ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the unchildlike child in the construction of the Progressive juvenile court at the beginning of the twentieth century. Debate and contestation over the unchildlike child in the Progressive era creates a moral cartography of the city drawing upon raced, classed, gendered, and heterosexist understandings of democratic life, the attributes of childhood, the creation of the family, and the responsibilities of neighborhood communities. Progressive logic founding the juvenile court was based in what Philippe Aris calls the modern institution of childhood, based on the idea that childhood, a period of time including what we might refer to today as the time of babies, children, youth, and teenagers, grew out of a Victorian bourgeois sensibility that young people could be shaped, molded and formed through education, environmental manipulation and bodily development. Advancement for Progressives stemmed from the combination of social scientific techniques and state practices to diagnose, analyze and cure delinquency.
