3: Little Democrats
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Gentle Boy” & The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair (1840)
- Horace Mann, “Report No 12 of the Massachusetts School Board” (1848)
Seminar Preparation
Last week we considered what might be called “overtly” coercive principles of child-rearing in Puritan New England, which were suggested by doctrines of predestination, infant damnation, and Original Sin, and which insisted on the virtue of work/study over play, the fear of God, acceptance of death, self-discipline (reinforced by corporal punishment when required), and so on. Yet we also noted a tension in Puritan attitudes to children that simultaneously expressed a deep investment in the progressive possibility of education both to steer the individual child to the good life, and to improve society as a whole. We also noted that the religious convictions of the Puritans, far from supporting their reputation for being uncaring and even brutal towards children, actually underscored the responsibility of both parents and the community to raise children well, placing special emphasis on the bond between mother and child, and emphasizing the need for “individualized” child-rearing practices that acknowledged that “[d]iverse children have their different natures” (Bradstreet) Consequently, while Puritan doctrine suggested a model of childhood that was innately evil, the representation of childhood and child-rearing practices suggested something close to the model of the malleable “immanent child.”
We take a big historical leap into the early nineteenth-century this week to consider the legacy of this model on the emergence of a public state education system in the United States in the 1830s. Focusing on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann, the seminar will introduce some central issues that impacted on ideas about childhood and attitudes to children through the nineteenth-century century.
1. The rise of national, State sponsored education.
2. The emergence of a Separate Spheres ideology, and the related Cult of Domesticity.
Relating these issues to the debate topic on “education as the destruction of childhood,” the seminar asks us to think about what the (US) State wishes from its children. Recalling from last week how ideas of childhood and child-rearing can contain an investment in the capacity of education to produce an ideal future citizen – and therefore an ideal future State – what kind of citizens do Mann and Hawthorne want? What kind of future citizen are they most afraid of? You could also consider how gender roles are (implicitly) defined in these texts (if at all). I have identified “democracy” in the week’s title as one of the issue of concerns in this respect. How is this played out in the texts? What vision of America does Hawthorne present to children in his tales?
Roy Harvey Pearce has argued that Hawthorne’s stories for children sought to teach the child “the proper image of itself.” What is the “proper” image of childhood? If it is proper to the child, then why does it need to be taught? Having identified in week one a range of philosophical models of childhood, which one to you feel to be most “true” to your sense of what childhood is? What mode of education do you think might be most successful in teaching the child the “proper image of itself”?
Hawthorne, Education, and The Cult of Domesticity
The material this and next week is all drawn from a rather socially incestuous group of people living and working in Massachusetts in the early to mid nineteenth-century. The connection is through three sisters: Sophia, Maria and Elizabeth Peabody. Sophia Peabody married Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1842, after a prolonged courtship (she was 32, he was 36). Elizabeth Peabody, who we will be looking at next week, was a very active within Transcendentalist circles, an early feminist, and a pioneer in early education. Maria became Horace Mann’s second wife in 1843.
Mann was the chief architect of the American public or “common” school system. (“Public” school in American meaning, far more logically than in Britain, a school for children from the general public, rather than a private fee paying school!) Politically conservative, Mann nevertheless introduced a raft of reform in his role as the secretary of the newly formed Board of Education for the state from 1836, which introduced most of the practices we are familiar with today: a centralized State school system, separate class rooms for different levels of ability (although this was not yet strictly defined by age), no corporal punishment, a range of subjects on the curriculum and so on.
As you will quickly find out in your research, issues of childhood are closely related to ideas about the family, the home – or domesticity – and its associated gender roles. The nineteenth- century witnessed an increasingly sharp division of family roles into what we now think of as a “traditional” division of labor, whereby women and children are associated exclusively with the “private sphere” of the home, and men with the bread-winning “public” sphere of business and work. (Hence the term “separate spheres“). The concurrent rise of feminism through the century challenged this division, although it was still quite firmly in place in Britain and America as the correct and “natural” way to organize family life as late as the 1960s.
The specific place of childhood within this ideology has only begun to be examined. Most early studies of up to he 1990s tend to examine how this ideology patterns expectation of children’s own gender roles: so, for example, that girls are expected to prepare for their future roles of wife and mother by playing “house” with dolls, while boys are offered a range of toys that might either prepare them for certain professions (chemistry sets, tool, train sets, and so on), or are encouraged to play competitive games that will prepare them for the world of work. Two obvious figures who confound this process are “tomboys” (otherwise known by that wonderful term “hoydon”) and “cissies” – and we will be considering these figures more closely later in the course.
Many critics have commented on the success with which Nathaniel and his wife Sophia Hawthorne succeeded on achieving a model of nineteenth-century domestic bliss in their marriage. T Walter Herbert has made perhaps the most extensive study of this aspect of Hawthorne’s life and writing in his study Dearest Beloved: Hawthorne and the Making of the Middle Class Family. Herbert takes as his starting point the frequently argued point that the renowned success of the Hawthornes’ marriage was based on a shared conviction in an ideal of bourgeois domesticity – more broadly described as the Cult of Domesticity – which had gained increasing credence among the nineteenth-century middle classes. Sophie in particular fervently believed that the home was women’s true “great arena,” and that they should therefore steer well clear of public life, despite having been raised in by an early Unitarian feminist Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.
The fact that this model of a distinct nuclear family is not only fairly new, in historical terms, and that it is one that is very closely related to the increasing cultural dominance of the middle-classes in the nineteenth-century is seemingly forgotten in popular discourse. (The nuclear family has, in Roland Barthes’s terms from Mythologies, become ideologically “naturalised”). Part of what I want us to therefore consider this week is the historical moment when this model began to be promoted as the “proper” one, and to think about how this impacted on ideas and representations of childhood.
Further Reading
Primary Sources
Horace Mann, “Report No. 12 of the Massachusetts School Board (1848),” in Lawrence A. Cremin, ed., The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men (1957), 79-80, 84-97. E-Text: Info USA: US Department of State.
Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer. Chapter 1, “Plans” from Record of a School: Exemplifying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture. First edition—Boston: James Munroe and Co., 1835. Second edition—Boston: Russell, Shattuck and Co., 1836. Third edition—Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874. E-Text, edited and compiled from all three editions by Paul S. Christensen.
Secondary Sources
Barthes, Roland, “Myth Today,” Mythologies
Herbert, T Walter, Dearest Beloved The Hawthornes & the Making of the Middle-Class Family (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics) (Paperback) University of California Press; New Ed edition (13 Mar 1995)
Lawrence A Cremin, The Genius of American education : Horace Mann lecture, 1965. Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 1965.
Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, Other Children’s Stories : A Wonder Book for Children, Tanglewood Tales.
American Childhoods 