Anne Scott MacLeod

In American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Anne Scott MacLeod writes, “If most children’s literature stays well within socially conventional bounds at the intentional level, as I believe it does… the less conscious levels often carry more unpredictable messages. What is endlessly interesting is the complex relationship among the conscious attitudes expressed in children’s books, the often unconscious subtexts, and the realities of the surrounding culture. Children’s books do not mirror their culture, but they do always, no matter how indirectly, convey some of its central truths” (pg. viii).

Discussing postwar fiction marketed to young and adolescent girls, MacLeod writes, “Though teenagers surely worried about war, the atomic bomb, and the draft, most of the literature written for them skirted such uncomfortable subjects. The civil rights movement was nearly as invisible… Juvenile delinquency, which attracted congressional and media attention off and on throughout the 1950s, surfaced only occasionally in girls’ novels, to be quickly dismissed as irrelevant to the story’s protagonists and, by extension, to its readers” (pg. 57). Discussing changes in themes in the early twentieth century, MacLeod writes, “Essentially, 1930s writers shifted the focus of children’s fiction. Where authors of the 1920s tended to look toward the future, putting achievement, social mobility, and material affluence at the center of their stories, 1930s authors turned their attention from future to present, and from status in society to relationships within families” (pg. 166).

Turning to censorship, MacLeod writes, “Throughout [the early twentieth century], and indeed until the fateful decade of the 1960s, the issue of censorship within the mainstream of the children’s book field was virtually quiescent. While there were sporadic assaults on the evils of comic books and other ‘trashy’ material read by children, the major products of the children’s book business, the trade books published by standard, respectable publishing houses and bought by libraries, were pretty much exempt from criticism, or even scrutiny” (pg. 178). Later on, “every group working for social and political change suddenly discovered what the nineteenth century had so often proclaimed: that children’s reading is a potentially powerful influence on society. The closed world of children’s book production was opened to newcomers who held no brief for the agreed-upon [singular moral] code of the near past. Peace shattered as hundreds of new voices demanded to be heard; unity gave way to a passionate diversity of views. By the late 1960s, children’s books had become a battleground for the personal, social, and political forces of a changing society” (pg. 182).

Describing fiction from the 1960s and afterward, MacLeod writes, “Indeed, if security was the emotional center of the literature of earlier decades, uncertainty is at the very heart of most recent children’s books. Human relationships are without permanence, and often without substance. At best, society at large is drifting, unsure of its values, unanchored by any firm belief in morality or predictability” (pg. 203). She continues, “The enormous upheavals in American society in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the advent of a ‘new realism’ in literature for children, and there is undoubtedly some causal relationship, however complex. The social and political struggles of those years set in motion powerful forces for change in American society, changes that must have inevitably affected the tone and tenor of literature written for the young as they affected so many other traditionally accepted conventions” (pg. 205).

MacLeod concludes, “Books for the young, like American politics, tend toward middle ground. The literature absorbs change, and presents it again with its sharper edges blunted” (pg. 214). While authors of children’s fiction now have the option to tackle taboo subjects, MacLeod argues that many do so in ways that blur recent topics with older techniques. Her study, though somewhat dated, represents a key examination of the transformative middle decades of the twentieth century in children’s literature.… (meer)

This book contains some very interesting essays on American children's literature. I have not read all of the essays as yet, but the essays on American girlhood and on the family story are both enlightening and thought provoking. The only thing that I might fault the book for is that it does not include a bibliography; each chapter simply contains endnotes. This makes supplementary research a bit difficult, especially for primary materials (and considering that it is often students of literature, it is often scholars who read or are required to read books such as this, the lack of a separate bibliography is a rather problematic omission).… (meer)