Volume 25, Number 11 · June 29, 1978
Throwaways
By Rosemary Dinnage
Infanticide
by Maria W. Piers
Norton, 139 pp., $7.95
'Good mothering,' a historian of childhood has roundly declared, 'is an invention of modernization'; and 'the history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken,' writes another.[*] The school of historians who are turning their attention away from public affairs to family relationships is, for the most part, bringing us a depressing story, and it is still an open question whether we can take such sweeping statements as the last word. In the meantime, if we had supposed that our present-day increase in mental illness and loneliness was somehow linked with the indifference of a mechanized society toward the un-mechanized—toward the mother-and-baby, for instance, who are not allowed a quiet comfortable place for birth and lactation—we have been forced to think again, and wonder if we idealized the customs of simpler societies. For from their study of religious tracts and parish records, child-care manuals and legal decisions, from memoirs, correspondence, and a host of other sources, the historians of childhood have put together a sorry picture of child labor, punishment, indifference, and intolerance, of children persistently treated as things rather than persons.
Review, 2825 words
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