Preliminary Programme

This paper explores model airplanes as sites for technological and cultural production in the 1930s. Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight in 1927 awakened popular interest in aviation technologies. For boys, this enthusiasm was met with an increased demand for model airplanes and numerous popular children’s magazines, “how-to” manuals, and model airplane kit manufacturers capitalized on the growing enthusiasm for flight. In time, an untold number of children took flight with their model aircraft. Drawing on decades old associations between boys and technology, manufacturers, children, and those who encouraged them reimagined hobby model building as industrial training and it soon became clear that while boys were making models, toy designers, kit makers, and a whole host of organizations were perhaps more interested in making men. In focusing on the airplane as a dominant symbol of modernity, these individuals created new meanings by creating objects of modernity that were suitable for use by children. In a way, model airplanes were fashioned as “gateway technologies” and it was widely believed that the most inventive of boys, provided they had the right encouragement, could grow up to be adult engineers themselves. These discussions reproduced widespread normative assumptions between gender and technology, which largely excluded women and girls as recipients of these potential future vocational benefits. Drawing from a wide array of graphical and visual sources, this paper ultimately redirects attention to material culture as a way to explore the connections between gender, technology, and children’s play. (Show less)

In recent years a research group at the Faculty of History and Arts made a comprehensive list of Dutch autobiographies and diaries (printed and manuscripts) covering the period 1500-1918. This data base was searched for information about toys and play. For the 17th-18th centuries more than 200 autobiographies and more than 200 diaries are analyzed, of which only a minority contained information on this theme. Of the more than 5000 texts of the 19th and early 20th centuries, some 600 authors wrote about toys and play, in a few cases rather extensively. In this paper the changing appreciation by autobiographers will be analyzed. Before around 1800 toys were hardly mentioned, and children's play was generally frowned upon when looking back at old age. In the 19th century in childhood memoirs more and more fond memories of toys can be found, while children's games were more highly valued for their own sake. This change found in autobiographical writing can be linked with changes in ideas about children and childhood, the success of modern pedagogues, and the development of industrial production of toys. (Show less)

The paper will deal with the material culture of urban and rural working class/poor children in Austria during the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. It will draw on rich autobiographical sources as well as surveys of the period. On the one hand it will examine the ways in which working class children shaped their material environments, constructing their toys, making use of public or private spaces (for example fields or streets) as playgrounds, using earnings from odd jobs in order to buy playthings or else. On the other hand it will examine the coming of commercial playthings and other commercial artefacts designed for their age in working-class children’s lives, either as adults’ (rare and therefore much appreciated) presents, or as learning tools at school, or even in the form of alms and through exchanges with better off children. The paper will argue that (compulsory) school education, technology, commerce and middle-class ideas on childhood influenced working class children’s material cultures in slow and gradual, albeit decisive ways and it will draw comparisons between rural and urban working class children, boys and girls, working class children and those in better off (peasant and middle-class) households. It will try to show the interaction between financial constraints, new consuming patterns, perceptions of gender and working class children’s raising patterns in a period of industrial development and economic instability. Among other, such an approach could stress the enormous change children’s material culture has undergone in western societies. (Show less)