‘The century of the child’?

In 1900 the Swedish feminist Ellen Key published a book withthe title The Century of the Child. The idea for it had come from a drama, The Lion’s Whelp, in which one character states that ‘The next century will be the century of the child, just as much as this century has been the woman’s century. When the child gets his rights, morality will be perfected.’ Key’s vision of the future was one in which children would be conceived by parents who were physically fit and in a loving relationship, and who would then grow up in homes where mothers were ever-present. Women’s role was emphatically to bring up children; they should prepare themselves for motherhood by a period of service ‘devoting themselves to the care of children, hygiene, and sick nursing’. Such systems of care for children as crèches or kindergartens were very much second best, and school itself should strive ‘to make itself unnecessary’. Success in childrearing lay in becoming ‘as a child oneself’, and then if this happened, ‘the simplicity of the child’s character will be kept by adults. So the old social order will be able to renew itself.’ Key was in no doubt that the future would be determined by the way children were reared, and she blamed failures in child-rearing for what she saw as three of the scars of the modern world, capitalism, war and Christianity. Thus if the twentieth century was going to be ‘the century of the child’ it was going to be so not simply for the sake of the child but, in addition, for that of humanity as a whole.1