| This dissertation considers the emergence of “child development” as a scientific project in disciplines such as anthropology, biology, physiology, and psychology at the turn of the last century. As children were increasingly visible as social subjects in an urban and industrial culture, an array of sophisticated practices converged upon childhood and generated the basic coordinates by which we continue to recognize them—as pupils, as patients, as objects of public policy, as symbols of the nation's future, and so forth. These conversations depended upon a view of childhood as legible, visible, and orderly, and I emphasize two particular modes by which that narrative of “development” was authorized: First, through the biological and anthropological discourse of recapitulation (which held that childhood duplicates the biological and/or cultural history of the species); and secondly, through a more experimental program of study that delivered the child as a “numerical person” whose physiological growth may be precisely measured and evaluated against particular norms (height, weight, motor skills and sensation, for example). In examining these images of children, I also consider the ways that scientific conversations about the child development were also conversations about the order of race and gender in modern America. The narrative of recapitulation, which often depicted children as “little savages,” often had less to suggest about the actual treatment of children than it did about the appropriate configuration of racial prestige in a multiracial society. Likewise, assorted claims about the racial organization (and origins) of humanity were never distant from auxiliary remarks about the appropriate distribution of cultural authority over children. While prominent men within the child study movement typically contended that certain forms of care and protection of the young were properly (and naturally) entrusted to women, they frequently depicted motherhood in terms of a romantic, “primitive” sentimental and sympathetic attraction to childhood that could not be squared with the rigors of scientific knowledge. |
