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Abstract
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One of the most transcultural markers of what historians call modernity has been an ethical, or at least discursive, prioritizing of children’s welfare. While the neglect of children in traditional patriarchal societies has often been exaggerated, there is no question that the dominant modern norm puts children in the privileged position. This transformation accompanied the historical metamorphosis of children from useful to useless, from workers to objects of sentimentality. 1
In theory, advantaging children is an aspect of modernism, advanced capitalism, and heightened individualism. But in the process of its development, the putting-children-first policy arose from some traditional as well as modern elements. In much of the world, the children-first perspective arrived with women’s increased cultural and political power, and organized women were primarily responsible for creating modern child-welfare consciousness. That women’s activism was, paradoxically, rooted in women’s traditional responsibility for children, even as it constituted part of the modern women’s-rights movement. Putting children first worked to promote motherhood as a claim to respect and power for women. The activist form of this construction, named “maternalism,” allowed women to make citizenship claims without seeming to deviate from their motherly destiny. And yet, in other contexts, the child-centered imperative has sometimes pitted children’s “interests” against those of parents, especially mothers. Thus the putting-children-first perspective has been used to advance diverse, even opposed, social ends. |