In the face of global democratic backsliding, feminist demands have gained renewed visibility even as patriarchal, racial, and class-based violence and exclusion have become increasingly normalized across regional, national, and local boundaries. In this context, childhood, and girlhood in particular, has emerged as a matter of political, moral, and ideological contestation. Situating these contemporary struggles within a broader historical perspective, however, reveals that gendered childhood, as a concept and social project, has long served as a site onto which collective fears, social aspirations, and competing visions of citizenship and belonging are projected. Indeed, Marcia Chatelain's work has shown that, during the Great Migration, Black girlhood in Chicago’s South Side represented a potential path to social mobility, even as it was undermined by indiscriminate lynchings, labor demands in an expanding commercial market, a punitive judicial system, and sexual victimization. This scholarship raises important historical and methodological questions, such as: Who is afforded the innocence and vulnerability of childhood? In what ways have race, gender, and class together impacted public discourses regarding what it means to be a “good citizen”? How have crises around racialized, gendered, and classed identity inspired unexpected historical affinities and collaborations? How might historians navigate (and overcome) gaps and silences in the traditional archive, which have effectively erased the perspectives of racialized and working-class children?

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.