Querying Childhood Feminist Reframings

List of Figures viii

Introduction 1

1 Chronological Age and the Uneven Development of Modern Childhood in the United States 19

2 ‘Is She a Child?’ Emergence of Chronological Age in Early Colonial Bengal 34

3 Age and Marriage: Problems of Girlhood in Colonial and Post-colonial Bengal 52

4 Reflections on the History of Childhood and the State in Kerala 80

5 The Travels and Appeal of the ‘Girl Child’ 104

6 Gender, Education, and Child Labour: Reflections on Ontological Issues 125

7 The Classroom as Sensorium in Mysore, 1840–1930 139

8 Juvenile Labour in Beedi Industry of Central India 1960s–’80s 172

9 Learning to Service: Vocational Training for Marginalised Youth, Aspirations, Consumption, and Social Reproduction 190

10 Disciplining Girls in German Families: Gendered Childhood Experiences of Violent and Authoritarian Parenting in Germany From the 1890s to the 1940s 213

11 Narrating Childhood: Difficult Memories in Trans Autobiography 234

vi Contents

12 ‘I Lost My Son Whom I Raised for 12 Years’ – Anxieties Among Parents of Trans Children 262

13 Contested Equality: Co-Parenting, Child Welfare, and Gender Politics in Contemporary History 290

Index 315

Biography

Mary E. John was formerly Professor and Director of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi. She was Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Women’s Studies Programme at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, from 2001 to 2006.

Barbara Lotz studied Indology in Heidelberg and New Delhi, focusing on modern Hindi literature, literary history, and translation studies. She has been coordinating Indo-German academic partnerships under the DAAD format: A New Passage to India since 2010 and is part of the M.S. Merian – R. Tagore ICAS:MP as a module member of TM 5, The Challenge of Gender (University of Wuerzburg).

Elisabeth Schömbucher is a former Professor of Anthropology. She has been teaching at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg, and joined the Department of Indology at Würzburg University in 2006. Besides teaching Anthropology of South Asia, she has conceptualised the teaching programme Global Systems and Intercultural Competence (GSiK).

“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