MARY JO MAYNES

AGE AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS : HIS TORY, AGENCY, AND NARR ATIVE S OF CHILDHOOD

Mary Jo Mayness work asks us to reconceptualize and broaden our notion of childrens agency. Maynes sees this problem as analogous to that of learning to recognize the agency of women which is disguised by the everydayness of their activities and by prevailing views that historical change is a result of the public actions of powerful individuals. She concludes, The effort to assess the place of girls in history brings us to question the very notion of historical agency itself. She goes on to show how life stories, particularly retrospective accounts of childhood, can offer new insights into both the agency of the young and the historical significance of childhood.M.S.

he autobiography of Adelheid Popp, who was an activist in the pre-World

War I Austrian socialist womens movement, provides a provocative opening for reflections on narratives of childhood and the historical agency of young people. Popp recalled that when her family moved to Vienna around 1880, when she was ten, it was left to her to complete the residency registration since her mother could not write. She recalled that she left the column labeled children blank because she didnt think of (herself) as a child. According to Popp:
When Id rush to work at six oclock in the morning, other children of my age were still sleeping. And when I hurried home at eight oclock at night, then the others were going to bed, fed and cared for. While I sat bent over my work, lining up stitch after stitch, they played, went walking or sat in school.

At the time, Popp claims, she accepted her lot as unquestionable; only later in life was she often overcome by a feeling of boundless bitterness because I had never enjoyed childhood pleasures or youthful happiness.1 Note the complexity of Popps narrative, and the challenges it raises for the historian of childhood grappling with questions of agency. At one level, we have a victim story; Popp deploys an account of her unchildish childhood as a
Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (v.1.1) 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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form of social critiquea not uncommon rhetorical device in German socialist autobiography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 However, Popp presents herself as a powerful ten year old. She was contributing to the familys income; she could read when her mother could not; she helped the family navigate the Viennese bureaucracy. In fact, from beginning to end Popp is much more the agent of her own destiny than is her mother, presented as the classic long-suffering German working-class mother. In addition, Popps comments underscore the ongoing reinterpretation of her childhood story over her lifetime. Only later in life did she realize that her childhood ought to have been different; this realization further contributed to Popps evolving sense of agency as an adult political activist. Using the problems raised by Popps account, I will address two issues: first, conceptualizing the historical agency of the young, and of girls in particular; and second, exploring how individual life stories, and in particular stories about childhood, illuminate and complicate notions of historical agency.

GIRLS HISTORY AND CHILDREN/YOUTH AS AGENTS OF HISTORY

In exploring the problem of agency through the history of girlhood, I am drawing directly on insights that are not mine alone but come both from my work with European workers autobiographies and more recently out of my experience working on the book Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 17501960.3 My co-editors, Birgitte Sland and Christina Benninghaus and I worked over a three-year period with an international group of scholars who are all interested in girls and girlhood. In the end we had no problem arguing that, despite girls marginality from centers of power and also from the processes of record keeping that are the bases of historical analysis, taking girls into account pushes us toward a revision of many aspects of modern European history. In short, girls do make history. Three examples emerge from various realms we explored in the bookmaterial and symbolic, institutional, and representational. First, girls labor helps to explain Europes particular path toward economic development before and during the Industrial Revolution. For example, girls comprised the bulk of the worlds first factory labor force and they were imagined as labor in the schemes of state economic planners and private entrepreneurs as early as the seventeenth century. Second, girls were on the political agenda in varied and changing ways as the modern welfare states were under construction. They were, for example, the object of many pronatalist and nationalist projects by dint of their centrality

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to reproduction. They were, of course, not merely passive objects of policy, but also active participants in the interactions of governing. Third, symbolically, as cultural emblems, girls have stood variously for national purity or for the excitement of modernity, but also for pollution, political oppression, and exploitation. At the same time, girls actions constructed, contradicted, and often defied such representations. In sum, girls as both historical actors and icons were at the center of Europes emerging modernity between the mid-eighteenth and the early-twentieth centuries. Still, by most usual criteria, girls have acted from positions of relative powerlessness, marginality, and invisibility. And they have often been acted on. How, then, are we to understand the agency of girls in history? And how does a focus on girls roles in history push us to reconsider how we understand historical agency and the ability of even relatively powerless people to function as historical actors? Clearly, many ordinary understandings of agency and power simply do not apply. What historians of women discovered in their earliest forays into writing women into historythat it was impossible to do so without changing the storylineis even truer for girls. Prodding at historical agency through the history of girls underscores a point that feminist historians and historians of childhood, and of many subaltern groups as well, have hammered at. The problem is the inadequacy of prevailing notions of historical agency. For a start, there is the concept of the individual inherent in hegemonic understandings of the ideal-typical historical or social actor. That actor is posited as everything a child, especially a girl child, is not supposed to be: autonomous, driven by the imperatives of rational choice, aware of how the world works. Thinking about girls as historical agents goes right to the heart of the contradictions in modern conceptualizations of individual agency as epitomized by rational choice models. But even historians who reject that notion of agency and who search for heroes in some of the more subversive traditions of historiographylabor history comes to mind heretend to structure their narratives around moments of political rebellion or heroic action in the public sphere, narratives that are difficult to construct around the sorts of actions and choices girls mostly have been able to take, and have taken.4 Thinking about girls in historyand I would think that this would extend to some extent to male children and youth as wellpresents in a more extreme form the feminist problem of thinking about how womens everyday activities embody historical agency. The world would not be as it is without them. They have an ongoing history. And yet the usual ways of talking about change over time generally do not take them into account. In the end, the effort to address

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the contributions of girls to history brings us to question the very notion of historical agency itself.

A PROBLEM OF SOURCES?
The problem of agency is compounded by problem of sources. Historians have trouble conceptualizing children and youth as historical actors because so few of the sources speak directly from their experiences. Here again we find an exacerbated version of the general problem of history from below or subaltern history in that children cannot and do not speak for themselves in most historical records about them. As historians of childhood know, the sources documenting the history of childhood and youth are at best scattered, often sketchy and inconsistent. One well-recognized characteristic of the documentary sources is that adults have produced almost all of the available evidence on which the history of children and childhood has been based. As we looked at the documentary source base for girls in particular, we noted a special problem that reflects the bigger methodological dilemma with which historians must always grapplenamely the extent to which our image of the past is driven by the agendas and perspectives of the record keepers in the pastby their agendas, not ours, and not those of the multitude of historical actors about whom they speak. Paradoxically, women and girls have generally been warned against and protected from attracting public attention. Public attention paid to a girl was a sign of her failure to maintain privacy and respectability, an indication that she was trouble, or in trouble. (This tradition in the West traces back to Ancient Greece; similarly, in orthodox Confucianist thinking, the virtuous woman was, at least in principle, one about whom nothing was known in public.5) Almost by definition then, girls and young unmarried women in many cultures exist on the margins of public life, and also, by definition, their activities are not normally part of the public record. These caveats must influence our reading of the historical evidence about girls that we do have. Obviously, then, much of the history of girls, and by extension, of children and youth more generally is actually the history of the ways in which adults tried to shape or characterize the young or remember their own or others youths. The discourses and definitions of authorities and other dominant players are, of course, invaluable. Yet at the same time these discourses are profoundly problematic, tied as they are to particular forms of definition, particular (and highly gendered) notions of private and public concerns, and so on. Returning to the case of European girls, the increasing visibility in the historical record in modern eras of some (not all) girls is both

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the cause and result of their being regarded as a social problem, in contrast to the more normal and respectable girls who kept to the private realm. Thus, historical documentation, or the lack thereof, is a product of the very historical processes under examination in the history of girlhood and reflects dimensions of that history itself, with its regional, chronological, and class variations. The very source materials on which we depend bring the risk of our simply reproducing the visions of girlhood and its problems that drove this documentation. They also make problematic efforts to write girlsor more broadly children and youthinto history as heroes of their own lives, as agents and actors rather than merely as the acted upon.6 However, upon reflection it becomes clear that this isnt merely a problem for historians interested in the agency of girls, or of young people more generally. Obviously historical agency is problematic in all historical accounts and all causal explanations. If adult agency appears as unproblematic in historical action (especially the agency of powerful adult males), if the problem comes to the surface only when we speak of children (or women or working-class people or the enslaved or colonial subjects etc.), then it becomes more obvious that the problem lies with the explicit or implicit notions of agency and power that operate in social theory and in historiography. If the problem seems mainly to be one of sources, then we are assuming too transparent a connection between agency and the expression of subjectivityas if we could somehow resolve the problem of motivation and power by knowing what people say about it. In this respect then, the problem of agency in the history of childhood is merely a special case of the problem of historical agency more broadly; as Steven Mintz suggests in his essay in this issue, the history of childhood and youth does indeed echo and parallel the history of gender in calling into question usual notions of historical agency and explanation.

LIFE STORIES, SUBJECTIVITY, AGENCY, AND NARRATIVES OF CHILDHOOD

I will turn now to a brief discussion of personal narratives, and in particular, to the stories of childhood they often include. What follows is not so much a solution to the problem of childrens agency posed above, but the laying out of another related problemthe problem of historical causality and the role that childhood plays as a causal force in personal narratives. These concerns also originate in my research on working-class autobiographies, but they are very much informed by subsequent discussions in a collaborative project on personal narrative analysis in the social sciences on which I am working with sociologists Jennifer Pierce and Barbara Laslett.7

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One of our arguments is that analyses based on personal narratives can help social scientists to rethink the problems of historical agency and social action and to bridge inappropriate analytic distinctions between the individual and social that still characterize much of social theory. Analyses of personal narratives unpack individual agencythat is, reveal its internal workings as socially and historically constructed. We demonstrate how personal narratives show how individuals strategize and act, not alone, but rather always embedded in social relations, in institutions, and in history. Life stories provide a unique perspective on the intersection of individual, collective, institutional, and societal evolution as captured in narratives. At their centers are accounts of what people have done during their lives set in the context of their evolving understandings of why they have done so, and with what consequences. Empirically, they provide access to individuals claims about how their motivations and actions have been shaped by memories, emotions, imagination, and cumulative life experiencesin other words, claims about the impact of personal pasts on human agency. They thus offer a methodologically privileged location from which to view significant aspects of human agency including the cultural circulation of understandings of that agency. Life stories also provide a unique approach to understanding historical dynamics. Because the narrative forms they typically employ are infused with specific notions of causality, they link the individual life and the sense of agency that structures it with the collective destiny. In analyses of life stories, two salient temporalities continually interact. Historical time contextualizes each life course and the possibilities it presents, even while an authors moment in the life course and in time affects how s/he remembers, relates, and interprets historical events. Most sociological and social-historical discussions of agency emphasize interests as if these could be inferred from social-historical positionality. As important as such a logic of inference has been for the evolution of social history in general and the history of the family and of childhood in particular, it is not adequate for all purposes. Nevertheless, we cannot properly understand agency without understanding its subjective dimensions, including, significantly, those structured in and by childhood, as these vary across particular social and historical contexts and locations and across the life course. One of the implications of these observations is that narratives of childhood can be very telling indeednot as direct evidence of the experience of children, of course, but rather as sources of insights into the impact and meanings of childhood, and of childhood as a phase of the construction of agency and subjectivity. Personal narrative analyses can connect personal development and historical development in even deeper ways by problematizing the operation

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of historical narratives within personal narratives. A good illustration of this sort of insight is provided by Dorothee Wierlings analysis of life history interviews conducted with members of the cohort of East Germans born in 1949. Wierling demonstrates how these personal narratives undercut more public narratives in revealing ways. In particular, Wierling argues that the official history of the Nazi era in postwar East Germany that celebrated anti-fascist heroes and victims of capitalist fascism in ritualized commemorations at the Buchenwald concentration camp was related in a very contradictory way to the more emotionally salient and private memories of GDR childhoods that came to the surface in life histories Wierling collected in the 1990s. Narrators recalled their early childhood identification with their parents, who are remembered more as the real victims of the war and postwar political and economic sufferings. According the Wierling, these 49ers even remember suffering that they were too young to really have experienced. Moreover, the inculcation of the official history through such rituals as Buchenwald visitsa component of the official coming-of-age ceremony in East Germanysometimes backfired in that it generated fascination with violence rather than identification with the victims. Wierling uses this subtle analysis of the interplay between personal narrative and public historical narratives to suggest the dynamics of what she terms return of the repressed in the form of unspeakable but real shows of sympathy for or fascination with the Nazis that later resurfaced in East German neo-Nazism. As Wierling puts it, (in) the GDR too, the past had many potentials. In other words, childhood experience functions, not just when it happens in real time, but, because of the dynamics of intersecting temporalities and ongoing personality development, as a life-long phenomenon, continually subject to revision, continually significant in the operation of human agency in the present, continually historical.8 In this respect, then, fully capturing historical dynamics and historical agency requires attention to childhood. To some extent, there is again a parallel with feminist analysis and the claim for the necessity of attention to the role of the personal in history more generally. Many life stories assume that the personal matters and, also assume that family life and childhood matter (whether they take a psychoanalytical or some other approach to the impact of childhood and family life). But not all do. The contrasting case here would be the biography of a man which begins in adulthood and assumes that all that matters is what takes place in the realm of public life. The latter sort of life storybiographical or autobiographicalmeshes nicely with modern Western masculinist notions of the autonomous self; the former sort challenges that construct. Under what conditions is childhood analytically necessary to expose the logic of the life

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story and the development of the subject-author? Addressing this sort of question of course raises huge comparative issues about the evolution of genres and conventions of the telling of life stories and the connections between the history of life stories and the history of the self. For example, early Chinese biographies include childhood stories, but they tend to be formulaic and perfunctory and predictive of the kind of life being recountedchildhood is implicitly regarded as more the product or emblem of the adult destiny than its cause.9 On the other hand, for what analytic purposes does the temporal depth of the life story matter? What difference does it make if childhood is or is not part of the causal account that explains a life in history? When has the childhood account seemed analytically necessary in social-science research? The answer depends on the analytic aim of the research, of course. Since individual life histories and social-historical forces evolve in connection with one another, the probing of life history research needs to extend back far enough in time to capture relevant social-historical and individual dynamics. Social scientists who use personal narratives make a variety of different choices about how deeply to delve into their informants histories. Some are satisfied with quite shallow life stories, but others find that they can only answer their questions by going all the way back. Kath Weston, for example, writing on contemporary lesbian identity in the United States: Talk to someone in the United States about gender for more than twenty minutes and youre likely to walk away with a childhood story.10 For many analytic purposes, we are persuaded, social dynamics significant for agency and social action begin to be established in childhood. In some cases, the process of telling a life story can itself jog self-consciousness that brings about awareness of changes in identity that have occurred over time, but are rooted in the distant past. For example, for each of the six African Americans in Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoots Respect: An Exploration, agreeing to participate in her project on race, hierarchies, and social mobility created some spaces for self-reflection.11 The stories suggest a doubled narrative of mobilitynot only do they record attributes and accomplishments that have changed over their life course, but also changes in the meaning of the characteristics or categories that they use to describe themselves. This can be seen, perhaps most clearly, in accounts of relationships with family members or childhood associatesthe desperate search to flee from them, to have differentiated oneself from them early in life, perhaps followed later by the need to reconnect with them. Similar accounts of identities rooted in childhood and continually renegotiated over time emerged from my own work with European working-class autobiographies. Workers self-understandings and their allusions to their categories

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for thinking about themselves evolved over the life course in a process of self definition that continually reverted to childhood stories (often, interestingly enough, in communication with other contradictory narratives about childhood gleaned from other real or fictional accounts). Adelheid Popps story, with which I began, is paradigmatic in this respect. Similarly, her colleague Anna Altmann deployed the commonplaces of German language and popular cultural associations with childhood as rhetorical weapons of class warfare:
The garlands woven by the proletariat on the path through life arent like those of the rich and fortunate, because by the cradle of the proletarian child there stand behind the actual parents a second coupleFather Sorrow and Mother Needwho also claim their rights. Today when I recall . . . pictures of the past, the first to emerge are the dark shadows of my ruined youth. The golden days that the children of the rich enjoyed under the protection of their guardians were never granted to me.12

These narratives (like so many of the German socialist narratives of the preWorld War I era) locate the origins of class identity early in lifefar earlier than the heros or heroines first encounter with the workplace, the union, or the party meeting. Revealing a past as a child martyr was typical in German socialist memoirs of the industrial era; class exploitation was, in this analysis, first evidenced in its negative impact on working-class family life. The historical subject-in-the-process-of-becoming experiences exploitation prior to the maturation of a level of class consciousness and accompanying political analysis that would have allowed for its appropriate interpretation. In this case, looking at personal narratives in greater depth uncovered stories of identity formation, dating from and referring back to a reconstructed childhood, processes of identity formation and notions of agency that emerge only through this sort of retrospective narrative. Moreover, the significance of historical framesthe changing context between a time when such childhoods were taken for granted (by the remembered child but also by the remembered adults of that era?) and a time in the present when such childhoods had become a political issueemerges clearly in this example. So, to sum up if not to conclude, my simple point in the first section is that the category of age, like the category of gender, calls attention to methodological, theoretical, and rhetorical dimensions of historical argumentation that are problematic, especially insofar as they rely on notions of agency that cannot even account for the actions of powerful, generally adult male, historical actors, let alone anyone else. And my point in the second section is that in thinking about how people understand their own agency as the central actors in their

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own life stories and thus in history, as revealed through personal narratives, it is possible to see childhood as a dimension of agency, experience, and motivation throughout the life course. It is worth going back to these basic questions about agency, narrative, and the role of childhood in life stories, in assessing age as a category of historical analysis.

NOTES
1. 2. Anonymous [Adelheid Popp], Die Jugendgeschichte einer Arbeiterin. Von ihr selbst erzhlt (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, 1909), 911. For an analysis of German socialist autobiography see Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Mary Jo Maynes, Birgitte Sland, and Christina Benninghaus eds., Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 17501960 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005). The search for heroic behavior that so often has characterized projects of recovering agency of marginal or oppressed groups seems misplaced here. Attention to more subtle forms of everyday resistance to authoritythe weapons of the weak that some postcolonial approaches to agency have emphasizedalso may be helpful in thinking about the historical agency of girls. (The phrase is from James C. Scotts book Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).) But even these interpretations are silent about many of the ordinary everyday activities of girls. The model of subaltern studies, with its emphasis on writing history from the margins of power, of trying to attend to positionalities that are not merely unrecorded by mainstream histories but outside of their logics, is perhaps closer to the point. A pioneering statement of this problem appeared in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Speculations on Widow Sacrifice Wedge 7/8 (Winter/Spring 1985): 120130. For a full discussion of spatial seclusion of respectable women in classical antiquity in the West, see Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Wives, Whores, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken Books, 1995). According to historian of China Ann Waltner, respectable women were supposed to remain out of the public eye entirely; however, ironically, virtuous widows in China could become the subject of public discussion and honor because of their decision not to remarry. Obituaries publicized their honor, as did memorial arches erected in their honor. See Ann Waltner, Spatial Decorum, Transgression, and Displacement in Shen Fus Six Records from a Floating Life in Empire, Nation, and Beyond: Chinese History in Late Imperial and Modern TimesA Festschrift in Honor of Frederic Wakeman, Joseph W. Esherick, Wen-hsin Yeh, and Madeline Zelin eds., China Research Monograph no. 61, (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2006). The origin of this useful concept is Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The History and Politics of Family Violence (New York: Viking, 1988). This argument is developed more fully in Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer Pierce, and Barbara Laslett, Telling Stories: Using Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and Histor y (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming, 2008).

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

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Dorothee Wierling, Conflicting narratives? The first postwar generation in the GDR and the Nazi past. American Historical Association Annual Meeting. Boston, January 5, 2001. See Anne Behnke Kinney ed., Chinese Views of Childhood (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), especially 178. Kath Weston, Render Me, Gender Me (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 45. Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect: An Exploration (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2000).

9. 10. 11.

12. Cited in Maynes, Taking the Hard Road, 6465.