Children And Globalization
Children and GlobalizationAuthor(s): Paula S. FassSource: Journal of Social History, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Summer, 2003), pp. 963-977Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3790359 .Accessed: 14/05/2013 16:44Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at ms.jsp.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal ofSocial History.http://www.jstor.orgThis content downloaded from 132.239.241.26 on Tue, 14 May 2013 16:44:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
CHILDRENANDBy Paula S. FassA BackgroundGLOBALIZATIONUniversityof California,BerkeleyNoteThis essay was written for a conference on globalization held at the Univer?sity of Lodz in Poland during the Fall 2001.1 thought that it would be useful tointroduce matters relating to children into the discussion, since at most such occasions, children hardly enter into the conversation. The essay does not attemptto engage directly such important questions as whether globalization is likely toreach all cultures, where it is most likely to be resisted, or if globalization is some?thing fundamentally new or only an extension of processes long underway in thewestern world. Although my mode of analysis?usingthe history of the UnitedthatStates as a basis for understanding current trends in globalization?suggestsI belong in the latter camp, the essay makes clear that I use this strategy, not asan answer to this last question but, as a means to illuminate a variety of mat?ters. I leave a headon discussion of these questions to others more familiar witheconomics.1 Instead, I writeand more eager to tackle issues of developmentalfrom deep within a specific historical framework, as someone who believes thatAmerican historians have something to contribute to the dialogue taking placeand who believes that social historians specifically are well positioned to provideinsights into matters of great contemporary consequence.It is odd that children and childhood should be nowhere on the agendaof those who currently discuss globalization. Children are most definitely partof the Western sensibility about globalization, and childhood is a particularlyIt is myin the politics of globalization.sensitive node for cultural contentionhope that an understanding of children's history will help to make discussions ofglobalization both more realistic, since many children are and will be affected,and more attuned to the peculiar western sentiments that are evoked in themedia's coverage of the conflicts over globalization. Children are everywherepresent in this debate, but never heard from or addressed.BringingChildreninto GlobalizationBoy and girl prostitutes in Thailand hired by French tourists; child pornography on the internet; five-year old indentured textile workers in India making silkfor American clothing; Eastern European adolescent girls assaulted and raped asthey seek glamorous careers on Milan's runways: These are the startling imagesthat confront us regularly now as the economy becomes a global network andas our means to communicate information penetrates into and out of every vil?lage and hamlet. We shudder at these assaults on the most vulnerable and askourselves if this is a portent of the future. As our planet shrinks in size will wesacrifice children to the yawning and ever more visible gulf between the richestand poorest nations of the earth?This content downloaded from 132.239.241.26 on Tue, 14 May 2013 16:44:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
964journal of social historysummer 2003Childhood is at once a universal experience, and one of the most culturallyspecific. Every society must have and raise children to survive, and each seeksto protect them in some fashion. Each culture defines and divides childhood asa stage of developmentdifferently, while devising unique means to express itsviews of what children are like, and practices relating to children through whichit fulfills a cultural vision of its own future. So too, each of us has experienceda childhood, and we are therefore strongly attached emotionally to an image ofwhat childhood is and should be like. Thus childhood is a critical point of socialcontention, a profound test of cultural autonomy, and a basic emotional referenceofpoint for all of us as we reflect upon the many meanings and consequencesglobalization.It is therefore not surprising that many ofthe starkest images of globalization'scosts take children as their subjects.2 And we can, I believe, expect that thecontinuing pressure toward global integration will expose the special differencesinvested in childhood practices. We can also expect that this tendency for changeto affect this most intimate place, where culture as well as individual memoriesare created, to explode in very public reactions. There are two reasons for this.The first results from the strategic role of childhood as the point of socializationand therefore as the means by which each society tries to protect its own identity.The second results from the fact that in modern western societies childrenhave been invested with an especially heavy emotional load. Indeed, becauseit has become such an emotionally resonant site in the Euro-American West,childhood and its associations have most often provided the occasions in therecent past around which we have expressed larger cultural anxieties and oursense of anguish about a whole range of issues. In other words, in addition tobeing a sociological and anthropological site, childhood has been invested withenormous symbolic power. I will give you just one example, from many that Icould choose. This one is very recent and very raw. First in the United Statesin the 1980s, and then in much of Europe in the 1990s, the issue of pedophiliaand the sexual abuse and murder of children has often dominated headlinesand resulted in widespread popular hysteria. Those reactions are almost alwaysway out of proportion to the actual occurrence of outrages against children, butthey express a much more general sense of vulnerability, and are often powerfulways to express a less clearly focused sense of grievance and fear about othermatters?thepolice, the economy, changes in the family, new sexual practicesand gender roles.3In order to understand both how globalization is likely to affect children andwhy we have come to focus so much power in childhood imagery, I would liketo turn now to aspects of American social experience that can provide someinsight into these matters. Such an examination of the old New World, so tospeak, is an unsually good point of departure for this discussion. Not only doesthe United States today provide the most powerful engine driving globalizationtoward the creation of the new New World, but America provides a kind ofmicrocosm of the early forms of globalization. After all, globalization today?the rapidly expanding domination of all forms of culture by market forces andthe penetrating power of communciations?continuespatterns of developmentthat began much earlier in the West, and most conspicuouslyin the UnitedStates. Here rapid economic expansion, the migration and mixing of popula-This content downloaded from 132.239.241.26 on Tue, 14 May 2013 16:44:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
CHILDRENAND GLOBALIZATION965tions, the breaking down of regionalism and localism, and the confrontationof disparate value systems took place first. The United States has experiencedall of these within its own historical experience during the last 150 years. TheUnited States was, after all, a nation whose dynamic capitalist economy andvast resources attracted tens of millions of immigrants to its shores, factories,workshops, and schools. I would like, therefore, to address three issues that areissue ofespecially significant to this experience as it centered on children?thechildren's work, the role of play in childhood development,and the problemof sexuality. Together these provide what I would like to call the contemporary"youth complex" with a powerful symbolic fuse.Children'sWorkWhen Aiexander Hamilton, America's first Secretary of the Treasury, imag?ined and wrote about America's manufacturing future, he had no sentimentalqualms about putting children into that picture.4 Children, he assumed, togetherwith their parents would work in the nations mills and factories. And why not?At the end of the 18th century when he issued his report, American childrenas young as five or six could be found working alongside their parents in farms,village shops, as well as throughout the homes of the nation. They also workedfor others as apprentices, or as bound labor paying off a debt, or because theywere put out to work by county officials as paupers or orphans. In the growingplantations of the American South as well as in places as far north as New Yorkstate, thousands of child slaves worked alone, and in groups, often in places thatwere quite distant from their parents or other relatives. Indeed, children workedeverywhere. The lucky ones did so as part ofa family economy where they couldunderstand their contribution as part of a corporate effort. Those who were lesslucky simply did so because of their master's orders. The sense of a childhoodand play (a protectedfreed from labor and devoted to individual developmentperiod of innocence sheltered from the cares of adults) had not yet become acommon point of cultural understanding, although Jean Jacques Rousseau hadalready proposed it half a century earlier as a theoretical possibility.Today, we are shocked when young children are put to work for pennies a dayin India, or China, in conditions of indenture that approximate slavery, or whenthey are kidnapped and enslaved in the Sudan. But it is important to rememberthat our contemporary response is the result not of our own historical superiority,ofbut because in the 19th century the struggle over slavery, the developmentof childhood in the Unitedhumanistic sensibilities, and the sentimentalizationStates and much ofthe Western world began to alter values as well as behaviors,among the middle classes especially, but increasingly among others as well. Thosechanges grew out of the rapidly developing market economy that was eclipsingslavery as a form of labor and swamping corporate identities of all kinds, whileincreasing the American commitment to the rights of the individual. It is thatnew sensibility which defines our reactions to issues of child exploitation today.But even in the nineteenth century, this perspective did not become universalat once in the United States, and it did not happen everywhere. It also took timefor this view to envelop adolescent children, those 12 to 18 whom we regard asneeding protection today but who were drawn into England's soot-filled "satanicThis content downloaded from 132.239.241.26 on Tue, 14 May 2013 16:44:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
966journal of social historysummer 2003mills" and the slightly more respectable versions ofNew England to work twelvehour days. Single girls of fourteen, whom we would today call adolescents, stoodfor hours in Lawrence, Lowell, and Holyoke, Massachusetts spinning yarn bythe mile from sun up to sun down, while they lived away from parents and homeunder severe restriction. They were glad at first to get such good work, and evenCharles Dickens and other visitors of conscience testified to their good healthand high spirits. Not until the 1850s did they begin to see themselves not asexceptions to the degradation of industrial labor, but as hardly better off thanslaves.5One of the great turning points for the revisioning of childhood came whenAmericans began to weep over slavery, when Harriet Beecher Stowe made Amer?icans visualize the family costs and inhumanity of an institution that affectedwhite and black. In so doing, Stowe gave the western world a picture of thepure innocence of childhood that helped to underwrite a new sentimentality.Together with other images of the time, but familiar to far more people, LittleEva and Uncle Tom and Topsy made childhood something to be treasured andcarefuly guarded. It was then, in the middle ofthe nineteenth century, that JohnLocke's tabula rosa, by then available for almost two centuries and well knownto some, found a wide audience to instruct in the fundamentals of childhood.By the middle of the nineteenthcentury, the unquestioned assumptions thatonce did not shrink from employing children as young as six came to a stop.A combinationof religion, of politics, and a new vision of what we owed, notjust to our own children but to other people's children came to the forefront.That view, with some alterations, continues to organize our responses to newsstories of children in India, Africa, and Thailand and adolescents in Sloveniatoday.It is worth stopping for a moment to examine this vision and its consequences,since it not only alerts us to why the western observer today is grieved by newsstories of children's oppression elsewhere, but suggests what kinds of issues eco?nomic expansion may bring foreward in the future. At the center of this visionstood what sociologist Viviana Zelizer has called "the priceiess child," the childwhose value stood apart from the economy, who literally had "no price" attachedto his or her being. 6 This child's importance was measured in emotional termswhich obligated parents and society as a whole to his wellbeing. In shifting thechild from a ledger where he or she could participate in economic calculationsand to which even his or her small contribution had weight, to a ledger in whichthe only legitimate calculation was how well he could be sheltered and providedfor, the society experienced a paradigm shift. This shift was quite as significant,I believe, as the other, more commonly discussed, change from seeing the childas primitive and unredeemed (the early American Calvinist child), to the childas innocent and cherubic expression of God's kingdom (the Victorian child).That innocent child had emerged earlier, in the 18th century, but had fewer im?mediate social and legislative consequences.7 It was the change in the values towhich children contributed?fromthe economic realm to the emotional realm,that made the great difference in the late 19th century. In salvaging childrenfrom the insatiable engine of market transformation and investing them withan alternative value, the west reserved in childhood an arena of innocence. Itwas only then, that these two changes together transformed the way childrenThis content downloaded from 132.239.241.26 on Tue, 14 May 2013 16:44:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
CHILDRENAND GLOBALIZATION967were conceptualized and how they were treated among the white middle classesin the United States especially, but in other parts of the world as well.It is through that now sometimes foggy lens that we continue to see the chil?dren of the world today. Let me repeat, in this new system of values and beliefs,the child was important not for what he or she could contribute economically,but for the emotional satisfactions his cultivation could provide to the family.This child could expect much since his value lay in his emotional well beingand effective preparation. Childhood was set apart as a period of innocence andvulnerability, which obligated adults to sheltering and protecting children. Thechild was also to be enjoyed now in and of himself for the special qualities hecontributed to the family, and for the better future he promised to the society.In this context, the newly created discipline of psychology and other scientificexplorations of emotional life began to develop, with their emphasis on theunfolding personality. The child was not only withdrawn from the calculationsoffered up by the market, but childhood was invested with the very origins ofthat individuality which western values had enshrined as worthy of respect.With this view of childhood's essential role in molding the future, also came thedemocratic extension of schooling.To me this is an honorable view of childhood and one with a great deal tooffer to civilized life. But it is a distinctly Western incarnation and it extends ain their wake.whole network of Western values that carry other consequencesWe might want to keep this in mind as we think about just what effects eco?nomic changes will have on the elaborate and complex cultures which are beingchallenged by globalization today. Americans withdrew children from the marketplace as a fulfiilment and alongside ofa range of beliefs and practices to whichvisions of childhood were attached.8The United States population in the post Civil War period was hardly com?posed strictly ofthe kind of urban middle-class population devoted to science andnurture which most readily adopted these sentiments about childhood. In its ownversion of internal globalization, this largely northern middle-class sensibilityconfronted a series of immigrant groups who were drawn to other features of theall by an exploding economy and open borders. AndAmerican promise?abovewithin its own borders, the United States still contained layers of preindiustrialrural populations whose visions of children's roles and obligations grew from anolder set of values, as well as a large group of former slaves and their children. Allthese children often became the beneficiaries, and sometimes too the victims, ofthe new vision of childhood and the various institutions constructed to fulfill itin the late 19th century. In this earlier version of globalization, what I have herecalled the western view won out. But not without cost. Some of these costs arevisible when we consider the institutions for children that spilled out from thisvision and whose aim was to protect, instruct and shelter them. The list is long,but among its most prominent components are the Children's Aid Society anda whole host of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, orphanages,adoption and foster care, juvenile courts and detention centers, sports clubs andplaygrounds, settlements and church social centers, and above all a refashionedand newly obligatory school, and its counterpart the reform school.These institutions were developed to protect and to constrain, to assist and toevaluate people whose values and beliefs did not usually conform to its standards.This content downloaded from 132.239.241.26 on Tue, 14 May 2013 16:44:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
968journal of social historysummer 2003And they began the construction of a picture of a normative childhood whichconformed to the values of some, but not necessarily the habits of many. Bythe turn of the twentieth century, these institutions had affected more andmore children, and for longer and longer periods of their lives. Many historiansover the last generation have demonstrated that these highminded institutionsThe protection of the childrenoften had less than wholesome consequences.of the poor and foreign often served as a means to condemn their parents andtheir values and practices.9 Over fifty years ago, Lionel Trilling explored howthe liberal impulse to enlighten and uplift also resulted in the compulsion tocontrol. This does not mean that this sensibility of protection was at fault, onlythat the extension outward from one's own children to the children of peopleunlike ourselves can harbor other emotions as well. In the process, those whoare criticized and dispossessed in this way can exp
of the Western sensibility about globalization, and childhood is a particularly sensitive node for cultural contention in the politics of globalization. It is my hope that an understanding of children's history will help to make discussions of globalization both more realistic, since many children are and will be affected, .
3.1 Macro-level feminist analyses of globalization Neo-liberal economic globalization The discourse of globalization 3.2 The impact of globalization The feminization of waged work Women's reproductive work Globalization and female migrant workers Globalization and difference The interaction of global and local forces 3.3 Women's Activism
9 Globalization has a home address: the geopolitics of globalization 127 JOHN AGNEW Cultural globalization 10 The globalization of culture: geography and the industrial production of culture 144 DON MITCHELL AND CLAYTON ROSATI The globalization of fear 11 The globalization of fear: fear as a technology of governance 161 BYRON MILLER PART III
globalization and culture as well as the impact of globalization on the culture. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Globalization According to Amiuwu, 2004, Scholte, 2002, as cited in (Ugbam, Chukwu, and Ogbo, 2014), the word globalization was coined in the second half of the twentieth century; globalization started
Unit-IV:Globalization and Culture: The Ethos of Globalization (Individualism, Freedom, Consumerism) Cultural Homogenization, Hegemony and Dominance Impact of Globalization on poor and women . UNIT-1 . Free Trade 1.3.4. Extended Economic Activities 1.3.5. Globalization is universal, but not a uniform process. 1.3.6. Globalisation is a .
What is globalization? Globalization is the integration of national economies into the international economy through trade, direct foreign investment (by corporations and multinationals), short term capital flows, international flows of workers, and flows of technology.* (Note this defines economic globalization rather than cultural globalization)
TO WHAT EXTENT SHOULD WE EMBRACE GLOBALIZATION? Chapter 2 Identity and the Forces of Globalization Figure 2-1 Forces like trade, transportation, communication technology, and international media have increased the pace of globalization and changed what you buy, watch, and read, how you communicate, where you go, and how you get there.
philosophy in the evolution from conflictual to peaceful human interchange -- not only economic and political, but especially social, cultural and religious. Hence the structure of the investigation of globalization in the volume begins with Part I on "Economic and Political Globalization," proceeds to Part II on "Culture and Globalization," and
Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism Introduction A very basic way of thinking about literary theory is that these ideas act as different lenses critics use to view and talk about art, literature, and even culture. These different lenses allow critics to consider works of art based on certain assumptions within that school of theory. The different lenses also allow critics to focus on .
