Review of City Children

David Nasaw's Children of the City is a study of the children of immigrants whose primary playground and place of employment was the streets of American cities. Nasaw covers the period 1900-1920 and the working-class children whose employment was not based on desperate need, but who did not have the complete leisure that middle class children possessed. Nasaw's principal thesis is that the experience of these children was overwhelmingly positive as they set up systems of rivalry and cooperation in their neighborhoods, frequently mixed with children of various ethnic backgrounds, learned numerous skills that would be essential to their futures, and assimilated to the American scene at a great rate. His secondary thesis is that these children had a considerable effect on the future of American entertainment and leisure services--becoming the first generation to look on work as a means of obtaining the money to entertain themselves rather than simply to make a living. The first thesis is fairly well demonstrated, but the second is, while convincing enough, more speculative and less firmly grounded in Nasaw's sources.

Nasaw begins with a description of the face of the new city of this era: electric lighting; elaborate department stores; restaurants and theaters that catered to the middle class; afternoon editions of newspapers; the nickelodeons and motion picture houses; and, family-oriented vaudeville. All of these innovations had in common the improvement of consumption

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fed and have their laundry seen to. The children of the larger cities in this period were not the factory or farm children whose brutal exploitation raised so many alarms. They were, as Nasaw says, "privileged" as they "were spared the deadly tedium of full-time menial labor" on which the family's existence depended and were able to labor part-time, while still attending school, at jobs that were "almost a pleasant interlude between a day's confinement in school and an evening in cramped quarters at home" (47). The majority of these jobs were taken by boys. Girls were closely watched and were expected to help with household chores and, most importantly, serve as "little mothers" for their young siblings--often assuming full responsibility for the babies "from the time they got home from school until the moment the babies fell asleep" (107). For boys (and a small number of girls) the principal sources of income were junk-picking, running messages, carrying deliveries, and, above all, selling newspapers. The newsies form one of the central subjects of Nasaw's book. They were the major form of income-producing activity and in the news accounts, memoirs, and child welfare reports of the era they are quite prominent. The indep

Category: History - R