The Moral Project of Childhood : : Motherhood, Material Life, and Early Children's Consumer Culture / / Daniel Thomas Cook.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2020 English
• VerfasserIn: Cook, Daniel Thomas,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Introduction -- 1. A Moral Architecture: Protestant Salvation and the Mother- Child Nexus -- 2. Productive Materialities: Making Bourgeois Childhoods through Taste -- 3. From Discipline to Reward: Reworking Children’s Transgressions -- 4. Simplicity, Money, and Property: Moralities, Materialities, and the Didactic Imperative -- 5. Think and Feel like a Child: Pleasure, Subjectivity, and Authority in Early Children’s Consumer Culture -- Conclusion: Legacies of Value -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author