The World Images site, a project of California State University, is designed for simplicity of use if not aesthetic elegance. It is a utilitarian database well suited to teachers, professors, or students looking for presentation images licensed for educational use on a comprehensive range of subjects including photography, painting, illustration, and material culture with global geographic representation.

The image collections are arranged as thumbnail panes on the home page, each hyperlinked to a list of portfolios that indicate how many images each contains. The site holds an archive of 72,000 images organized into 867 portfolios, and a tutorial shows how to create Community Portfolios. Users can browse the collection using keywords, artists, topics, titles, regions, or periods in quick or advanced search modes. Search results can be viewed as titles with hyperlinked acquisition numbers, as thumbnail images with titles, or as small or zoomable images with their metadata.

Categories include institutional collections in the database, faculty collections, course materials, and a collection of image portfolios correlated to required history topics in the California Educational Standards for grades 4–10. Since these curricular requirements are fairly common across the U.S., and in world history beyond the U.S., this is a valuable resource for teachers.

World Images is rich in images related to children and youth. The "People and Portraits" portfolio contains three sub-categories on children with a total of 1,094 images, some overlapping. They include Children to 1500 (234), Children 1500-2000 (544), and Children of the World (316).

The first is fairly inclusive geographically, but includes many images from Western traditions. The second is almost entirely European and American, and the third includes North and South American, African, Asian, and European children's photos and a few artworks and artifacts. Much of the third collection is the work of photographer Kathleen Cohen.

The following search terms returned images on children and youth: "children" (1000), "childhood" (80), "girl" (382), "boy" (555 items), "infant" (119), and "family" (858). The metadata provided with each image includes title, artist or maker, historical period, region or country of origin, copyright holder of the image, and/or museum holding the object. The individual object view also shows what other collections include the object, and links to other objects by the same artist or unknown generic maker from that culture. The photographs are labeled with title, year, location, and photographer, but nothing further, though some of the titles are very descriptive.

The information associated with World Images is thus limited, providing no further contextualization, nor are there links to descriptive information on museum sites where some are housed, for example. For this reason, the works of art found through this website are starting points for research about children in history rather than destinations. Some images, however interesting, remain mysterious.

Teachers wanting to illustrate already researched lectures or activities with licensed images will find this site a rich resource, especially if the lack of detailed information on the images is not a problem. Interesting objects from the collection can stimulate fruitful discoveries of available research on the web or from books and articles. For example, an image of an ancient baby bottle led to a trove of online information about infant feeding through the centuries.

Teachers can also create thematic collections that can be used for primary source investigations. A number of art images show punishment of children's misbehavior, for example, and children at play, as well as infant equipment from various times and places. These images can be used as exercises in examining primary sources as if they were "found objects" at a site or in an archive.

World History Sources at the Center for History and New Media has extensive lessons, exercises, and scholarly models for analyzing primary sources, including photographs, that could provide tools for working with the rich sources available on this website. A feature called "You be the Historian" could be adapted to interrogating the images from the World Images collections, and would reveal much about childhood by investigating questions to ask, and suggesting how to find answers.

A truly fascinating collection, the Perseus Digital Library presents an immense array of ancient texts, artifacts, and images from Greece and Rome, as well as a smaller collection of materials from the European Renaissance, the Arabic world, and 19th-century America. A rich website for educators and students alike, those engaged in the study of children and youth will find several sources of great interest, particularly in the histories of the ancient Mediterranean and the U.S. in the 19th century.

There are seven primary collections in the Perseus Library. The largest collection is devoted to Greek and Roman materials. There is a vast collection of ancient prose, including iconic authors such as Homer and Aristotle, but also hundreds writers who are less well known. An Art and Archeology Artifact Browser catalogues "1305 coins, 1909 vases, 2003 sculptures, 179 sites, 140 gems, and 424 buildings" for perusal. There is also a small Arabic collection, which is focused almost exclusively on translations of the Qur'an, as well as a Germanic Peoples collection, a section devoted to Renaissance works, and a database of Documentary Papyri. Moreover, there is a 19th-century American history source collection, as well as many 19th century issues of the Richmond Times Dispatch, a Civil War-era newspaper from Virginia.

The Perseus Digital Library is an incredibly rich resource. There is one significant issue, however, that users must contend with if they are trying to locate resources on children and youth in history. The search function for the website is not very specific, making its utility reliant on the patience of the user. For instance, a search for "child" brings up every single time the word “child” is mentioned in any of the website’s sources. Because there are many thousands of sources on the site (including the complete works of Shakespeare and a vast array of Aristotelian works), such a search is useless for quickly narrowing down required documents that specifically deal with the history of children. However, users may find what they are looking for by taking some time to browse more generally among the various collections, as well as become more creative with the "exact phrase" search mechanism.

For example, a fascinating piece from Plato's Laws comes up when searching for the phrase "slave child." In this piece, Plato conflates adult slaves with children in terms of legal testimony, thereby reducing the significance of both in a court of law. Educators could create instructive lessons using this source, along with other sources on legal testimony and children throughout time, and have students compare and contrast the legal authority of youth testimony cross-culturally and cross-temporally.

Another wonderful example comes from a search for "children’s education"—an excerpt from the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus' A Dialogue on Oratory. In this passage, Tacitus explains that he believes that Roman boys grew up to be great only when reared by virtuous and well-educated mothers, and he cites important emperors as evidence. This excerpt provides teachers of children's history a wonderful opportunity to create lessons based on historical notions of education, the role of the family in creating citizens for the nation, and shifting notions of gender roles and domestic life over time.

There are also interesting and useful sources for American history, including a primary source entitled The War-time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865 by Eliza Frances Andrews. Written during the Civil War by a young teen, the document invites educators and students alike to consider the value of first-hand narratives to understanding larger historical events, as well as the subjective nature of primary sources. Moreover, it is a fascinating look into the social expectations of young women of the era who were living in the midst of war, and sheds an interesting light on the significance of gender, race, and class for understanding the historical experiences of children. An intriguing assignment using this source may be to juxtapose the experiences this young girl relayed in her wartime journal to other girls in warfare situations in other parts of the world, both contemporaneous to the U.S. Civil War and in other eras.

Overall, the Perseus Digital Library is a fantastic resource. With a little patience learning the search engine’s peculiarities, it is also a wonderful resource for exploring the history of children.

1. Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone. Translated by David Hawkes. 5 vols. New York: Penguin Classics, 1973.
   A classic novel from 18th-century China that presents the life of an elite family, offering rich detail of daily life and practice, period humor, and dramatic intrigue.
2. Hsiung Ping-chen. A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
   A path-breaking work on childhood in late Imperial China – an excellent study that explores the lives of children in relation to the social, material, and philosophical context of the period while raising important historiographic issues for further research.
3. Kinney, Anne Behnke, ed. Chinese Views of Childhood. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995.
   An edited volume rich in its thematic and temporal coverage of themes related to childhood in Chinese history.
4. Saari, Jon L. Legacies of Childhood: Growing Up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press East Asian Monographs, 1990.
   This text provides an insightful examination of the experience of childhood at a moment of historical transition between the established traditions of family and education and the shifts accompanying the rise of a modern China in the early 20th century.

by Susan Douglass
(Suggested writing time: 50 minutes)

Using the images and texts in the documents provided, write a well-organized essay of at least five paragraphs in response to the following prompt.

• Create a portrait describing childhood in late Imperial China in terms of the roles children were socialized to fulfill, the roles parents were expected to play in providing for and nurturing children at different stages of development, and the cultural objects used in teaching, entertaining, and childrearing. Base your description on analysis of evidence in the documents.

Your essay should:

• have a clear thesis,
• use at least six of the documents to support your thesis,
• how analysis by grouping the documents into at least two groups,
• analyze the point of view of the documents, and
• recognize the limitation of the documents before you by suggesting an additional type of document or source to make your discussion more complete or valid.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following institutions for primary sources:

[Information Coming Soon]

About the Author

Sue Fernsebner is a specialist in the cultural and social history of China during the 19th and 20th centuries. Her interests lie in the shared realms of material culture and social experience, gender, and global encounters. Included among her published works is the study "A People's Playthings: Toys, Childhood, and Chinese Identity, 1909–1933." She is currently finishing a book on China's participation in world's fairs and international expositions. She is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mary Washington.

About the Lesson Plan Author

Susan Douglass is a doctoral student in history at George Mason University, and also serves as education outreach consultant for the Al-Waleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. Publications include World Eras: Rise and Spread of Islam, 622-1500 (Thompson/Gale, 2002), the study Teaching About Religion in National and State Social Studies Standards (Freedom Forum First Amendment Center and Council on Islamic Education, 2000), and teaching resources, both online and in print, including and the curriculum project World History for Us All, The Indian Ocean in World History, and websites for documentary films such as Cities of Light: the Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain and Muhammad:Legacy of a Prophet.

An exploration of primary sources on childhood in late imperial China (framed broadly as the Song through Qing dynasties, ca. 960-1911 CE) offers a window into lived experience and the diverse ways in which childhood itself could be imagined and articulated. As with other times and places, the historical record presents a variety of perspectives and different takes on childhood, providing a sense of that realm as socially defined, imagined, and experienced.

Chinese family life in the late imperial period was marked by a complex realm of relationships. Children often grew up amidst an extended family of parents and siblings, grandparents, cousins, and, for the wealthier families, a domestic realm that would also include servants, wet-nurses, as well as the various women of a household including a formal wife and (potentially) multiple concubines. Extended families were thus the norm, offering a rich and complex community for the child.

Practices of child-rearing and the life patterns of children were shaped by class and gender. The management of the household was overseen by females as was child-rearing itself. Women would care for the children and, particularly as the late imperial period progressed through the Ming and Qing dynasties, would also be responsible for much of their early education. Youngsters would be guided in their initial acquisition of literacy and numbers through memorization of basic poetry and childhood primers.

Men in a family would also often play a role in children's lives, particularly in shaping decisions about the continued education and training of children (both boys and girls). Many a father or grandfather would also enjoy and celebrate leisure time with kids at play in the domestic quarters.

Children themselves would share together the joys and endeavors of early childhood through to an age of seven or eight years, at which point gendered divisions would be more clearly defined in their own activities and in their own spaces of learning. Growing girls would learn from other women in the household the essential skills associated with the feminine, including embroidery, sewing, cooking, and, particularly for elite girls, reading and calligraphy.

Elite boys, having shared an early training and playful realm with little girls, would then move to their own education, building up a literacy and experience with the canon of Confucian classics in preparation for the imperial state's civil service exams that could bring true success to their family and lineage. Boys who were not from elite classes, but who were raised in peasant households or by working class families, would also begin to engage in more strenuous work in the fields or perhaps new duties in the shops and artisan studios of an urban center.

Social relationships, meanwhile, were shaped by and articulated through a rich culture of philosophy and practice associated with the family. Confucian classics such as The Book of Rites (Liji) set forth an ideal vision of the proper child and the mandated aims of child-rearing. Here, as in the many instructional texts that circulated amidst China's booming print industry of the late imperial period, an emphasis was placed upon a moral training for the child in appropriate forms of behavior and in a recognition of the value of social relationships.

Moral teachings included the inculcation of a respect for elders and the encouragement of a child's true expressions of filial piety. This latter ideal was one celebrated as the foundation of a good family and of society itself. In ideal examples, children were honored for displaying a heartfelt sense of obligation, gratitude, and loyalty to their family as well as their dedication, throughout life, in caring for their elders.

Actual practice, naturally, was more complex. Reaching beyond the texts devoted to the ideal and exemplary, one also discovers more varied depictions of children's lives. Sources found in literature, poetry, biography and family records as well as in visual images from the time reveal the variety of experiences, emotions, challenges, and playful intrigue found in (or represented through) the experience of childhood.

The collection of primary sources offered here presents a view of both the normative prescriptions for the proper child as well as alternate perspectives on a culture of childhood in late imperial China.

The texts presented here offer a broad range of perspectives on childhood in late Imperial china. They include historical tales for children that paint the stories of heroes and villains, period literature, images, and folklore collections that offer a view toward the daily life and amusements of children, as well as the rhymed primers intended to train the child not only in literacy but also in a social and moral sensibility.

The sources cover a broad time frame as well as diverse aspects of childhood in late imperial China. They speak to a number of related themes and issues including ideal notions of the child and a child's place in the family, practices of play and amusement, and the complexities of latter-day efforts (and, indeed, those of adults themselves) to recapture and understand childhood as its own realm.

One aspect for students to explore through their readings of this material is the moral instruction and dissemination of values that historical children would have encountered in their own exploration of these texts and stories. Students may read and compare the Meng Ch'iu and San Tzu Ching texts in regard to this issue. These two texts also provide for a view towards a comparison over time as the Meng Ch'iu text was critiqued and later faded from use (see source introductions for more detail).

Useful questions to ask here would include:

• What moral instructions might children have found in these texts?
• What were the idealized social roles that were presented?
• What might adults who shared these texts have hoped that their children would have learned from them?

Students might also explore the visions presented of the relationship between an individual and the social world that they inhabited, sometimes subtly and often less so, in these texts. In exploring these questions, students may discover the closely tied (at least in an idealized realm) relationship between children and parents and the celebrated role of the family as the center of an ordered Chinese society.

A second line of exploration for students lies in a comparative exploration of notions of amusement. Here we may compare pedagogical texts, particularly the San Tzu Ching, with images and impressions gained from literature (Story of the Stone), rhymes (Headland's collections), and images of childhood play.

• How does the evidence offered in these diverse sources complicate a vision of childhood discipline as presented in pedagogical texts?
• What did "fun" mean to different children of the time?
• How did these sources' own presentation of childhood amusement offer evidence towards more complex visions of personal identity, life-paths, and social relationships?

Here one may explore articulations of family relationships, marriage, and education, among other topics, that are revealed in these texts and images.

Finally, Isaac Taylor Headland's study of childhood rhymes and amusements sheds light upon a culture of play shared by children outside the elite class as represented in Hong Lou Meng. His collections introduce their own complexities, however, as material presented by a foreign observer of Chinese life in an era of high imperialism. As such, it offers a valuable opportunity for students to explore the complex nature of a cross-cultural encounter at a particular moment, one defined by a new economy and culture of global exchange, competition, and colonialism.

Worthwhile questions of exploration include:

• How does I.T. Headland describe or define "Chinese" in this discussion?
• What are the points he seeks to make?
• Who might he have imagined as his audience?
• In what ways do our Chinese sources coincide with – or complicate – the depiction and analysis he offers?

Discussion Questions

Sources 1 and 2: Meng Ch'iu, Empress Ma in coarse-woven silk. . . and K'uang Heng bores a hole in the wall Sun Ching shuts his door [Literary Excerpts]

• Are these visions of success or achievement? What makes a good husband, wife, son or daughter? How are the relationships between people in these roles celebrated?
• What are the values that are celebrated here?
• How is friendship or companionship characterized or depicted?
• How does emotion, as shown in these stories, related to moral value(s) or to idealized social roles?

Source 3: Three-Character Classic [Literary Excerpt]

• What are the core social roles presented here?
• What kinds of mutual obligations and responsibilities are encouraged or mandated by these verses?
• How does memorization as a way of learning shape knowledge, and the individual? Is this a practice still known in our own day?

Source 4: The Story of the Stone [Literary Excerpt]

• What constitutes joy (or the opposite) for the elite children depicted in this text?
• What are the visions of talent and success as seen here? What skills do these youngsters celebrate for themselves?
• In what ways does this text complicate our vision of society as seen in the text of the children's primer?

Source 5: "Joyous Celebration at the New Year" [Image]

• What objects do the children in these images make use of? How do they appear, how are they handled or used, and what life do they seem to hold for the little ones who possess them? Students are encouraged to explore the visual depictions of the toys and objects themselves, and to imagine the games and play they might suggest.
• What kinds of social relationships within an elite household are represented in this image, both in the arrangement of domestic space and its uses? How does this visual depiction reveal an ideal vision of relationships within the family and between generations, genders, and classes?
• How does this visual image compare to the textual expressions of domestic ideals and relationships? (e.g. a child's feelings of respect and filial piety towards their parents, the joys of play and creative diversions, engagement in productive work in the household?)

Source 6: The Chinese Boy and Girl, Preface [Literary Excerpt]

• How does Isaac Taylor Headland describe or define "Chinese" in his discussion? What are the terms he uses? Points he seeks to make? Who might he imagine as his audience?
• In what ways do the Chinese rhymes and discussion he shares depict Chinese childhood and family life? What perspectives are offered on family roles, gender, socio-economic class? In what ways does Headland invoke discourses of nation and culture?
• How do these sources compare with others, translated from Chinese, that we have seen?

Source 7: Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes [Literary Excerpts]

• What can we learn about specific social values as defined by a role in the family – mother, son, daughter, father, others? How do these rhymes reflect and/or complicate understandings of a traditional family system in imperial China?
• In what way does the humor presented in these rhymes also shed light upon an individual's expectations, hopes, or view of their life-path at that moment in history?

Source 8: "Yin Yu Tang: A Chinese Home" [Online Exhibit]

• How did families organize their domestic space in the late imperial period as seen in this exhibit? What are the ways in which the space is arranged, utilized, and imagined?
• Imagine yourself as a child growing up in this house. Where, in this household setting, did the children fit in? How does it seem that children may have used or experienced this space?
• What objects, in this family home, were designed for children? What were their practical purposes or uses? What might have been the personal value or symbolic meanings attached to them?

Sources 9 and 10: Children and Toys and Selling Toys [Selections]

• Describe, in detail, the toys that we see depicted in these photographs of street scenes in China. Of what materials where they constructed and who made them? Who sold them? Who are the consumers depicted here?
• What attractions might these toys have held for children? What sorts of figures or imagery do they present? What stories, games, or visions of make-believe might they have inspired?

Lesson Plan: Children in Late Imperial China

by Susan Douglass

Time Estimated: three to four 50-minute classes

Objectives

1. Students will make inferences from primary sources about expectations for instruction and roles of children in late Imperial China, 10th to 20th century.
2. Students will differentiate between roles and attributes of boys and girls in China during the period.
3. Students will explain how expectations for child raising changed over time in late Imperial China.
4. Students will explore what a household reveals about ways of life for family members through examination of the Yin Yu Tang house virtual exhibition.

Materials

• Printouts of primary sources sufficient for each student to have a full set of the texts and images in the Late Imperial China Teaching Module. 1
• Computer(s) with internet connection to view the Peabody Museum online exhibit Yin Yu Tang house (lab, projection, assignment, or smartboard for viewing)
• Writing materials, notebooks, pads & pencils for sketching

Strategies

Hook
Think of a favorite children's book of yours, and describe its storyline in a short paragraph or narrative. Explain what moral or ethical message may be inherent in that story, and what it says about the contemporary culture of childhood (or the culture of the period in which it was written) and what expectations for the upbringing of children it reveals. Then, think of a favorite toy and sketch or describe it, explaining how you played with it, and why you enjoyed it. Did the toy have gender-specific attributes? What did it say about childhood in contemporary culture? Was it handmade or mass-produced, generic or a famous brand-name?

Toys and Celebrations
Using the images "Joyous Celebration at the New Year," and the photographic collections "Children and Toys" and "Selling Toys," students can make sketches of the toys and play activities shown. The annotations to the primary sources give some explanations of the images, and sketching the toys shown may help give clues as to their play value—what did they do that was attractive to children as play (e.g., movement, making sounds, humorous animals, whirligigs, fireworks, dolls or puppets, etc.) ? A high-resolution image of Joyous Celebration at the New Year, shows much greater detail for the individual figures and groups. Discuss continuity and change over time between the painting and the photographs, as well as universal aspects of play across cultures. Which toys and activities seem gender-specific? What activities in the images do not rely on toys (e.g. putting pine branches in the fireplace in the painting, children playing with each other, etc.), and how are children in the painting and photographs involved in helping, serving adults, etc.

Children's Literature
Building from the hook activity on children's literature, read the selections in the module such as the Three-Character Classic, The Story of the Stone, Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes and the more biographical Meng Ch'iu, Empress Ma in coarse-woven silk and Meng Ch'iu, K'uang Heng bores a hole in the wall Sun Ching shuts his door. Make a list of citations from the excerpts that indicate normative behavior. Mark them with sticky-notes, highlight, or copy the citations. Make a two-column chart with the headings: Qualities of the ideal boy and Qualities of the ideal girl. Using the citations, list the personal and moral qualities the stories instill about proper behavior and moral actions of boys and girls in Chinese society. (Extension: for comparison, the same activity can be done with examples of didactic literature either from other Children & Youth in History primary sources or from historical children's literature for examples).

Exploring the Yin Yu Tang House
Introduce the activity by asking students to quickly sketch the layout of their own house, describe their sleeping space, and list the members of their household. They should use this material to think about how the house relates to the neighboring homes, how the common spaces of the house are shared by family members, and how this shared space reflects rules about adults' and children's roles in the family. What does your bedroom convey about the importance given to individual space and expectations about raising children, or child development? What values does the difference in decoration in common and private spaces say about the culture and how the family is constituted? Share ideas and differences among members of the class in discussion.

Yin Yu Tang House, cont.
Building from the ideas shared about the students' own homes and lives, view the exhibit. Students may be assigned to view the exhibit as homework if this is practical. Pay particular attention to the layout of the house and conventions for who occupied which spaces in the house, who slept in which rooms with whom, and how other spaces in the house were used. In the Yin Yu Tang house, there were also spaces created or reserved for absent persons, and for reverence toward other figures. These figures changed over time (e.g., Buddhist objects of worship, ancestor images, lists of past family members, and later images of Mao).

Optional Activity
The letters reproduced in the exhibit provide considerable evidence concerning lasting expectations and relations between adult children and their parents. Inquiries about health, concern for the raising of children from afar by absent fathers, duties concerning marriage of siblings and others, requests for goods from the city, formulas of politeness required in addressing family members, all make for interesting inferences about the nature of family life and the results of traditional upbringing of children.

Optional Activity
The sections of the exhibit on Ornamentation and Belongings are very revealing of change over time, as traditional carving and invocation of legends, lore, and protective decoration give way to the use of industrially produced decorative elements such as wallpaper, newspapers, and nationalist iconography such as Mao images vs. images and writing related to ancestors and religious imagery.

DBQ

Writing the essay as a culminating activity can be done as a timed writing or as a homework assignment (see: Document Based Question).

Differentiation

Advanced Students
Students may explore the objects and layout of the house in further detail, reporting on clothing, furnishings, and other aspects of interest. They may also explore additional passages from the literature excerpted in this module and evaluate these sources in terms of their use as evidence in explaining childrearing and education in late Imperial China.

Less Advanced Students
Students can work with a limited number of documents, focusing their writing on one or more of the following three choices:

1. comparison between their own family home and the Yin Yu Tang house;
2. comparing toys in contemporary society with the toys and games shown; or
3. a familiar didactic work of children's literature may also provide a concrete foil for comparison with some of the examples given in this module.

Use one or more of these three possibilities to compose a concluding essay that utilizes evidence from the two sets of sources.

Mencius' mother lived near a cemetery when Mencius was small and he enjoyed going out to play as if he were working among the graves. Mencius enthusiastically made tombs and performed burials. His mother said, "This is no place to raise my son!" So they moved and dwelt next to the city market. But when her son began amusing himself by pretending to be a merchant, Mencius' mother once again said, "This is no place to raise my son." 1 Once again they moved, settling this time, beside a school. Here, the boy played at arranging sacrificial vessels and the rituals of bowing, yielding, entering and withdrawing. Mencius's mother said, "Here indeed is a place to raise my son." And that is where they stayed. When Mencius grew up he studied the Six Arts. 2 In the end he became a famous scholar. The gentleman says, "Mencius' mother understood enculturation by immersion." 3. . . .

When Mencius was young, after finishing his studies he returned home. At that moment, Mencius' mother was weaving. She asked him, saying, "How far did you get in your studies today?" Mencius replied, "About the same as usual." Mencius' mother then took up her knife and cut the cloth she was weaving. Mencius became alarmed and asked her to explain her actions. She said, "Your neglecting your studies is like my cutting the cloth I wove. Now a gentleman studies in order to establish his reputation, he asks questions to broaden his knowledge. This is the means by which he obtains peace and happiness at home and avoids harm when he goes abroad. If now, you neglect your studies, you will be unable to avoid a life of menial service and will lack the means to distance yourself from trouble and strife. How is it different from weaving and spinning to make a living? If midway I give up and abandon my weaving, how would I be able to clothe my husband and child and go for long without grain to eat? If a woman who abandons her livelihood and a man who neglects cultivating his virtue do not become burglars or thieves, then they will end their days as slaves." Mencius was frightened by his mother's words. Day and night he studied tirelessly. He then studied with the great master Zisi until he became one of the leading scholars of his generation. 4

1. Abbot, Mary. Life Cycles in England, 1560-1720: Cradle to Grave. London: Routledge, 1996.
   Includes chapters on children and youth and primary written and visual sources with suggestions for their use.
2. Beier, Lucinda. Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-century England. London: Routledge, 1988.
   Focuses on the patients and those who treated them, from housewives to bonesetters to surgeons. Includes an analysis of the casebook of Joseph Binn, a London surgeon and some of his younger patients.
3. Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman. Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
   Discusses the shorter life span of pre-modern people and why youth was so important as a result. Themes include the physical and emotional effects of being an apprentice or a servant. Not an easy read.
4. Houlbrooke, Ralph A. The English Family, 1450-1700. New York: Longman, 1984.
   A classic work on the importance of understanding family structure in this period as the context to disease and death. Includes a chapter on children.
5. Pollock, Linda. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900 Cambridge University Press, 1983.
   A controversial work that argues against the idea that there was little concept of a childhood in the past and that life for the young was a brutal experience. Discusses the treatment of sick children and youth.

by Sharon Cohen
(Suggested writing time: 50 minutes)

Directions
The following question is based on the documents included in this module. This question is designed to test your ability to work with and understand historical documents.

Drawing on specific examples from the sources in the module, write a well- organized essay of at least five paragraphs in which you answer the following question:

• To what extent did parents in early modern England try not to become too attached to their children, as infant and child mortality was so high?

Write an essay that:

• has a relevant, clear thesis that answers the question,
• uses at least six of the documents,
• analyzes the documents by grouping them in as many appropriate ways as possible. Does not simply summarize the documents individually, and
• takes into account both the sources of the documents and the creators' points of view.

You may refer to relevant historical information not mentioned in the documents.

Be sure to analyze point of view in at least three documents or images.

What additional sources, types of documents, or information would you need to have a more complete view of this topic?

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following institutions for primary sources:

• Fordham University,
• Irwin Publishing,
• Neonatology on the Web,
• The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, and
• Wellcome Library.

About the Author

Lynda Payne, Ph.D., RN, Sirridge Missouri Endowed Professor in Medical Humanities and Bioethics and Associate Professor of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is the author of With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England, and is currently researching and writing a monograph on the 18th-century surgeon Percivall Pott.

About the Lesson Plan Author

Sharon Cohen teaches AP World History and IB Theory of Knowledge at Springbrook High School in Maryland. She regularly presents papers on world history pedagogy at the annual conferences of the World History Association, the American Historical Association, the National Council for Teaching History, and the National Council for the Social Studies, served on the College Board's AP World History Development Committee, contributed articles to the online journal World History Connected, and published curriculum units in world history for the College Board and the online model world history project World History For Us All.

Children and youth in early modern England (1500-1800) were subject to many diseases and physical hardships. From the great epidemic diseases of bubonic plague and smallpox, to more common illnesses such as measles and influenza that still afflict children today, sickness put children and youth at great risk. With no knowledge of bacteria or antibiotics, and surgery performed without anesthesia or even hand washing, there were few remedies for childhood illnesses beyond a nourishing diet and keeping the patient warm. Even surviving an illness could have permanent consequences, for example, scarlet fever left many children blind and deaf, and measles could cause severe scarring and facial bone loss.

One measurement of health in early modern England is revealed in the statistics of the number of deaths kept by church parishes. From these records historians have gleaned that infant mortality (death during the first year of life) was approximately 140 out of 1000 live births. The average mother had 7-8 live births over 15 years. Unidentifiable fevers, and the following list of diseases, killed perhaps 30% of England's children before the age of 15 – the bloody flux (dysentery), scarlatina (scarlet fever), whooping cough, influenza, smallpox, and pneumonia.

Death from disease was higher in urban than in rural areas. Early modern cities were widely, and often rightly, regarded as deadly environments. They contained large concentrations of population who were often poorly fed and housed. "Crowd diseases" such as typhus, smallpox, and tuberculosis prospered, and bubonic plague epidemics periodically swept through dense urban populations. In 1563, 1603, 1625 and 1665, about one fifth of the population of London died in plague outbreaks. In 1665, one of the deadliest years, 80,000 people died in the capital city. Of this number, historians estimate that at least 45,000 of the victims were under the age of 15.

Besides diseases, accidents were common sources of sickness, disability and death for children and youth. From surveys of coroners's inquests, drowning in wells and bathtubs, was the most reported accidental death in children under the age of 5. Accidents were also reported connected to the work in which children were engaged beginning around age 8. Children cracked their skulls while fetching water, were trampled by horses while ploughing, or dropped and injured while under the care of siblings. Boys, unless they were from the noblest of families, were expected to serve an apprenticeship. They were often placed in dangerous crafts such as tanning, blacksmithing, or serving on ships, where chemical poisonings, fires, and war injuries were frequent occurrences. There are also accounts in diaries of the period of youthful pranks leading to injury, for example, hiding gunpowder in candles so they blew up when lit.

Throughout this period the primary place where sick children and youth were cared for was in the home, and the principal healers were women – mothers, daughters, wives, and servants. Powder burn remedies —applying a mixture of poultry fat and dung—were commonly included in home receit (remedy/recipe) books kept by the mistress of the household. Women developed considerable professional knowledge after the rise of the printing press in 1500 and the publication of books that had been only in the hands of physicians. Both herbal and chemical medicines were described as suitable for the young in family receit books, such as dried dill in honey for a cough, and iron filings in beer for paleness of the skin.

Children were rarely treated by the small and expensive elite of university-trained physicians to whom adult patients turned for a prognosis and not for a cure. Their remedies were also considered too drastic for children as they largely consisted of rectal purging (laxatives), bloodletting (cutting a vein open with a lancet), and forced vomiting (emetics). These treatments were based on an ancient Greek medical theory that the body was composed of four substances, or humors, created from the digestion of food. The four humors were choler or yellow bile, phlegm or mucus, black bile, and blood, and all had properties of being hot/cold and dry/wet. If the humors were balanced – neither too strong nor too weak – you were healthy. The hot and wet humor of blood and the hot and dry humor of yellow bile were believed to be naturally stronger in the young. Occasionally if these humors were not weakened and released from the body in the form of sweat, tears, urine, feces, or even sneezing, physicians would give children emetics to make them vomit or let blood through "cupping." Heated glass, bone, or brass cups would be placed upon skin that had been scratched or scarified with a knife. Blood would then flow gently from these wounds due to the creation of a vacuum by the heated cup.

Worried parents consulted surgeons, trained through apprenticeship, for broken limbs, ruptures, and the bladder stone. The latter was caused by the early modern diet, which was rich in gravel. Boys were often operated on for the stone by surgeons in this period with a mortality rate of 30%. The operation was called a lithotomy and took about three to five minutes to perform. No anesthesia was used, instead surgeons relied on the child fainting from pain and being out during the extraction of the stone. Most often, parents turned first to family, friends, and neighbors, for medical advice, even the local blacksmith for a fee would set bones in humans as well as animals.As the specialty of pediatrics (from the Greek for child and healing) had yet to emerge, children were treated as small adults in hospitals and kept in the same wards as adult men and women. Some charitable institutions were opened in the early modern period, for example, the Children's Hospital in Norwich in 1621, but they tended to be more for children who were abandoned by their parents or orphaned, than for sick youngsters. The largest institution for orphans was the Foundling Hospital in London, opened in 1741. There were also medical discoveries that helped children and youth in this period, most notably, inoculation and vaccination for smallpox.

Starting in the 1960s several scholars have argued that early modern parents tried not to invest too much emotion (or money) in a child until it reached an age where survival was likely. High birth rates, accompanied by high death rates for children under the age of ten years old, meant that family life was fragile and uncertain. Yet the parent-child relationship seems to have been as strong in the early modern period as in any other age, and former ideas of emotional indifference before the eighteenth century are now widely questioned by scholars. Most of the population had a hard struggle for existence but children were cared for as much as conditions would allow. The harrowing grief of mothers and fathers who lost children to disease or accident is indeed all too apparent in diaries and letters of the period.

I have found that the best way to teach about sickness and health from centuries ago is to not to focus on the biology and statistics of diseases but to focus on the suffering and the impact of illness on a person's life. I have had students write about their own experience of illness until the age of 18, and then had them compare and contrast that with the common illnesses a child and youth would have experienced in early modern England. Students have also researched how medical conditions of children and youth would be diagnosed and treated by a variety of healers. They took into consideration wealth and poverty, class status, gender, and whether they were living in a city or in the countryside. Finally, I have had success with using visuals to illustrate not just medical care and treatment but environmental conditions. If you have students imagine life without modern conveniences such as electricity, gas, sewers, clean water, cars, and so forth (the list is long), their understanding and interpretation of images of early modern children and youth grows as they take into account the context of health, hygiene, and illness.

Discussion Questions

• What were the common illnesses of children and youth in early modern England? What remedies were suggested and by whom? Can you describe some of the changes in medical treatment during this period? (Classification and description of diseases, inoculation and vaccination).
• Some historians have argued that children and youth had a miserable existence and that parents in early modern England tried not to become too attached to their children, as infant and child mortality was so high. Can you use the sources to argue for and against this thesis? (Teeth pulling, Gin Lane, Infanticide Trial versus The Graham Children and the Evelyn Diary).

Lesson Plan: Health in England (16th–18th c.)

by Sharon Cohen

Time Estimated: three 45-minute classes

Objectives

1. Students will be able to identify possible connections between the lack of modern conveniences and health, hygiene, and illness among children in early modern England.
2. Students will be able to debate the extent to which parents demonstrated attachment to children in a period of high mortality for infants and young children.

Materials

• Printouts of primary sources sufficient for each student to have a full set of the texts and images in the Health in England Teaching Module. 1
• Highlighters
• Index cards

Day One

Hook
Ask students to imagine life without modern conveniences such as electricity, sewers, and clean water by listing ten possible effects on health, hygiene, and illness. Then, with a partner, have them predict which of those effects were common among children in early modern England. Make a class list of these predictions to post for comparison later.

Activity
Students will read the primary sources looking for any connections between the lack of modern conveniences and health, hygiene, and illness among children. One strategy to help with close reading is to help the students generate lists of typical words they might find in the text, and then encouraging them to underline or highlight the words associated with a lack of conveniences (such as lack of clean water for drinking or washing) and circle or highlight the words associated with symptoms of illness (complexion, fever, fits, pain, sweat, swollen, shivers, blisters) and treatments (ointment, medicine, bloodletting, fasting, bed rest). Have the students turn in their annotated sources. Check to make sure they found most of the key words. If not, show them to the students the next day.

Day Two: Debate Prep

Return the annotated sources and ask students to share with a partner the words that appeared the most often.

With partners, have students try to translate those words into lists:

• identifying the common illnesses of children and youth in early modern England and
• identifying the remedies suggested and by whom.

They should write these analyses of the sources in the margins.

Students prepare for a debate on whether parents in early modern England tried not to become too attached to their children, as infant and child mortality was so high.

Day Three: The Debate

Debate Directions
Divide the class into two groups (pro and con).

Assign each student a specific speaking role in the debate.

• Each group has a different student make the opening statement and the closing statement.
• Each group has six main pieces of evidence delivered by six different students.
• Each group also assigns six students to critique the evidence delivered on the basis of the authority or reliability and perspective of the source.
• That's 28 student roles. Adjust as necessary for the size of the class. If the class is larger, assign students to critique the arguments and evidence used overall in the debate and then report on their assessment at the end.

Differentiation

Some strategies for supporting and challenging students are already included in the lesson. For struggling readers, the sources might need to be translated into modern English, and perhaps even analyzed together as a class. The preparation for the debate for students still learning how to construct and support arguments might take an extra day, so the teacher can speak individually with each student to guide the framing of the arguments and selection of evidence to support the main points. To challenge students further, it might be possible for them to find additional evidence not included in this module, even perhaps going beyond the borders of England to compare the attitudes and practices toward children's health in other places.

CASE XVI.—Sarah Nelmes, a dairymaid at a farmer's near this place, was infected with the cow-pox from her master's cows in May, 1796. She received the infection on a part of her hand which had been previously in a slight degree injured by a scratch from a thorn. A large pustulous sore and the usual symptoms accompanying the disease were produced in consequence. The pustule was so expressive of the true character of the cow-pox, as it commonly appears upon the hand, that I have given a representation of it in the annexed plate. [In original.] The two small pustules on the wrists arose also from the application of the virus to some minute abrasions of the cuticle, but the livid tint, if they ever had any, was not conspicuous at the time I saw the patient. The pustule on the forefinger shews the disease in an earlier stage. It did not actually appear on the hand of this young woman, but was taken from that of another, and is annexed for the purpose of representing the malady after it has newly appeared.

41

CASE XVII.—The more accurately to observe the progress of the infection I selected a healthy boy, about eight years old, for the purpose of inoculation for the cow-pox. The matter was taken from a sore on the hand of a dairymaid, 10 who was infected by her master's cows, and it was inserted, on the 14th of May, 1796, into the arm of the boy by means of two superficial incisions, barely penetrating the cutis, each about half an inch long.

42

On the seventh day he complained of uneasiness in the axilla, and on the ninth he became a little chilly, lost his appetite, and had a slight headache. During the whole of this day he was perceptibly indisposed, and spent the night with some degree of restlessness, but on the day following he was perfectly well.

43

The appearance of the incisions in their progress to a state of maturation were much the same as when produced in a similar manner by variolous matter. The only difference which I perceived was in the state of the limpid fluid arising from the action of the virus, which assumed rather a darker hue, and in that of the efflorescence spreading round the incisions, which had more of an erysipelatous look than we commonly perceive when variolous matter has been made use of in the same manner; but the whole died away (leaving on the inoculated parts scabs and subsequent eschars) without giving me or my patient the least trouble.

44

In order to ascertain whether the boy, after feeling so slight an affection of the system from the cow-pox virus, was secure from the contagion of the smallpox, he was inoculated the 1st of July following with variolous matter, immediately taken from a pustule. Several slight punctures and incisions were made on both his arms, and the matter was carefully inserted, but no disease followed. The same appearances were observable on the arms as we commonly see when a patient has had variolous matter applied, after having either the cow-pox or smallpox. Several months afterwards he was again inoculated with variolous matter, but no sensible effect was produced on the constitution.CASE XVIII.—John Baker, a child of five years old, was inoculated March 16, 1798, with matter taken from a pustule on the hand of Thomas Virgoe, one of the servants who had been infected from the mare's heels. He became ill on the sixth day with symptoms similar to those excited by cow-pox matter. On the eighth day he was free from indisposition.

48

There was some variation in the appearance of the pustule on the arm. Although it somewhat resembled a smallpox pustule, yet its similitude was not so conspicuous as when excited by matter from the nipple of the cow, or when the matter has passed from thence through the medium of the human subject.

49

This experiment was made to ascertain the progress and subsequent effects of the disease when thus propagated. We have seen that the virus from the horse, when it proves infectious to the human subject, is not to be relied upon as rendering the system secure from variolous infection, but that the matter produced by it upon the nipple of the cow is perfectly so. Whether its passing from the horse through the human constitution, as in the present instance, will produce a similar effect, remains to be decided. This would now have been effected, but the boy was rendered unfit for inoculation from having felt the effects of a contagious fever in a workhouse soon after this experiment was made.

50

CASE XIX.—William Summers, a child of five years and a half old, was inoculated the same day with Baker, with matter taken from the nipples of one of the infected cows, at the farm alluded to. He became indisposed on the sixth day, vomited once, and felt the usual slight symptoms till the eighth day, when he appeared perfectly well. The progress of the pustule, formed by the infection of the virus, was similar to that noticed in Case XVII, with this exception, its being free from the livid tint observed in that instance.

51

CASE XX.—From William Summers the disease was transferred to William Pead, a boy of eight years old, who was inoculated March 28th. On the sixth day he complained of pain in the axilla, and on the seventh was affected with the common symptoms of a patient sickening with the smallpox from inoculation, which did not terminate till the third day after the seizure. So perfect was the similarity to the variolous fever that I was induced to examine the skin, conceiving there might have been some eruptions, but none appeared. The efflorescent blush around the part punctured in the boy's arm was so truly characteristic of that which appears on variolous inoculation that I have given a representation of it. [In original.] The drawing was made when the pustule was beginning to die away and the areola retiring from the centre.