The Moral Project of Childhood

Examines the Protestant origins of motherhood and the child consumer Throughout history, the responsibility for childrens moral well-being has fallen into the laps of mothers. In The Moral Project of Childhood, the noted childhood studies scholar Daniel Thomas Cook illustrates how mothers in the nineteenth-century United States meticulously managed their childrens needs and wants, pleasures and pains, through the material world so as to produce the child as a moral project. Drawing on a century of religiously-oriented child care advice in womens periodicals, he examines how children ultimately came to be understood by mothersand later, by commercial actorsas consumers. From concerns about taste, to forms of discipline and punishment, to play and toys, Cook delves into the social politics of motherhood, historical anxieties about childhood, and early childrens consumer culture. An engaging read, The Moral Project of Childhood provides a rich cultural history of childhood.