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BOOK REVIEWS

Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of 
Children. By Marta Gutman and Ning De Coninck-Smith, eds. (New Brunswick, 
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Pp. vii + 346, introduction, photographs, 
epilogue, index.)

CATHARINA I. KESSLER 

Designing Modern Childhoods is a collection of fifteen illustrated essays that  
draw from a vast variety of sources, accompanied by a foreword by Paula S. Fass 
and an epilogue by social and cultural historian John R. Gillis. Marta Gutman is 
an associate professor in the School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape 
Architecture at the City College of New York, and Ning de Conninck-Smith is 
an associate professor in the Department of Educational Sociology at the School 
of Education at Aarhus University in Denmark. The book is partly a result of an 
international, multidisciplinary conference organized by the two at the University 
of California, Berkeley in 2002 and assembles contributions from architectural 
historians, social historians, social scientists, and architects.

The essays are grouped into four parts: ‘Child Saving and the Design of  
Modern Childhoods’; ‘The Choreography of Education and Play’; ‘Space, Power 
and Inequality in Modern Childhoods’; and ‘Consumption, Commodification, and 
the Media: Material Culture and Contemporary Childhoods.’ Drawing on data 
from the USA, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Europe, Turkey, Senegal and 
Indonesia from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the collection covers a 
broad spectrum of landscapes and time periods. The essays are framed by the 
thesis “that spaces and settings made for children are pivotal to the construction  
of modernity in global society” (2).

The first two sections of the book are mainly historical and discuss and 
challenge the concept of the “islanding of children,” described by Gutman  
and de Conninck-Smith in the introduction as “the specialization of space and 
material culture” (5) designed by adults for children, thus systematically separating 
the lives of the two groups by relegating children to the home (as in the paper 
by Annmarie Adams and Peter Gossage), schools (Anne-Marie Châtelet, Zeynep 
Kezer, Kristin Juul), special children’s hospitals (David C. Sloane), playgrounds  
and special parks (Roy Kozlovsky, Anéne Cusins-Lewer and Julia Gately), and 
summer camps (Abigail A. van Slyck). An essay by Annmarie Adams and Peter 
Gossage on “Sick Children and the Thresholds of Domesticity” sits well in this 
volume and highlights the large “extent of healthcare practices that took place 
beyond the thresholds of the bedroom and the home” of Canadian families 
of the Victorian era (77). The authors ask to reconsider notions of the passive 
child in their analysis of letters written by members of John William Dawson’s 
family, culled from the McGill University Archives. Adams and Gossage show 

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BOOK REVIEWS  

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how Dawson’s healthy teenage daughter manages the everyday affairs of her 
sick siblings while her mother is away, actively reordering the domestic spaces, 
opening windows to provide them with fresh air, and reporting back to her mother 
about her activities, in which she is aided by a close network of relatives and other 
families (70). The study challenges historians’ suggestion that in the past, sick 
children of middle-class Canadian families were tended by mothers before being 
admitted to hospital, isolated from other families or outside institutions. Rather, it 
argues that sick children inspired travel and connection beyond the home. 

The second half of the collection is mostly ethnographic, focusing on the 
historical present of childhood with one section on power and inequality, and 
another on consumption, commodification and the media. The chapters in 
this section complement the first, historically-oriented portion of the volume 
in positioning children as actors in their own right. They highlight children’s 
strategies of using, co-creating and influencing spaces of the house and backyard 
(Rebecca Ginsburg), street (Harriot Beazley) and school (Mary S. Hoffschwelle), 
or their use of material goods and associated cultural practices such as presents 
(Alison J. Clarke), McDonald’s Happy Meals (Helene Brembeck), snowboards 
(Olav Christensen) and anime media (Mizuko Ito). The insightful essay by 
architectural historian Rebecca Ginsburg on “The View from the Back Step,” set 
in the context of South African apartheid, draws attention to the tight nexus of 
dominant social values and spatial order by examining how white children learned 
about apartheid by observing and partaking in its racial geography. Through the 
analysis of interviews with white people who were children in the 1960s and 
1970s and former African servants from the same period, Ginsburg traces the 
relationships of white children and their black nannies, who used to live in huts 
in their backyard. The authors show how their understanding of racial hierarchies 
led many children to change their views of these maids from integral figures 
to peripheral ones, while others defied their parents’ expectations by regularly 
venturing into the backyards and spending time with their nannies. The chapter 
provides a nuanced view of children’s varied responses and actions in a social 
world where behaviour appears to be spatially restricted.

Overall, the volume is a good example of comparative, multidisciplinary 
childhood studies, demonstrating especially the importance of material culture 
to, and the impact of design on, children’s lived experience. The broadly 
conceptualized book appears to be very useful for classroom instruction in 
Folklore, Childhood Studies, Architecture and History, as it introduces readers  
to a wide-range of topics as well as to different forms of data and analysis,  
making it a valuable source for any instructor willing to contextualize the  
special scientific and theoretical backgrounds of the different chapters.

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