supposed, but to describe what he saw as a “fateful” new relationship between people and material things.

Sociologist Colin Campbell endeavored to rethink the Weberian thesis in light of consumer culture whereby a Romantic ethic, which emphasized and allowed hedonistic self-pleasure, arose as an alternative to the Calvinist ethic of self-denial and came to exist alongside it in modified form.²⁰ Campbell pointed to changes in the relationship between “belief and emotion”²¹ whereby the experience of grace became an important emotional element in Protestant practice, a development that ultimately linked well with a rising Romanticism in literature, art, and philosophy.²² Campbell, like Weber, largely ignored the place of women, and specifically mothers and motherhood, in the unfolding of this complex historical dynamic, and he made no substantive mention of children or childhood. He acknowledged, quite late in his argument, that women had been the audience for romantic, sentimental fiction for at least two centuries, offering a stereotypical gender division between male instrumentalism (puritanism) and female sentimentalism to account for the co-presence of both of these “ethics” in the same social class.²³

Other scholars also have sought accommodation and interconnection between high, Evangelical Protestantism and a growing culture of sentiment and consumption in the nineteenth century—rather than a wholesale conquering of one over the other—although not necessarily in direct response to Weber. Historian Peter Slater discusses how the often-ignored emotional component of Protestant faith and practice figured into understandings of disciplining children. He notes that New England writers, from the notorious Cotton Mather (see below) and John Witherspoon in the eighteenth century to authors Louisa May Alcott and Lydia Maria Child in the nineteenth, advocated for mixing love with authority so as to effect a gentle sort of coercion with children.²⁴

Feminist historian Ann Douglas famously wrote of the connection between nineteenth-century middle-class American women of the Northeast and the sentimentalization of religion and, ultimately, of mass culture overall.²⁵ Many of these women, argues Douglas, wrested a measure of cultural influence from men, especially the clergy, by exalting “feminine” qualities of taste, manners, and domesticity over traditional male values of rationality and instrumentality and did so largely through consuming and producing sentimental literature.²⁶ As economic production continued its move from home to factory over the early part of the nineteenth century, a sentimental culture adopted by white, Northeastern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1. A Moral Architecture: Protestant Salvation and the Mother-Child Nexus
• 2. Productive Materialities: Making Bourgeois Childhoods through Taste
• 3. From Discipline to Reward: Reworking Children’s Transgressions
• 4. Simplicity, Money, and Property: Moralities, Materialities, and the Didactic Imperative
• 5. Think and Feel like a Child: Pleasure, Subjectivity, and Authority in Early Children’s Consumer Culture
• Conclusion: Legacies of Value
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author