The Care for Children in Early Modern English Society
Early modern English child rearing practices like wet-nursing,
swaddling, prescriptive literature and apparent lack of parental
emotional attachment has caused much discussion, regarding the care of
children. Philippe Aries and Lawrence Stone used these ideas, amongst
others, to suggest that parents did not care for their children.
Their ideas have been challenged by a number of historians who argue
that, through research of first hand accounts in diaries and official
records, it is clear that children were cared for and even though
these practices appear to our modern society as uncaring and cruel
they were, in fact, carried out with the best of intentions.
Aries in Centuries of Childhood (1962) claimed that before medieval
times the idea of a state of childhood was non-existent and parents
were not aware of the need to treat them any differently to adults.
He studied the depiction of children in paintings of the time and
concluded that children were treated the same as adults because they
were portrayed the same, with the same clothing and features. Aries,
along with Lawrence Stone, argued that there was, however, a change in
attitudes towards children during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, when adults began to realise that children were emotionally
different to them and as such needed protecting.
Although most people now saw that children were different to adults
and as such needed to be treated differently, they believed that
children needed guidance and instruction to be good. Much of the
literature available for children at the time was in a prescriptive
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Edition, 1812
http://www.calvaryroadbaptist.org/TokenIndex-james_janeway.htm
(Accessed January 2005)
Pollock, L. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations, Cambridge
University Press, 1983
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[1] Janeway, J. A Token for Children, 1676
[2] Sharpe, J. A. Early Modern England: A Social History 1550-1760,
Hodder Arnold, 1993, p. 75
[3] Quoted in Stone, L. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England
1500-1800, Penguin Books, 1990, p. 269
[4] Houlbrooke, R. The English Family 1450-1700, Longman Group Ltd,
1992, p. 132
[5] ibid, p. 269
[6] Ibid, p. 133
[7] Stone, L. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800,
Penguin Books, 1990, p. 270
[8] Extract from Lady Anne Clifford’s Diary - July 1619
Using the primary sources in chapter 2, child-rearing in Puritan New England was described as the responsibility of Puritan parents. By introducing their children to the importance of education, Puritan parents agreed that child-rearing is a methods that will help ensure their children’s spiritual welfare (Hollitz, 22). The two main goals Puritans taught their children are reading and writing. It is a system they believed that will properly mold their offspring. Parents also taught basic beliefs of religion and principles of government to their children (Hollitz, 22). Puritans took child-rearing very seriously; by using different practices to help the children’s writing development, they are responsible to write: diaries, journals, letters, histories, sermons, and notes on sermons. Although Puritan husband have the power within the household, other than house chore and wifely duties, the mother is mostly in charge of child rearing and provided their child with the proper education on reading, writing, and spiritual (Hollitz, 23).
Compared to people in the twenty-first century, with all their modern conveniences and technological advances, the life of any early-American seems difficult. However, the lives of children were among the most arduous. Linda Pollock states in her book Forgotten Children that between 1660 and 1800 families -and society in general- became more affectionate, child-oriented, and permissive of uniqueness and unstructured time (67). Although this may be true, many other sources depict the lives of children as taxing and oppressive at best. Children of the time were either forced to abandon education for their family contributions, or had to balance school with a full day's work ("Education"). Even when they were not in school or doing manual labor, their day-to-day lives were uncomfortable and harsh (Kids). Social status, as is expected, was a key factor in determining how hard a child's life would be (Murray 9). Although many children at the time had it easier than others they were all asked at an early age to take on adult responsibilities. The lives of all children in 1800 were mundane and difficult due to family and societal expectations for labor, schooling, and maturity.
The practice of medicine in medieval times played a very important role in society. The communities and civilizations would not have survived without the treatments that were offered. In order to have kept the population going, medicine was required. The population might have been much smaller, or even tanked without the hope of these medicines in certain cases. If the Black Death had not occurred, most of the advancements in medicine would not have taken place. While this was a devastating event in history and a misery for all of the people affected, it led the way to many new improvements in medicine. Medical recipes were developed which used the resources they had available to create relief for some of the illnesses that affected people at that time and which we still have today. The medical issues that could not be cured with the herbs and resources they had available required surgery. Compared to modern surgeries, medieval surgeries were very different. Surgery was only performed if it was the last resort and there was no other option. They had to use poisonous resources, which could be extremely dangerous. Today, we take for granted the opportunities we have with surgery, and if we need it there is sometimes no thinking twice, as in the case of someone who gets plastic surgery to change the appearance of a part of the body. Although these practices may seem like they have no affect on where we have advanced to today, they in fact do. Without the practice of medieval medical recipes and surgical practices, the medical world would not be where it is today.
Collapse of medieval social structure paved the way for the policies which majorly concentrated on the upliftment of poor. This resulted in the poor relief act for the betterment of the underprivileged people of the society. During 1547 beggars were grouped as ‘V’ and were forced to slavery for two years. The law of 1572 continued this approach stating that beggars should be punished and for a third offence should be given death penalty. The only help for poor people was through private charity. Growing numbers of beggars and vagrants were of great concern to the then ruling government. They were of the view that this might lead to social disorder and hence a distinction was being made between the poor. The poor then were categorized into deserving and the undeserving poor. The deserving poor consisted of the elderly and the very young and families who occasionally found themselves in financial difficulties due to a change in circumstance they were considered deserving of social support. The undeserving poor were those people who often turned to crime to make their living, migrant wo...
Concepts of femininity in eighteenth-century England guided many young women, forging their paths for a supposed happy future. However, these set concepts and resulting ideas of happiness were not universal and did not pertain to every English woman, as seen in Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice. The novel follows the Bennet sisters on their quest for marriage, with much of it focusing on the two oldest sisters, Jane and Elizabeth. By the end, three women – Jane, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s friend, Charlotte Lucas – are married. However, these three women differ greatly in their following of feminine concepts, as well as their attitude towards marriage. Austen foils Jane, Charlotte, and Elizabeth’s personas and their pursuits of love, demonstrating that both submission and deviance from the rigid eighteenth-century concepts of femininity can lead to their own individualized happiness.
Ulrich shows a progression of change in the way that women’s sexuality was viewed in New England. First, she starts with a society that depended on “external rather internal controls” and where many New Englanders responded more to shame than guilt (Ulrich 96). The courts were used to punish sexual misconducts such as adultery with fines, whippings, or sometimes even death. There were certain behaviors that “respectable” women were expected to follow and “sexual misbehavior” resulted in a serious decline of a woman’s reputation from even just one neighbor calling her names such as whore or bawd (Ulrich 97-98). Because the love between a man and his wife was compared to the bond between Christ and the Church, female modesty was an important ideal. “Within marriage, sexual attraction promoted consort; outside marriage, it led to heinous sins” (Ulrich 108). This modesty was expected to be upheld even as death approached and is seen with the example of Mary Mansfield in 1681. Ulrich describes Mary to have five neck cloths tucked into her bosom and eleven caps covering her hair. “A good wife was to be physically attractive…but she was not to expose her beauty to every eye”. Hence, even as she died, Mary was required to conceal her sexuality and beauty. However, at the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the
Do you love fashion, food, and sports? During the Elizabethan Era these things were a little different then what it is today. In today’s time we listen to music for fun, go to parties, or even a movie. Elizabethan Era had other ways of having fun. The people during this time played chess, golf, watched bears fight, and even went animal hunting. However, they also did things that we do today such as dance and even went to theaters to see plays. People who have seen a play from the Elizabethan know that the fashion has changed. Back in the Elizabethan Era time women mostly wore gowns, hats, corsets, and shoes. The corset was not meant to draw in the waist and not create an hourglass figure; rather it was designed to mold the torso in a cylindrical shape, and to flatten and raise the bustline. As for the men, they wore ruffs, hats, doublets, and shoes. The ruff which evolved from the small fabric ruffle at the drawstring neck of the shirts was worn by the men. They served as changeable piece of cloth that could themselves be laundered separately while keeping the wear’s doublet from bec...
IT WASN’T EASY LIVING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. In the middle ages 400 AD thru 1300 AD, there was a system call the hierarchy. The hierarchy was the feudalism system that was based on mutual obligations.The highest person in the royalty system would be the king, the king has all power and control over everyone. The next in the hierarchy would be the clergy, the clergy is filled with Popes, bishops, archdeacons, abbot, priors, deans, priests, and monk. You wouldn’t think their would be any other people under the monks, but they were. After the monks there were friars, clerics, vicars, barber surgeons, chaplains, confessors, scribes, and culdees. The people on the bottom of the hierarchy were the system of peasantry. Some peasants had more rights than others such as, the vallien was the wealthy class of peasants. Serfs and commoner lived in small communities, they couldn't leave or marry without their lord's permission. Next in line came the smallholder, they were the middle class peasants who farmed more than a cottager, but less land than a vallien. Some people owned the farms and worked on it. In the middle ages there were women and men who practiced being trappist. People chose to give their life to the churches because they found it a more appealing way to get closer to God. For the women, they gave up everything to become a nun because they weren’t able to be educated. Once the women became nuns they were able to learn how to read and write. As for men, they became monks because they were being offered a peaceful quiet place to escape from the violence in the world and get more close to their god. Women and men in the middle ages preferred to devote their lives to churches, because they found it a better lifestyle.
In this essay I will be discussing my concept of childhood and how it compares to my understanding of the theories and concepts of John Locke and John Wesley. I have chosen to look at these two theorists as although they lived in similar times their theories and concepts on children were influenced by very different factors and so differ greatly from each other and in most respects differ from my own concepts. My concept of childhood is influenced by personal experience and the views of my parent.
Within popular discourse, the historical period of the Middle Ages is synonymous with the term “Dark Ages”: how did this particular equation come about? The immediate connotations of the Dark Ages are clearly negative: they suggest oppression, ignorance and a period of motionless in human development. The reason behind this description of the Middle Ages is arguably the result of a contrast to the subsequent periods of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment: the Renaissance itself signals a “new birth”, whereas the Enlightenment clearly evokes images of a new insight and vision wielded by humanity. Accordingly, the negative values ascribed to the Middle Ages are the result of this historical period’s difference to the Renaissance. Such an account, namely, judges the Middle Ages from an entirely different world-view.
The dictionary definition of a child is a young human being, an immature person and offspring (Oxford, 1976). This idea is reflected in Mead’s statement ‘that children to adults are representative of something weak and helpless in need of protection, supervision, training, models, skills, beliefs and ‘character’’ (Montgomery et al, 2003, p vii). The emphasis is on the concept of the child by adults rather than the size or mentality raising the notion that a child, and therefore childhood, is not just a biological concept but also an ideological one (Falconer, 2009). This ideology makes an oxymoron of Children’s Literature according to Rose (Hunt, 2009a) as adults write, publish and purchase books with each set of adults having their own ideas about childh...
Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550-1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 37-9 Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.lib.utah.edu/journals/parergon/v019/19.1.crawford.pdf
Somewhere around the beginning of the seventeenth century, the perception of the nature of childhood -- its duration, its perceived purpose, its requirements, its quality -- changed rather significantly in the Eurocentric world, a period Valerie Suransky identifies as a watershed for the modern notion of childhood (1982, p. 6). Actually, two things seemed to have happened: first, the idea of childhood as a separate developmental stage began to arise; second, the idea of who was deserving of childhood also began to broaden. The pattern was similar in Europe and America, with some minor variations which resulted from geography, religion, etc., but the differences are inconsequential. Generally speaking, the factors which influenced this change are the view of the nature of humankind, the development of industry, urbanization, parents themselves, and the women's movement.
The text depicts a historical perspective on Middle Childhood, as during the twentieth century, children were viewed primarily as an economic source of income, in terms of providing for the family. According to the text this happens often in European counties and in parts of the United States. Elizabeth D. Hutchinson, Dimensions of Human Behavior The Changing Life Course 3rd, 2008. In this short review we will look at how this historical perspective in itself is not a question to how, but when these individual give.
Child Labor and England’s Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century England brought about many changes in British society. It was the advent of faster means of production, growing wealth for the Nation and a surplus of new jobs for thousands of people living in poverty. Cities were growing too fast to adequately house the numerous people pouring in, thus leading to squalid living conditions, increased filth and disease, and the families reliance upon their children to survive.