The History of Childhood: The Untold Story of Child Abuse

from the Foreword: Possibly the heartless treatment of children, from the practice of infanticide and abandonment through to the neglect, the rigors of swaddling, the purposeful starving, the beatings, the solitary confinement, and so on, was and is only one aspect of the basic aggressiveness and cruelty of human nature, of the inbred disregard of the rights and feelings of others. Children, being physically unable to resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost unimaginable ways by way of expressing conscious or more commonly unconscious motives of their elders... The present volume abounds in evidence of all kinds, from all periods and peoples. The story is monotonously painful, but it is high time that it should be told and that it should be taken into account... The history of childhood is of major importance to any study of human society. This book reviews systematically the attitudes and practices of parents toward their children in different Western cultures and time periods. The chapters of the book are: (1) "The Evolution of Childhood" (Lloyd deMause); (2) "Barbarism and Religion: Late Roman and Early Medieval Childhood" (Richard B. Lyman, Jr.); (3) "Survivors and Surrogates: Children and Parents from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries" (Mary Martin McLaughlin); (4) "The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century" (James Bruce Ross); (5) The Child as Beginning and End: Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century English Childhood" (M. J. Tucker); (6) "Nature versus Nature: Patterns and Trends in Seventeenth-Century French Child-Rearing" (Elizabeth Wirth Marvick); (7) "Child-Rearing in Seventeenth-Century England and America" (Joseph E. Illick); (8) "A Period of Ambivalence: Eighteenth-Century American Childhood" (John F. Walzer); (9) "'That Enemy Is the Baby': Childhood in Imperial Russia" (Patrick P. Dunn); and (10) "Home as a Nest: Middle Class Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Europe" (Priscilla Robertson). Each article contains references. (HTH) Children, being physically unable to resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost unimaginable ways by way of expressing conscious or more commonly unconscious motives of their elders. This work includes evidence on this topic from various periods and people. Lloyd Demause, Editor. Originally Published: New York : Psychohistory Press, 1974. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.