The moral project of childhood : motherhood, material life, and early children's consumer culture / Daniel Thomas Cook.

ISBN:

9781479881413

Title:

Author:

Cook, Daniel Thomas, 1961- author.

Personal Author:

Cook, Daniel Thomas, 1961- author.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 217 pages) : illustrations

Contents:

Introduction -- A moral architecture: Protestant salvation and the mother-child nexus -- Productive materialities: making bourgeois childhoods through taste -- From discipline to reward: reworking children's transgressions -- Simplicity, money, and property: moralities, materialities, and the didactic imperative -- Think and feel like a child: pleasure, subjectivity, and authority in early children's consumer culture -- Conclusion: Legacies of value.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Subject Term:

Enfants consommateurs.

Livres numériques.

maternity.

e-books.

SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Sociology -- General.

SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Sociology of Religion.

Child consumers

Consumers

Motherhood

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

http://ezproxy.angliss.edu.au/login?url=http://ezproxy.angliss.edu.au/login?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&AN=2090051

Publication Date:

2020

Publication Information:

New York :

NYU Press,

[2020]

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
306.8743 23	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

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.

Author Notes

Cook Daniel Thomas :

Daniel Thomas Cook is Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden and author of The Commodification of Childhood: The Children's Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

This book treats changes in upper-class education in the 19th-century northeastern US in response to industrialization and the changing nature of religion in society. As mainstream Protestantism relaxed previously dour convictions regarding sinfulness and discipline, newer views held that children were not born sinful, but were instead malleable beings. Concurrently, industrialization reshaped families by putting men to work outside the home, resulting in mothers becoming solely responsible for raising children just as the new economy began to provide bountiful consumer goods. Thus, Cook (Rutgers Univ., Camden) argues that rather than continuing to instruct children according to stern religious values to ensure their moral education, this period emphasized refined taste--a sense of which goods were and were not good--as the new basis of morality and defense of the status quo. Here, however, the author's claim ignores the fact that all knowledge is conditional. This volume might have offered more to a social scientific understanding of the topic had it been more modest in its claims and not replaced historical narrative with sociological jargon and too much exposition. In sum, this is a book for specialists only. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Graduate students and faculty. --Douglas W Steeples, emeritus, Independent Scholar