Children Educating Children

Autobiographies of the upper and middle classes abound with descriptions of servants who seem to have been in charge of the master's children day and night. What we usually gain is the perspective of the master's children, while servants' own accounts are few. How did they feel about their responsibility for the master's children? It was common to hire young girls to take care of infants but what did the girls themselves think of the job or the master's baby they were carrying in their arms all day long? Unlike, say, in London working‐class quarters a century ago, where young girls seem to have liked being hired as nurses, the overall impression is that in Finland and Sweden girls disliked the job or at least preferred other jobs. The information we have is infrequent (ethnographic descriptions, written oral history and a few autobiographies) but consistent enough to be suggestive. It is easy to list the disadvantages of the job: it was binding, patience demanding, the responsibility may have been heavy. Yet these factors characterised child care everywhere, thus they do not explain why in some places children liked the job but in others they would rather have avoided it. In this paper young girls' experiences as hired baby nurses in late nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Finland and Sweden are discussed and some explanations are suggested for their liking or disliking the job

Child care · Ethnography · Patience · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Working class · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Psychology · Social and Educational Sciences · Social Psychology

• Children in paid care-giving work

  Open Access•Adéla Souralová•Childhood•2017

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