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Querying Childhood

Feminist Reframings

Mary E John editor Barbara Lotz editor Elisabeth Schombucher editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:26th Sep '24

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Querying Childhood cover

This book critically examines assumptions about age, women, and gender. Amidst all the attention that has been granted to difference and inequality, however uneven and unsatisfactory in terms of class and caste, race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, disability, religion, and nation, questions of age and its importance for feminism have been less well defined.

Drawing on recent literature on childhood, the chapters in this volume cover a range of fresh perspectives. These include:

  • What kinds of biological, legal, chronological histories age has and the fundamental ways in which these links are being recast
  • How gender differences occupy a prominent place in historical constructions of identities, especially the frequent infantilisation of women, who are never seen as adults in the full sense of the term nor equally allowed to be children beyond the first years of life
  • Ways in which class, caste, gender, and ethnicity shaped classrooms and opportunities for education in the colonial period and the 20th century to produce new ideas of childhood
  • Gendered outcomes for children in the context of a long entanglement of law with labour, transformations in practices of parenting over time, and how the concept of care emerged in both Western and non-Western societies

An incisive study on how childhoods have come to be understood, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender studies, childhood studies, family studies, modern history, legal history, social policy, social psychology, education, and sociology. This volume will also interest parents, paediatricians, family health providers, teachers and educators, and anyone who works with children.

“With her characteristic brilliance and perspicacity, Mary E. John makes a signal contribution to feminist scholarship in this book. Her genealogy of child marriage draws upon historical, comparative, and intersecting analytical frameworks. This deep and nuanced contextualization compels us to consider afresh what we had long assumed we knew about a familiar subject. Her argument about "compulsory marriage," which she introduces to reframe the discussion of child marriage, offers an important conceptual advance that will likely become a valuable new resource in the feminist toolkit. This is one of the most original and exciting feminist interventions to come along in a while.” — Mrinalini Sinha, Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History, University of Michigan, USA

This elegantly incisive book by Mary E. John, one of India’s leading feminist scholars, challenges us to interrogate some of the myths of reason and progress that we complacently live by. Her object of study is public discourse and social policy on the issue of child marriage, a ‘social problem’ which, for close on two centuries, has been an object of attention by Indian social reformers, women’s movement activists, and latterly, in a global context, by international development agencies. In a tour de force, John decodes the intricacies of various data sets and the assumptions that drive them, to suggest that it is not child-marriage that is the problem for Indian women, but rather the ‘compulsory’ nature of marriage itself which must be the frame of reference for genuine change.” — Patricia Uberoi, Retired Professor, Institute of Economic Growth & Chairperson, Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi, India

ISBN: 9781032783499

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 630g

324 pages