Shaping the Future:
Paula Fass mines the rich history of childhood, both in America and around the globe

Tweaking her profession's central concern with the past, UC Berkeley professor of history Paula Fass finds herself looking back as a way of seeing the future. During a quarter century of historical research, Fass has returned again and again to one particular subject: childhood.

"Every society understands that they create their future through their children," Fass says. "Every culture defines itself through its children. Slicing that particular vein really spills the blood of a culture."

"Mann Page and His Sister Elizabeth," John Wollaston (photo courtesy Virginia Historical Society)

Fass is currently co-editing a three-volume encyclopedia on the history of childhood around the globe, due to appear in the fall of 2003. The encyclopedia is the first of its kind, bringing together over 400 articles drawing on a variety of disciplines. On the whole, the tomes will illuminate a wide range of research on childhood throughout history, but it will also look at specifics ranging from childhood in ancient times, to children soldiers in Africa to the effects of the Cambodian genocide on children.

"We've tried to do what I call a kind of cubist look at childhood," she says. "We really are trying to break up the surface plane, cutting it in various ways, and yet still maintain a coherent view."

Intended for high school classrooms as well as university libraries, the encyclopedia forwards another one of Fass' priorities -- making history meaningful to the present and relevant to people outside the academy. In October of 2003, Fass will host "Childhood: a world history," a two-day conference that will explore many of the issues raised by the encyclopedia.

Working on such a large-scale project inspired Fass to pursue a less broad, but no less ambitious project of her own. During a spring semester sabbatical, Fass will begin research on a book about child-parent relations in America over the past two centuries.

The global reach of the encyclopedia encouraged Fass to take a multicultural approach in her research. In particular, she wants to explore the family relations of immigrant groups as they adjusted to the American way of life.

"We cannot understand the American experience -- politically, economically, socially, as well as culturally -- without understanding the profound way in which parent-child experiences have influenced all those things," she says.

"Mrs. Nakamura and 2 Daughters, Manzanar War Relocation Center," Ansel Adams (Library of Congress photo)

Immigrant families have long straddled the line between cultural adaptation and resistance to change.

For Fass, gender roles are at the forefront. The historian plans to explore how newcomers from more patriarchal societies -- Chinese immigrants, for example -- have both adapted to and resisted aspects of a new society in which women could play a larger role. Each immigrant group has tackled this issue differently, but all have adopted some similar approaches as well.

Parent-child relations are central to how a culture is created, Fass argues, and she hopes to show through her study of parents and children how America has evolved within the space of the domestic household.

"The role of women has been far more important than in other societies," she says. "I want to argue that we have not been a patriarchal society for a long time. By looking at relations between parents and children, you can say that in a way that you couldn't if you only looked at male and female relations."

Fass intends to explore the rich history of child-rearing literature over the past two centuries. As each generation of American parents struggled to raise its children, a huge swath of manuals, books, pamphlets, and other publications emerged to help them do the job right.

The Yiddish-language newspaper Jewish Daily Forward contained an advice column "The Bintel Brief," which preceded Dear Abby and Ann Landers by decades. Among other things, advice seekers wrote in for help with parenting.

Fass catalogues the complaints: "My child doesn't respect me, she says I don't speak English right, I'm embarrassed in front of her friends. Of course, that still happens today."

Newsboys at work in a photo by Lewis Hine (Library of Congress photo)

Fass hopes to supplement such "prescriptive" literature with artifacts of the "felt experience" of parents and children as well.

Fass has a special interest in the relationship between mothers and their sons, and plans to probe this relationship through letters written between mothers and their sons during wartime.

"The concern is rarely about how mothers raise their daughters," she explains."The usual concern is how they raise sons for war."

In arguing that women took on a much greater role in shaping American society than is commonly perceived, Fass aims to give today's women a sense of their own importance. It's a way of making history relevant to the present, of making people into "historical beings."

"I really would like to see much more of a dynamic relationship between the past and present," she says. Fass has personally felt a similarly dynamic tie between her personal life and her academic pursuits. From her first book on American youth in the '20s, to a 1991 book about American education, to her last book on child kidnapping, Fass acknowledges that childhood has long remained her principal focus, even if it hasn't always been obvious to her.

"It didn't even occur to me that that was the path I had taken until I did this book on child kidnapping and realized -- oh my goodness -- there really was a connection," she says.

Fass says her interest may well stem from her own childhood. And of course, as a mother, she has a very personal stake in her research.

"I didn't experience motherhood as a historian," she explains. "But certainly there's something in being a mother and learning that there are things in history that mothers could learn from that motivated me." -- Todd Dayton