Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus

Dominique Marshall is an associate professor of history at Carleton
University in Ottawa.

Between 1880 and 1920, “a dedicated band of English Canadians
transformed certain crude notions into a new social consensus on how the
young should be reared.” Idealism, enthusiasm, and experimentation
distinguished this unusually large group. Motivated by religious,
middle-class, and professional ambitions, they transformed institutions
of public health, education, and delinquency. Their converging efforts
were also interpreting nationalist hopes and changing attitudes toward
immigration and the increasing proportion of children raised in cities.
First published in 1976, this study is remarkably inclusive given the
provincial nature of most documents on child welfare.

A new foreword by Cynthia Comacchio provides the historiographical
contexts of the pioneer book in Canadian childhood history, emphasizing
especially the role of French historian Philippe Ariиs. When he started
writing, Sutherland knew that reformers’ concern for the child as a
person, for their emotional lives, and for their productive economic
role represented a domain particularly riddled with nostalgia and
anachronism, and he paid attention to the constitution of images and
myths. In doing so, he also wished to inform contemporary readers about
the old nature of some of their ideas about childhood. This sensitivity
to changes in discourses, as Comacchio rightly points out, prefigured
current concerns for the history of representations.

The preoccupation for childhood allowed Sutherland to open the
boundaries of existing institutional histories to the processes by which
some practices became norms. Indeed, the systematic identification of
agents and contexts of change brought forward a precious number of
facts: studies of reformists accompanied examinations of associations.
Regional case studies helped study the implementation of social measures
such as the Juvenile Delinquent Act of 1908. A sound awareness of the
class and regional limitations informed the findings. Sutherland also
placed Canada under comparative light by tracing lines of influence
between Canada and British and American reform. Despite his attention to
the limits of reformists’ programs and to parents’ resistance,
Sutherland’s analysis of the role of “popular expectations” in the
history of norms was less successful. Indeed, critics of the book have
underlined the limits of this “new consensus” in the history of
children’s experiences. Moreover, Ariиs’ thesis on the increasing
“tenderness” of parents and society has itself been challenged.

But for the poorer quality of the reproduction of the pictures, this
new edition is most welcome. Twenty-five years ago, the book served as a
guideline for many studies of immigrant children, eugenics, or the
“new” rural and vocational education. The thorough review of primary
sources and the careful hypothesis still provide an essential point of
departure for students pursuing Sutherland’s later work: an oral
history of childhood in the later 20th century and two essential
bibliographies on childhood.