Playing at Class

[Joanna Sheldon]

At 17:05 26-05-01, you wrote:
>For what it's worth....   Yoshie
>
>*****   Karen Sánchez-Eppler, "Playing at Class," _ELH_ 67 (2000) 819-842
>
>...The invention of childhood entailed the creation of a protracted period 
>in which the child would ideally be protected from the difficulties and 
>responsibilities of daily life -- ultimately including the need to 
>work.  "For the history of children," Priscilla Clement explains, "the 
>legacy of industrialization was the hardening of class lines," with 
>middle-class families' exemption of their children from labor as one of 
>the strongest markers of their difference from the lower classes.2  Thus 
>to the extent that childhood means leisure, having a childhood is in 
>itself one of the most decisive features of class formation.  Yet since 
>the "work" from which children were exempted never fully includes 
>household labor, these general shifts in the definition of childhood 
>function quite differently for girls than for boys.

A point continually reinforced by television ads like the one I saw the 
other night: Mother's preparing dinner while Dad reads the paper, the son 
watches television, and the daughter sets the table.

Thanks for this, Yoshie.

Joanna S.

www.overlookhouse.com