Mona Gleason and the Limits of “Children’s Voices”

Mona Gleason, author of Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health, 1900-1940, was a recent guest blogger on the Society for the History of Children and Youth website. The following is an excerpt from her post.

Perhaps the one concern that binds historians of children and youth together, regardless of national context, time frame, or thematic interest, is the search for “children’s voices” in the past. Recovering and highlighting the perspectives of young people in our histories distinguishes our field from others. Many papers at SHCY conferences, published journal articles, and books in the field are devoted to finding and underscoring the child’s voice, often used as a short hand for a commitment to uncovering their “agency.” Having just completed a book entitled Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health, 1900 to 1940, I’ve struggled quite intimately with what it means to include and highlight the “child’s voice.” After all, the perspectives of young people on this complex and multilayered history, I argue in the book, is the very thing missing in much of the Canadian historiography on health and medicine, generally, and health and childhood, in particular. My book relies heavily on the oral histories of a wide range of adults who grew up in Canada over the early to mid-twentieth century. It was critical to me that the oral histories about health experiences formed the backbone of the book. This would, I believed, literally “give voice,” however imperfect and mediated, to young people thereby establishing their agency as historical actors. It was not that simple. My attempts to “write children into” this history by including their “voices” in my analysis, brought to the surface a number of theoretical and methodological caveats that are particularly applicable to the Canadian historiography, but that also have relevance writ large. I briefly outline only two of these caveats below – there are others, but I’ll limit myself to these for this brief post.

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Read an excerpt

Join us for the Small Matters Book Launch in Vancouver
Thursday, October 3  at 3:00 pm
UBC, Department of Educational Studies 
Click here for more info

To learn more about Small Matters, or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.