By Gareth Millward “Our mid 19th-century education acts were brought in […] because workers had to be taught to turn up punctually and not lie in bed when the weather was bad. […] So get ’em young, went the thinking. Get them into “schools”; let the truant officer terrify; let the register morning and afternoon …
By Laura Tisdall “Shocking Pink, from its very first issue, laid out the issues facing young women by explicitly reckoning with age as an axis of oppression in a way that Spare Rib tended to avoid. In this way, although the magazine set itself up as in opposition to mainstream eighties teenage magazines like Jackie, …
Spare Rib, Shocking Pink and the Politics of Age in 1980s Feminism Read More »
By Natalie Coulter “The girl is “understood” purely in market terms, not as a citizen with collective needs and desires, not a complex heterogenous category with diverse experiences of girlhood based on class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, etc. But instead as a consumer, assumed to be a white, middle class, able bodied, heterosexual girl, whose …
Not “berry nice”: Marketing Strawberry Shortcake to Girls in the ’80s Read More »
By Lucy Pearson “‘we live […] in an age where television, radio, the press and the internet have rendered the secrets adults may wish to keep from children impossible to hide. […] Our best hope is to help them become fleet of mind, understanding, tolerant and above all, able to make decisions for themselves.’” Quote: …
Innocence destroyed? The Carnegie Medal and the post-Bulger years Read More »
By Jennifer Crane “The tensions in these debates also reflected broader tensions in the 1980s themselves: new strands of individualist thought, new interest in listening to and publicising children’s voices and opinions, and the work of a sensationalist media interested in narratives of family, failure, and success.” Photograph: Child Therapy Sessions from the Wellcome Collection. …
By Helen King “there are books that make you laugh or cry, and there are books that change your way of thinking and your life.” Quote: Email from Dania, 25/11/12.Photograph: Hector Pieterson being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo as his sister, Antoinette Sithole, runs beside them. Sam Nzima, 1976. Sam Nzima’s photograph of 13-year-old Hector Pieterson, …
By Dominic Dean “Today’s American and British Right owes much to the 1980s. Nevertheless, we are now in the future that the dominant politics of the 1980s failed to fully imagine, much as Ronald Reagan’s ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’ slogan laid the seed for, yet failed to anticipate, its Trumpist reincarnation” Photograph: A billboard …
The Politics of Child Abuse and the Legacy of the 1980s in the US and UK Read More »
By Anna Sparrman “It seems as though a dark view of children and sexuality has arisen since the political changes of the 1980s. Our own contemporary worries about the omnipresent paedophile limits the case for sexual citizenship for children because it refutes the political space and agency that needs to be created for this to …
Children’s sexual citizenship: Changing notions of the sexual child Read More »
By Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson “I can remember my mother just being there, and sewing and cutting things out, and I used to be with her, sometimes I remember sitting, like, by the fireplace with my sister making rag mats and – and things like that, but I can’t remember really being really involved …
Childhood in coalfield communities from c. 1945 onwards Read More »
By Charlotte Faircloth “In retrospect, and from the vantage point of watching my younger friends and colleagues with their children today, my parenting style seems, if not neglectful, certainly a mite casual” Quote: Margaret K. Nelson. Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times, 2010. Photograph: Deniz Arzuk, 2014, stock image from Hürriyet newspaper, …