History of Childhood

from the Foreword: Possibly the heartless treatment of children, from the practice of infanticide and abandonment through to the neglect, the rigors of swaddling, the purposeful starving, the beatings, the solitary confinement, and so on, was and is only one aspect of the basic aggressiveness and cruelty of human nature, of the inbred disregard of the rights and feelings of others. Children, being physically unable to resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost unimaginable ways by way of expressing conscious or more commonly unconscious motives of their elders... The present volume abounds in evidence of all kinds, from all periods and peoples. The story is monotonously painful, but it is high time that it should be told and that it should be taken into account...

Brilliant . . . bold . . . challenging . . . heavily documented., Crucial in understanding how the wounded child is archetypal of our time., Neither history nor psychiatry can ever be the same again. A turning point in the integration of the social sciences., Lloyd deMause is probably the first scholar who has made a thorough study of the history of childhood without glossing over the facts.