Fine-Grained Comparisons

...Scholarly endeavor does not, of course, necessarily lend itself to social policy initiatives...

...The same causes are behind the changing nature of the life course...

...The baptisms, nuptials and burials noted in the village rectory, if properly reconstructed, could reveal birth, marriage and death rates, household size, and related domestic data...

...Demos examines the emergence of adolescence in terms of biology, psychology and culture...

...Demos evaluates this contention, beginning with a survey of the court records of early New England—a ceaselessly vigilant society—and carefully shows why he accepts "the absence of records of child abuse as the absence of the behavior itself...

...Of the eight essays written over the last decade that make up Past, Present, and Personal (four of them previously published) four derive from Demos' cross-disciplinary contacts with psychiatrists, specialists in child abuse and gerontology...

...Old age was in early America associated with images of loss, decline and decay, a time of life when human vices seemed "especially detestable—and visible...

...Here he offers no comparison with the present, but we can wonder whether the elderly's stronger hold on America's increasingly limited resources today might not amount to a similar condition...

...The Council was in a poor position to know because it had decided early on to study the child in the setting of the family, rather than of the whole community—a strategic judgment in which Demos concurred, it should be noted...

...Nowhere was the issue more pressing than on the Carnegie Council, discussed under the title'' History and the Formation of So-cialPolicy...

...The current heightened awareness of the problem reflects our increased sensitivity to human feelings, according to this view...

...Yet the possibility is there, as Demos demonstrates in the most provocative of his essays: "Child Abuse in Context: An Historian's Perspective...

...His A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (1970), so gracefully written that it has ever since been a much appreciated mainstay in the classroom, drew upon both colony and individual town records, wills and inventories, as well as a third source of information historians have only recently recognized: physical artifacts of the period ("material culture" is the term often applied...

...Only one member deemed history irrelevant to the purposes of the Council...

...Now that the subject of family history has grown to maturity and become respectable, it seems ironic that Demos, currently the Sterling Professor of History at Yale, was not deemed worthy of a PhD for his ground-breaking work...

...They fought in court, clapped their fellow citizens in stocks, yet found time to love (and discipline) their children as they went about their daily affairs...

...Nonetheless Demos, always open-minded and in search of a way for history to prove its worth, seems to have been frustrated by his minimal contribution (indeed, he describes the Council as "a noble failure...

...The characters of A Little Commonwealth were not the quaint cardboard cutouts of our Thanksgiving celebrations but recognizably human actors who had childhoods, grew upandmarried, worked, and expressed their feelings—the most notable being anger, followed closely by shame...

...These are admittedly interrelated, but there is little doubt that, as Margaret Mead argued decades ago, culture is decisive...

...requires far-reaching social change...

...The family has become smaller and has ceased being a productive economic unit, or even an educational enterprise...

...The result was an imaginatively reconstructed 17th-century world(afeat Demos would repeat in Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, 1982...

...Demos labels their condition "sociologically advantageous but psychologically disadvantageous...

...At least he is addressing the matter, however, and that is more than can be said for much of official Washington...

...In carrying out his role as an innovative historian by drawing on such disciplines as demography, psychology, archeology, and sociology, John Demos provokes us to consider in the present those very social issues which have framed our past...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of history, San Francisco State University Historians have traditionally gathered their information about the past from published sources...

...Without attempting to understand this academic situation, the full facts of which I do not know, suffice it to observe that Demos has never felt constrained to address his work exclusively to professional historians...

...Some historians today argue that the farther back one searches in time, the more child abuse one will discover...

...A fifth is based on his role as a panelist on the broadly representative Carnegie Council on Children, set up in 1972 and meeting several days a month for five years in various settings with an assignment "to 'think broadly,' to construct insofar as possible a 'framework' with which policy programs might be organized, and to explore the 'ecology of childhood.'" Demos concludes several of his scholarly essays with reflections on the larger responsibilities of the historian...

...over the past three and a half centuries as presented in Past, Present, and Personal (and always bearing in mind the author's virtually exclusive focus on persons of Western European origin), we cannot fail to be impressed with the determinative impact of environmental conditions—means of production, technology, and the social relations they giveriseto...

...He then considers explanations for abuse put forth in contemporary scientific literature—environmental (endemic violence, social isolation, rootlessness), situational (intense relationships in small families), and psychological (individualism, low self-esteem)—pointing out that such factors were alien to 17th-century American communities...

...With midlife too, the difference between past and present lies largely in the choices made available by society: "For our colonial ancestors, the middle years must have been easier—because the alternatives were fewer, their verities less open to challenge or change...

...Yet, due to the nature of community at that time, ties between grandparents and grandchildren were close...

...There children were productive family members, households were large and relationships relatively distant, and a person's fate was ascribed to the wishes of God and to social status...

...What remains is primarily an emotional entity, a haven from the hard and cruel "real world" where (until recently) father works, and mother, the nurturer, does not...

...actual abuse cases are on the decline...

...Demos' comparison of past and present, with its strong sociological dimension, affords the sort of understanding that is surely essential for the design of social policy to aid the family...

...Interestingly, Demos concludes that present-day adolescence may not be "as stressful, as variable, as altogether salient" as it was earlier in the century...

...Furthermore, old people fared better than other age groups materially: They had somewhat less wealth but greatly reduced needs, and most stayed self-sufficient and capable of work...

...This ingenious new methodology reached America in the 1960s, and John Demos—then a graduate student at Harvard—was one of the first to put it to use...

...In fact, it has already been publicly argued that senior citizens are diverting funds from the young...

...All these developments must be attributed to that central vehicle of modernization, the Industrial Revolution, and to an ancillary feature, compulsory public education...

...Demos further made use of psychological theory—specifically the work of Erik Erikson on the stages of psychosocial development through the life cycle—as an interpretive tool, an approach taken by few historians...

...But dependence on the printed word (and hence on the testimony of a small literate class) was undone by a group of social historians in post-World War II France who recognized the demographic value of 17th-century church records...

...the others felt it could dispel fears of change, identify needs of children, "unveil certain nostalgic myths," or show clearly what sort of programs had failed in the past...

...Regrettably, Demos does not consider this whenhe observes, apropos the Carnegie Council: "Our public policies affecting the young, and the welfare of American children as measured by various social and medical indices, suggest an actual commitment to children substantially lower than that of other industrialized countries...

...Looking at the major lineaments of family and life course history in the U.S...

...The largest question put to history emerged, he observes, from the Council's conviction that "Effective advocacy for children...

...How could such change best be accomplished...