ABSTRACT
Marxist feminist accounts of childhood also point to the radical structural inequalities affecting children across historical eras and geographic boundaries. The pendulum swung between a notion of successful socialisation as an integration of societal norms into behavioural and attitude frameworks, and the idea of the negotiation of these norms between individual children and the groups to which they belong. Discussions of subalterns, hegemony and consent, and poststructuralist accounts of power and resistance which are typical of the work of scholars of labour, media and social change, are oddly rare in the literature about children and childhood. However, some children's conformist agency is more visible when contrasted with their peers' or their own older selves' more dissident agencies evidenced in the micro-political contexts of romance and sexuality. Cunningham suggests that, like Edward Shorter, Stone is also interested in the development of new 'sentiments' of childhood rather than in changes in social structures or markets.
