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"Viviana Zelizer" has become a household name in many of the courses I have taught since 1985. Soon after Pricing the Priceless Child was first published, Contemporary Sociology asked me to write an essay-length review. I read the book with a great deal of pleasure and wrote a positive review;1 in subsequent years I have routinely assigned Pricing in courses related to the sociology of childhood. This essay shares insights I have gleaned from many years of teaching Zelizer's fine book.
It is rare, in my experience, for a book to hold its teaching value for well over two decades; perhaps that's a useful operational definition of a "classic." Pricing the Priceless Child has held up over time, in part, because it traces a compelling sociological trajectory through the specifics of the varied and changing lives of US children during a key period of historical transition between the 1870s and 1930s. With careful attention to empirical detail, Zelizer maps the institutional as well as ideological reconfiguring of childhoods that took place as boundaries shifted among families, markets, and states. Her attention to both structural and cultural change helps demonstrate the value of focusing not only on children, but also on childhoods, that is, on the institutionally and discursively constructed conditions in which particular children grow up.
Zelizer develops her illuminating historical and sociological account through ingenious case studies of varied domains of changing practice such as reliance on or limiting children's participation in paid labor, shifts in the types of children most desired for adoption (from work-fit older boys to sentimentalized baby girls), and the altered framing (from "wage" to "allowance") of monetary payments to children. These vividly detailed cases give concrete specificity to Zelizer's broader argument, and, I have discovered year after year, they open up rich topics for further exploration.
In my sociology of childhood courses I often ask undergraduates to do their own small-scale empirical projects, framed by and used to reflect on course readings and lectures. Taking offfrom Zelizer's discussion of children's wages and allowances, some students have interviewed elementary school-aged children about their relationships to and feelings about money. They have found that young informants are often closely attuned to the ways in which different families organize their children's...