ABSTRACT
The French sociologist Jacques Donzelot argued that Western childhood was transformed by the state during the nineteenth century into a kind of “supervised freedom”, initially of bourgeois children, but later extended to working-class children. The problem of working-class childhood was excessive freedom – “being left to the street” – and this had to be limited and controlled, “by shepherding the child back to spheres where he [sic] could be more closely watched: the school and the family” (Donzelot, 1979: 47). The object of the plethora of parliamentary measures during the nineteenth century that attempted to enforce standards for protecting children, including child labour laws and the introduction of compulsory education, was both “hygienic and political in nature, the two … being indissociable” (Donzelot, 1979: 78). Thus childhood in developed countries has become a “quarantine period” (Aries, 1960); a preparation for adulthood that has led to a marginalisation of children in time and space (see Ennew, 1994).
