The Moral Project of Childhood argues and demonstrates that fundamental problems stemming from a growing acceptance of children’s moral, spiritual, intellectual, and behavioral pliability drive the assembly of a contemporary “moral architecture” of childhood from extensive maternal responsibility coupled with the increasingly hegemonic presence and existence of child subjecthood. Drawing on materials published in periodicals intended for women and mothers from the 1830s to the 1930s, the book examines how mothers—and, later, commercial actors—found themselves compelled to consider children’s interiorities: their perspectives, needs, wants, pleasures, and pains. In this process, the child’s subjectivity progressively, albeit unevenly, arises as a form of authority in a variety of contexts, including discourses about Christian motherhood, the elements of cultural taste, and the discipline and punishment of children, as well as in machinations about play and toys, questions of children’s property rights, and the uses of money by and for children.
The book considers the Protestant origins of the child consumer—a somewhat unlikely pairing—and makes visible and relevant the prefigurative elements and rhetorics from which the child consumer emerges as a contemporary, dominant, and normative ideal.