Science in the Service of Children, 1893-1935

Description

This book is the first comprehensive history of the development of child study during the early part of the twentieth century. Most nineteenth-century scientists deemed children unsuitable subjects for study, and parents were hostile to the idea. But by 1935, the study of the child was a thriving scientific and professional field. Here, Alice Boardman Smuts shows how interrelated movements—social and scientific—combined to transform the study of the child.Drawing on nationwide archives and extensive interviews with child study pioneers, Smuts recounts the role of social reformers, philanthropists, and progressive scientists who established new institutions with new ways of studying children. Part history of science and part social history, this book describes a fascinating era when the normal child was studied for the first time, a child guidance movement emerged, and the newly created federal Children’s Bureau conducted pathbreaking sociological studies of children. Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Three Movements, One Goal Part 1 Preparing the Way, 1893–1910 1. Save the Child and Save the Nation: The Rise of Social Feminism and Social Research 2. G. Stanley Hall and the Child Study Movement 3. Scientific Child Rearing, Organized Motherhood, and Parent Education 4. Social Welfare Reformers and Reform-Minded Scientists Part 2. Creating the Models, 1910–1921 5. The Children’s Bureau under Julia Lathrop: Government at Its Best 6. From Juvenile Delinquency Research to Child Guidance 7. Better Crops, Better Pigs, Better Children: The Iowa Child Welfare Research Station Part 3. Breaking Through, 1922–1940 8. The Children’s Decade 9. Child Development Research: Preventive Politics 10. Out of Step with His Times: Arnold Gesell and the Yale Clinic 11. The Child Guidance Movement: Another Approach to Preventive Politics 12. Child Guidance Becomes Child Psychiatry 13. The Children’s Bureau under Grace Abbott: Uphill All the Way Epilogue: What Happened to the Early Movements? The Child Development Field after World War II Notes Index