Contradictions inherent in ‘pink for girls, blue for boys’ exist, too, in directives as to ‘appropriate’ attire for boys and girls. Jeanne Maglaty of Washington’s Smithsonian Institute observes that childhood photographs of Franklin D. Roosevelt are ‘typical of his time’. Photographs from 1884 show him at two years, wearing an ankle-length white dress, his head a profusion of ringlets. Not until age 6 or 7 was a distinction made in dress: frocks for girls, short pants – later trousers – for boys. Within the last fifty years, dress distinction was neutralised by the coming of rompers – a trouser suit, generally with bib and braces. Then, both girls and boys wore trousers – reverting to the gender neutrality of Roosevelt’s time, albeit in the opposite direction.
Tag: children
Women’s History Month: Advice to Mothers
Observations upon the Proper Nursing of Children, Edinburgh Magazine, June 1761, pp. 304-5. A child, when it comes into the world, is almost a round ball: it is the nurse’s part to assist nature in bringing it to a proper…
Ahead of Her Time – Jane Johnson’s Nursery Library
Johnson wrote out her “fairy-tale” for her daughter and eldest son, and bound it like a proper book, about five or six years after the little Barbara had looked like herself rather than like her relations. This is startlingly early, before the late-eighteenth-century wave of professional writers for children, at about the same time as John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, 1744, which is generally presented as a first … Johnson’s manuscript is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and it finally, in 2001, reached print as a Bodleian publication …
Marital Advice from Parents to Children
During the early-eighteenth century, the passing of wisdom from parents to children was an expected part of their relationship and vital to the proper socialisation of children. Throughout their lives, parents offered children advice on their behaviour, passing on their…
The Foundling Hospital
The Foundling Museum, located in Bloomsbury, London WC1, tells the story of London’s first home for foundlings which was established in 1739 to care for destitute and abandoned children. Three major figures in British social history – philanthropist Thomas Coram,…
Big Society: Supporting People
One of the top news stories this week has involved a family who has asked for their daughter, who has severe disabilities, to be taken by social services after they felt unable to care for her without greater support. The…
16 Days Against Violence Against Women: Lucy Faithfull (or was she Lady Faithless?) – Mother to Hundreds
An account of Lucy Faithfull’s life is a history of child care in the twentieth century. She was a passionate campaigner for children, Children’s Officer for Oxford, and the first social worker to sit in the House of Lords. In…
Black History Month: Hidden lives and silent voices in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Caribbean island of Grenada.
In Britain it has always been a challenge to establish what sort of lives poorer people had during this period; the lives of black and mixed-race women in the British West Indies island of Grenada are even more difficult to…
Black History Month: Apprenticeship and Slavery
Title: Young Slave Boys. Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Document. Type: Visual Sources from the Schomburg Photographs and Prints Division (Slavery – Slaves – Portraits)- SC-CN-90-0190. Sir, I beg leave sir to…