Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Withdrawn Module: Parents and Children in Western Europe and North America, 1860 to the Present (HI3G2)

This module was available until 2018
but has now been withdrawn
and is no longer available


Module leader: Angela Davis

This undergraduate 30 CATS final-year advanced option module will enable students to develop an in-depth knowledge of the history of parent-child relations in Western Europe and North America in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will introduce students to a range of theoretical perspectives surrounding childhood and the family and how these developed over the period. We will consider how these trends operated transnationally, in Western Europe and North America, but with a particular focus on Britain, France and the United States.

In term one students will consider the broader changing conceptions of parenthood and childhood that occurred transnationally throughout the whole period. We will trace the developing role of the state in family, consider the effects of this intervention and think how they were mediated by class, region, religion and ethnicity.

Term two will focus on the experiences of children and young people from birth to adolescence, taking specific themes and examining them comparatively over shorter chronologies. It will explore children’s lives in the arena of the home, work and school. It will then consider on mother-child relationships, father-child relationships and the experiences of children cared for outside the family home.

In the course of the module students will consider different methodological approaches to the history of childhood and family and interrogate historiographical debates.

Students will be introduced to a range of primary source material, including oral history, diaries and autobiographies, social surveys and community studies, the reports of government committees, and film and pictorial sources.

The module will be taught through weekly student-led seminars. Attendance at the seminars is compulsory.

Wellcome