Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 2008"

East & West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe

Abstract: What is the origin and essence of fashion? This question has engaged scholars of various disciplines over the past decades, most of whom approach this subject with a Western or European focus. This paper argues instead that Asia was also pivotal in the articulation of the fashion system in Europe. The long interaction between these regions of the world initiated profound changes that included the iteration of the early modern fashion system. Silk and later printed cotton textiles are uniquely important in world history as agents of new consumer tastes, and the embodiment of fashion in Europe. Particular attention is given to the process of the Europeanization of Asian textiles, and the consideration of the intellectual, commercial and aesthetic relationship between Europe and Asia, as the European printed industry developed. Fashion was not just created through the adoption and use of Asian goods, but it was also shaped by a culture in which print was central; and it was the printing of information—visual, as well as literate—along with printing as a productive process, which produced a type of fashionability that could be “read”.

Imperial Emotions: Affective Communities of Mission in British Protestant Women's Missionary Publications c1880–1920

Abstract: This paper explores the ways in which the imagery and vocabulary of emotion circulated to create affective communities of mission in the missionary texts of Empire bringing Indian and British subjects into the ‘heart’ of colonial difference. In so doing, we argue, emotion is revealed as another dimension of the ways in which racialised power circulated to construct the imperial social formation of both colony and metropole. Our study focuses on women missionary writings during the 1880s and 1890s and the early 1900s. We argue that in all of these writings, the rendering of a transnational space of shared emotion works to draw the missionary women, the readership ‘at home’ and the Indian women and children who are the objects of women's mission work, into communities of ‘right feeling’. Our study also captures how these communities of feeling registered change, specifically with the growth of more secular discourses of empire and religion as modernity gained pace in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, refigured in tropes of secular professionalism redolent of the modernities of the twentieth century.

Different Paths to Mass Consumption: Consumer Credit in the United States and West Germany during the 1950s and '60s

Abstract: This article shows how differences in the way Americans and West Germans financed their consumption during the postwar decades underlines differences in social and cultural meanings of consumption. Consumer debt rose rapidly in postwar America. Many Americans came to regard credit as a means of ensuring democratic access to the American dream and to an expanding middle class. The federal government regarded installment credit as a viable way of expanding mass purchasing power and to reinforce a nascent consumer culture built on emulative spending and the rapid diffusion of new goods. By contrast, many West Germans consumers as well as retailers and regulators were more reluctant to embrace consumer credit. Financing consumer goods on credit did not become the hall-mark of new-found middle-class respectability in West-Germany. Rather, to many West German elites and middle-class consumers credit buying retained the stigma of a working class life-style. While the use of consumer credit became more common, it never reached the importance it had across the Atlantic. Far from being a model, the United States stood out as a peculiar case with regard to credit financing and household savings during the postwar period.

Homemaking and the Aesthetic and Moral Perimeters of the Soviet Home during the Khrushchev Era

Abstract: This article explores the role of design and decoration in the process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s. Situated within the context of the liberalizing reforms initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in the political and economic realms, it focuses on one key policy program of the era ending the Soviet housing crisis and providing each family its own apartment. Based on the premise that this objective was part of a broader return to the task of building Communism, this exposition argues that the domestic realm was ideologically charged and metaphoric for the moral order of society. Therefore, much more was at stake in homemaking than simply creating a cozy living space, and household objects became saturated with meaning: simple, modern lines in decorative wares as for housing design in general signified a productive society, fundamentally opposed to individualism and materialism.

Perils of Degeneration: Reform, the Savage Immigrant, and the Survival of the Unfit

Abstract: This article focuses on settlement house work and social reform as efforts to reconcile concerns about the survival of the unfit with the desire for reform and charity. Self-described progressives regarded themselves as shaping the evolution of the race and their work as an expression of civilization. While the social history of reform is rich, historians know less about its intellectual underpinnings. This article shifts the focus from the methods of reformers to their fears of failure and their desire for racial progress. Settlement house workers worried about the perils of degeneration. To understand degeneration, they turned to a language of civilization that historians generally associate only with imperialism to divide populations into savage and civilized. When settlement house workers advocated organized play and boys clubs and began milk stations and better baby contests, they believed that they were civilizing the immigrant urban savage. They believed that the acquired characteristics of civilization could be passed on to a new generation. Yet reformers still worried that their efforts were also preserving the unfit who, in a more savage society, would have perished. Their concern about saving the fit while helping the extinction of the degenerate opened the door to eugenics.

"Infantile Specimens": Showing Babies in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract: This article examines the origins and development of a common but little-studied form of nineteenth-century popular culture: the baby contest. Though contests were widely popular, they were also controversial. Fans of baby shows saw them as an expression of domesticity and maternal love, while critics of the shows argued that they objectified and commodified human beings. At issue was whether domesticity could be displayed and whether the objectified could be esteemed. Support for the shows overwhelmed opposition, and as the century wore on, criticism of the contests faded. By introducing a new form of display—the exhibition of the normal-baby contests helped to usher in a culture in which traditional oppositions such as public and private, home and market, objectification and approbation, were complementary rather than contradictory.

The Marginalization of the Black Campus Movement

Abstract: Most of the small amount of literature on the Black Power Movement consists of autobiographies or are examinations of the Black Panther Party. That's why Peniel Joseph's Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour , Clayborne Carson's In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s , Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar's Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity , and Van Deburg's New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 —all scholarly non-autobiographical, non-Black Panther literature—are so important as they inquire about the breadth of the movement. However, as they seek to demarginalize the Black Power Movement, this review essays shows that they in turn marginalize (in varying degrees) the struggle waged by Black college students to reform higher education and the vanguard organization of that struggle, the San Francisco State Black Student Union. They marginalize the Black Campus Movement and its leading organization despite many of the icons of the Black Power Movement coming into their own in college, and most of noteworthy Black Power protest and reforms occurring on these campuses.

Creativity under Constraint: Enslaved Afro-Brazilian Families in Brazil's Cacao Area, 1870–1890

Abstract: This article follows the stories of men and women who live the experiences of enslavement in Brazilian emerging cacao area in the last two decades of slavery there. It focuses particular attention on their efforts to construct and maintain family ties, as well as the significance of those ties in the transition from enslavement to freedom. It shows the connections between the internal economy of slavery as practiced in the cacao area and parents' efforts at retaining the integrity of the family group despite efforts on the part of slaveowners to manage their property without regard to emotional and biological connections between and among them. This argument dialogues, and indeed confronts, a lengthy historiography that has tended to ignore or even dismiss the possibility of the creation of families among the enslaved in Brazil until quite recently.

Melancholy and Modernity: Emotions and Social Life in Russia Between the Revolutions

Abstract: This article addresses the various manifestations of a new fascination with melancholy, as it developed in various sectors of Russian society early in the 20th century. The new atmosphere seemed, in part at least, a response to rapid social change, and it joined popular moods to discussions by leading intellectuals. The result provides a distinctive cultural moment in Russian history, and contributes as well to the larger study of emotions in history.

"Criers and Shouters". The Discourse on Radical Urban Rebels in Late Medieval Flanders

Abstract: In the majority of the narrative sources concerning late medieval Flanders and Brabant we encounter very negative descriptions of rebels. They were often referred to as 'mutineers' or as 'the bad' or 'the evil'. Rebels were attributed the vices of irrationality, foolishness, stubbornness and pride, or they were considered as spineless followers of conspiring demagogues. The often spontaneous character of their actions was thus misjudged by the chroniclers. A rather specific discourse on urban rebels, who were often from the lowest classes of urban society, included the terms 'shouters' and 'criers'. Shouting and crying was associated with the acts of mobilization and agitation that could start a revolt. It was a repertoire used by those rebels who could not count on formal political representation to fulfill their demands.

Be a Patriot, Buy a Home: Re-Imagining Home Owners and Home Ownership in Early 20th Century Atlanta

Abstract: The Own Your Own Home campaigns launched by the federal government and private land dealers immediately after World War I lured Atlanta builders and real estate agents into the trajectory toward homeownership ideology. Rhetoric mobilized by state and private interests associated ownership with socially valued institutions, such as family, or other subjectivities, such as masculinity. Brokers and state interests enticed individuals into assuming the risk of (significant) debt—into participating in this system of predictability and order—by giving homeowners status within American society. In advertisements, speeches, expositions, and other practices, federal policymakers and private real estate interests positioned homeowners as patriots and citizens. Homeowners were painted as good family protectors and providers. They were labeled prudent and reliable. The association of homeownership with an individual’s thrift and constancy led to associations of homeownership with job stability and adulthood. Thus, young Americans came to view homeownership as part of life’s stages—and expectations. As homeownership became part of the American culture and life cycle, it became less necessary to persuade citizens that a relationship existed between homeownership and status or particular values.

Between Wage Labor and Vocation: Child Labor in Dutch Urban Industry, 1600–1800

Abstract: Although child labor was a widespread phenomenon in the pre-industrial Dutch economy, we do not know very much about it. This article aims to expand our knowledge by looking at children's work in several urban industries in the Dutch Republic. By investigating the kind of economic activities children performed, their starting age, working and living conditions and the amount of training they received, we want to typify pre-industrial child labour more specifically. Did children's work serve as a necessary source of wage income, or rather as a vocational training for their later participation in the labour market? It will appear that this characterization as ‘work’ or ‘training’ depended largely on the child's age, sex and social background. These distinctions may help further research on the performance of preindustrial economies, in which a demand for flexible labor played a crucial role.

Eating, Dancing, and Courting in New York Black and Latino Relations, 1930–1970

Abstract: Using records from the WPA's "America Eats" project, manuscript collections, periodicals, oral histories, and autobiographies, the paper interprets Black and Latino relations in Harlem, New York and further north in the Suburbs of Westchester County. The paper focuses on southern African American and Hispanic Caribbean migrants in New York and the race and gender dynamics that develop between them.

Engineers or Artists?: Toys, Class and Technology in Wilhelmine Germany

Abstract: Ganaway argues that toys allowed millions of comfortably situated Germans to participate in a debate in Imperial Germany about the role modern technology would play in shaping the ideal middle-class citizen. Germany's nascent consumer culture easily facilitated this argument. Entrepreneurs envisioned the ideal German as a masculine engineer controlling human and natural environments. They marketed accurately miniaturized toys designed to turn boys into manipulators of technology and girls into domestic managers. Artists, intellectuals and maternal feminists demanded humanistically-trained individuals who could unite Germany's fractious society. They called for hand-crafted miniatures that emphasized imagination and creativity and blurred gender boundaries. Neither side wanted to entirely destroy the other, but both felt compelled to argue that only their vision could ensure a strong Germany. In the end, the engineers and entrepreneurs won this debate, but only at the cost of assimilating the most appealing aspects of "reform" toys into the factory process. Artists and intellectuals carved out a space for themselves and their vision of the middle-class via the market which outlived the Kaiserreich. This shows that consumer culture permits personal self-fashioning; while it tends to reinforce the power of dominant social groups it is remarkably permeable to subversive ideas.

From Anger to Jealousy: Explaining Domestic Homicide in Antebellum America

Abstract: This essay argues that in the sensational 1859 trial of Daniel Sickles for the murder of his wife's lover, Philip Barton Key, jealousy appeared, for the first time, as a normative masculine emotion and as instinct—as, moreover, integral to marital love and as a legitimate explanation for domestic violence. Although Sickles' lawyers presented their client's jealous rage as thoroughly understandable—indeed, inevitable—their narrative represented a break with legal precedent, with case after case of domestic homicide in which jealousy was either absent or was present only to be condemned as a vicious passion. Instead, through the first few decades of the nineteenth century, anger, not jealousy, routinely appeared as the principal cause of troubled relations between husbands and wives. In articulating the legal pre-history of the Sickles trial this essay discloses that jealousy, purportedly innate within men, was absent: earlier cases reveal that in fact jealousy was not a shared property of men and hardly ever a motive of domestic homicide. Cases prior to Sickles are also bereft of romantic love and of apotheosized domestic life, twinned ideals that formed an integral part of the emergence of jealousy as inevitable and excusable in Daniel Sickles' trial.

No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870 (review)

Abstract: activists, younger activists, and community members. In this context, he is able to lift up the various perspectives that shaped the black freedom movement. He successfully shows that Atlanta’s urban protests were as significant in shaping the Black Power movement as were the more well known northern conflicts in Harlem and Detroit. The book’s last two chapters do not support his framework as well as earlier chapters. In his chapter on black intellectual development the author contends that the emerging Black Studies programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s grew out of the grassroots activism in poor and working-class neighborhoods. Unfortunately, he focuses more on the activism of scholars with little connection to the “eclectic group of Black activists” that framed his study. This approach makes it difficult to appreciate the relationship between grassroots urban activism and black intellectual activists. In his final chapter Grady-Willis maintains that the activism of the 1970s operated on “four distinct, yet connected fronts” (xxii). But, in his discussion of grassroots neighborhood activism, black elected officials, women-centered activism, and “progressive Black political activism,” he fails to make clear how these fronts were linked in the human rights struggle. Despite these criticisms, Challenging U.S. Apartheid is an important read for anyone interested in Black Power, Atlanta history, and the internationalization of the African American human rights struggle.

Common Skies Divided Horizons: Aviation, Class and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century Egypt

Abstract: How is high-technology consumed by societies that cannot shape technology but could only be shaped by it? As the first study of Egyptian aviation, this article examines the unique process through which Egyptians embraced aviation as an exemplar of high-speed modernity and as an instrument of social transformation. It illustrates how, under colonial circumstances, Egypt’s upper-class shaped a vision of aviation as a tool that could bring an array of utopian benefits to all Egyptians, including prosperity, freedom of movement, social status, equality, and ultimately, a smooth transformation to the happiness of the modern world. In reality, this vision was a self-serving survival strategy whose aim was to contain the frustrated middle class, or effendiyya , which did not profit from the process of modernization. After World War II and the gradual collapse of the upper class, the effendiyya entrusted the state with the mission of adopting high-technology and modernizing society on an equal basis. Beginning in the early 1950s civil aviation was arranged accordingly.

The Political Work of Leisure: Class, Recreation, and African American Commemoration at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, 1881-1931

Abstract: The latter decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of historic sites as vacation and excursion destinations. Places such as Gettysburg and Mount Vernon, as other scholars have shown, welcomed steady streams of visitors throughout the summer months. At Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, African Americans similarly sought to fashion their own recreational and commemorative destination befitting a "rising race." Wealthy African Americans from nearby Baltimore and Washington purchased summer cottages in the sleepy village where John Brown waged his heroic assault on slavery. Excursion parties boarded the Baltimore & Ohio railroad to visit the famed federal armory where Brown made his last stand and picnic along the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers' shore. Storer College, an African American Normal School founded after the war, welcomed summer boarders to its dormitories. But hopes of transforming the war-torn town into a "Mecca of the colored American citizen" contended with local whites hostile to the growing numbers of black visitors and African Americans' ambivalence to the role of leisure in the fight for civil rights. As this essay shows, the politics of leisure bore more than an incidental relationship to growing class stratification among African Americans, and broader debates over the struggle against Jim Crow.

The Columbia Coalition: African Americans, New Leftists, and Counterculture at the Columbia University Protest of 1968

Abstract: The Columbia University protest of 1968 marked the loudest and most widely noted American student protest in a year distinguished by such unrest. This article reframes the protest through the lens of movement culture and analyzes the ties between different social movements. Activists at Columbia were a motley coalition of Harlemites and students, political and cultural radicals, black and white. This article argues that the establishment of five communes in occupied campus buildings facilitated the temporary reconciliation of political and social difference that accounts for the formation of the Columbia coalition. The tight confines within each commune sparked intense political and cultural debate but also forced activists to recognize the legitimacy of other views in the name of commune solidarity. The creation of multiple communes, however, allowed for several protest factions—including a black separatist group—to coexist under a single banner. The Columbia coalition provided a fleeting moment of unity during a period characterized by black separatism, white student radicalization, and counterculture flight to rural communes.

“Conduct … Inexcusable and Unjustifiable”: Bound Children, Battered Freedwomen, and the Limits of Emancipation in Kentucky's Bluegrass Region

Abstract: Documents compiled by Freedman's Bureau agents in Kentucky's Bluegrass Region clearly reveal open hostility on the part of white residents to black freedom. Bands of white supremacists pillaged black homes, murdered black community leaders, and violently resisted federal efforts to intercede on behalf of freed people. Yet non-lethal violence, particularly against freedwomen and their children, was far more prevalent, an effective means by which to limit black autonomy, and typically deemed less significant by authorities. Freed people frequently reported physical abuse at the hands of white people, including former masters, some of whom refused to acknowledge slavery's demise; and they also reported numerous abuses associated with the Commonwealth's apprenticeship system for black children. Further, black women, now free laborers working in both white households and urban settings, complained of the unfair, often violent, treatment they received at the hands of employers. Finally, black women and girls with virtually no protection under state law suffered sexual abuse at the hands of white men. Taken altogether, these and other limits imposed on emancipation by white residents of the Bluegrass constitute a concerted effort to enact white supremacy and thereby deny former slaves the liberty and equality they desired and demanded.

Texas and Virginia: A Bloodied Window into Changes in American Public Life

Abstract: The comparison of two university massacres, at the University of Texas and Virginia Tech, at a roughly forty-year interval, allows a focused historical inquiry. Changes in media but also public emotional standards created quite different reactions to mass killings, particularly in terms of public grief, memorialization, and efforts to compensate. Assessment also suggests strengths, weaknesses, and question marks of the contemporary approach compared to its 1960s antecedent.

Rewriting Patriarchal Scripts: Women, Labor, and Popular Culture in South African Clothing Industry Beauty Contests, 1970s-2005

Abstract: This study explores how black women garment workers in South Africa transformed a seemingly banal beauty pageant into a cultural event for self-empowerment, solidarity, and trade union democratization. It examines beauty contests in the Cape Town clothing industry by using oral and written sources that privilege the voices of factory workers. The study analyzes how and why the Spring Queen festival changed from being a tool for social control of increasingly restive employees to a partially autonomous space for proletarian women's sociability and power. As apartheid gave way to democracy in the 1990s male and female unionists debated the value of the Spring Queen pageant, which they eventually transformed into a vehicle for the promotion of South African-made clothing and textiles in a fiercely competitive global business. The article reveals how black working women reworked a gendered form of popular culture to assert their humanity and citizenship, and promote gender equity within the union.

Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (review)

Abstract: marked contrast to actual court cases in which female plaintiffs met with much suspicion, popular accounts of rape that centered on men portrayed rape as both factual and intolerable. Block’s impressive analysis of the continuities and the cultural specificities of rape in American history will give readers much to think about and will decisively shape the future scholarship on gender, race, sexuality and power.

The 1899 cuban marriage law controversy: Church, state and empire in the crucible of nation

Abstract: In this essay, a battle over canon and civil marriage that took place during the first U.S. occupation of Cuba, 1899–1902, is examined. The controversy surrounded the publication of a marriage law that declared that henceforth only civil marriages would be recognized by the state. The debate is discussed from the point of view of three key sets of actors: the Cuban nationalists who championed the law, the outraged Catholic prelates who opposed it, and the U.S. military administrators who ultimately decided the outcome of the controversy.

Subjected to the Current: Batteries, Bodies, and the Early History of Electrification in the United States

Abstract: “Subjected to the Current” charts the advent of electrolysis in nineteenth century America. Situating this technique of human hair removal within larger histories of electrification, the essay traces operators’ debates over the design of specific artifacts (needles, batteries, and so on) and the establishment of technical standards (for speed, current, etc.). Such technical developments, however, were but one feature of the technique: as early commentators were well aware, successful electrolysis depended equally on the rearrangement of human conduct and feeling. Operators and clients alike were hardened to their painstaking task, accommodating themselves to the financial, physiological, and emotional demands of hair removal by electric needle. Reflection on the intertwining of norms, affects, standards, and things in this instance serves to illuminate the history of power in both the literal and figural senses of that word: in the early history of electrolysis, we see the formation of power not as a discrete capacity which one might have or lack, but as a dynamic force flowing between elements of a complex system.

Popular Culture and Modernity: Dancing in New Zealand Society 1920–1945

Abstract: The popularity of dancing in New Zealand during the 1920s and 1930s was accompanied by a concern on the part of some contemporary observers that the behavior of dance-hall patrons left much to be desired. The concerns focused particularly on issues such as drinking and illicit sex, but these concerns were also linked to the wider influence of American culture on New Zealand Society, most notably Jazz, and Hollywood. Given such concerns the aim of this article is to reflect on what such criticisms reveal about the nature of New Zealand society; a society which has been depicted as either puritanical or pleasure-seeking depending on the historical viewpoint adopted. This article sympathises with the view that despite a ‘great tightening’ from above, New Zealander's continued to enjoy their leisure time and often subverted by-laws and national restrictions in order to do so.

The Long and Varied Relationship of Andrea Mora and Anzola Davide: Concubinage, Marriage and the Authorities in the Early Modern Veneto

Abstract: In 1577, the merchant Andrea Mora married one Cattarina di Gratiani, a member of a minor Trevisan noble family. With this marriage, he rendered his relationship with his concubine, Anzola Davide, adulterous. When he refused to give Anzola up, he enraged his wife's family; this resulted in over fifteen years of legal action. By tracing the investigations of several religious and secular authoritative bodies, first-person testimony, and the actions of this drama's three principle players, this essay explores concubinage within the context of greater early modern Venetian society. Concubinage sits on the well-understood but poorly articulated, mutable boundaries of acceptable behaviour and the relationship could have both beneficial and deleterious effects for the people involved. As we watch Andrea progressively learn how to negotiate a tenable position within his community, we see that it was necessary to maintain a balance between wife and concubine and family and personal interest.

The Long and Short of Salem Witchcraft: Chronology and Collective Violence in 1692

Abstract: This essay closely examines the chronological and geographic scope of the Salem witchcraft outbreak of 1692, the only mass witch hunt in American history. Drawing upon data about 152 accused witches in over two dozen communities, as well as scholarship in early-modern witchcraft and collective violence, it challenges the traditional image of Salem as a yearlong epidemic of hysteria. Analysis reveals, instead, that accusations progressed as a sequence of limited and brief flare-ups and that the accused were generally logical targets. Within most communities, the witch hunt passed quickly and the number of accused was small. Even in the high profile centers of the storm, such as Salem and Andover, the episode was limited in duration. Everywhere, the victims of 1692 most often resembled those who were traditionally associated with witchcraft in seventeenth-century England and New England. Despite its reputation for irrationality and excess, Salem witchcraft demonstrated the kind of constraints, limits, and coherence that scholars have found in riots, crowds, and other forms of collective violence. Such an approach helps explain how the outbreak spread to numerous communities as well as why the episode came to an end.

"Earth Has No Sorrow That Heaven Cannot Cure": Northern Civilian Perspectives on Death and Eternity During the Civil War

Abstract: This article examines how religious Northerners conceived of death and eternity during the Civil War. Letters and diaries reveal that religious civilians coped with their own mortality or the deaths of family members with a steadfast hope that they would be reunited with loved ones in heaven. Believing that God sovereignly determined the timing of a person’s passing, civilians encouraged soldiers to be prepared for death at any moment. Upon receiving the unwelcome news of a soldier’s passing, they sought evidence that he had left a testimony of dying in the faith. Comforted by a hope of attaining heaven, civilians described its blissful shores with some specificity, yet their conflicting depictions of heaven demonstrate a breadth of theological views. While some individuals imagined heaven as a place where the worship and praise of God predominated, others focused on reunion with families in a setting that resembled the Victorian home. Far from representing the beginning of a secular approach to death and dying, the Civil War marked the continuation of a religious understanding of death while exposing the theological fragmentation that characterized mid-nineteenth-century American religion.

Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960-1977 (review)

Abstract: culture and social issues, he spends less time on consumerism’s political ramifications. Consumer reception, and specifically how children appropriated toys, is also underplayed in Hamlin’s account. Hamlin defends this lacuna by pointing to the difficulties in reconstructing childhood experiences through adult memoirs fashioned to conform to conscious life narratives. Nonetheless, by avoiding such sources, Hamlin gives an overly privileged position to the normative assumptions of pedagogues and parents. This becomes problematic, for instance, in the example of dolls, which were regarded by adults as the only suitable toys for girls. Hamlin takes these assessments as evidence that toys reinforced gender hierarchies in successive generations. However, other studies have indicated, on the basis of German memoir literature, that children often played with their siblings’ toys, regardless of their gender designations. Understanding such cross-gendered play practices helps to explain not only how the habitus of femininity rooted in motherhood was replicated, but also how it could be undermined as toys inspired young girls to expect greater mobility. If some girls at the fin-de-siecle were playing with their brothers’ safari sets, zeppelins, and electrical trains, this might provide a clue to the marked increase of female aviators, safari hunters and other women adventurers in the early twentieth century. Such private play practices are largely opaque to authority figures, and can only be recaptured through the voices of the actual consumers/users. This kind of reception history would have added an important element to an otherwise rich and stimulating book.