site became the academy instead of the literary journal – children’s literature generally disappeared from the purview of the cultural elite” (p. 181). The field then became the province of librarians, and this association shored up the division between children’s texts and male-dominated “serious” literature, given women’s prominence both in community libraries and in the professionalizing discipline (see Anne Lundin 2004 for an extended analysis of the parts that librarians, literary critics, and readers have played in determining the value of children’s literature). The twentieth century’s new cultural construction of children’s literature emphasized what Maria Nikolajeva (2010) has defined as an “aetonormative” understanding of childhood, in which the adult is seen to be the standard while childhood is an (inherently limited) departure from this norm. Given this foundational concept of childhood, it is unsurprising that cordoning off children’s literature has not prevented adults from admitting a certain flexibility to the boundaries when it suited them – as in the case of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) coming to be seen as “really” fitting within the more respectable category of adult literature. As Clark says, this approach displays “a tendency to consider anything that adults find valuable as really adult” (2003, p. 159).
While twentieth-century children’s literature was no longer considered to be equal in stature to literature for adults, isolating the field did provide new opportunities for recognizing quality within it, as seen by the number of prominent children’s literature awards established in the first half of the century. The American Library Association instituted the Newbery Medal in 1922 and the Caldecott Medal for illustration in 1936; in 1935 the UK association of professional librarians established the Carnegie Medal for children’s books written in English, followed by the Kate Greenway Medal for illustrated texts in 1955; the Children’s Book Council of Australia, also the brainchild of librarians, first awarded a prize in 1936 and added a category for illustration in 1952; and New Zealand’s library association instituted the first of a series of awards in 1945. These efforts to acknowledge the aesthetic value of writing for children paralleled the expansion of access to the texts, as developments in publishing increased children’s ability to own books and exercise some choice in the purchase. Book tokens, an early form of the gift certificate, were introduced in Britain in 1932; more affordable Puffin paperback editions of children’s texts began to circulate in 1941, and the extremely cheap Golden Books first appeared in 1942 (Clark 1996, p. 474; Epstein 1996, p. 481). Meanwhile, the first half of the century saw the establishment in the United States of specialized children’s divisions in publishing houses and children’s rooms in public libraries (Epstein 1996, p. 479). England and the United States maintained a virtual stranglehold on publishing children’s books in English throughout the twentieth century until a US antitrust ruling in 1976 (Clark 1996, p. 475).
Developing Diversity
Although the general field of English-language children’s literature made some significant progress before 1970, these advances did not benefit all children, as publishers worldwide primarily targeted white, middle-class audiences and preferred books that, to use Rudine Sims Bishop’s terms, “mirrored” these identities and failed to provide “windows” to any others (1990). Indigenous and diasporic authors and illustrators were not welcome in the major publishing houses, and widely available, institutionally supported children’s texts included prejudicial assumptions about and degrading stereotypes of these groups – if, indeed, they depicted them at all. In Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Children’s Picture Books, 1845–2002 (2004), Michelle H. Martin provides an overview of the demeaning ways in which Black people were depicted in popular texts of the early years of the twentieth century, arguing that it is crucial to maintain knowledge of these works despite their horrifying depictions, because “[these] early black images were what Harlem Renaissance writers who wrote for children were writing against, and black authors’ methods for creating this revisionist genre have contributed a great deal to what contemporary African-American children’s literature has become” (p. xx). Martin here references works such as the magazine The Brownies’ Book, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1920 to 1921, and books by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, which she discusses at more length later in Brown Gold and in “‘He’s So Sweet’: Bon-Bon Buddy, Literary Child of Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes” (2010). Similarly, Dianne Johnson (2009) sees The Brownies’ Book as contextualizing “all of the African American children’s literature to follow” because “[b]y paying attention to the art and interests of people of African descent around the world, [Jesse] Fauset and [W.E.B.] Du Bois attempted, perhaps, to help Negro children think of themselves both as children of the African diaspora and as world citizens” (p. 338). Clark (2003) mentions that Hughes and Bontemps were among the few US authors after the 1910s who wrote for both adults and children, and Martin emphasizes that this approach reflects a deliberate intent to use children’s literature to intervene in racist discourses, commenting that “[t]he evolution of African-American children’s picturebooks has mirrored the nineteenth-century ‘Golden Age,’ which moved the focus of children’s literature ‘from instruction to delight’ – but this form of instruction [during the early twentieth century] was firmly grounded in concerns about race” (Martin 2004, p. 19). Moira Hinderer (2014) explores the efforts of Black librarians during the 1930s and 1940s to contribute to these instructional imperatives. Chicago’s Charlemae Rollins, Atlanta’s Virginia Lacy Jones, and New York’s Augusta Baker were among those who supported racially progressive writers and pressured major publishers to replace racist “plantation literature” with titles that centered non-stereotypical Black characters and valued African and African American cultural heritage. Hinderer comments that this cadre of librarians “sought to shape children’s thinking on issues such as race and class, by introducing them to a specific set of aesthetic practices and specific forms of narrative and autobiography that were tied to a northern urban outpouring of Black artists and writers of the 1920s, while also finding a usable southern past and present” (p. 42).
Due to the suppression of children’s literature by and about marginalized groups throughout the greater part of the twentieth century, late twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship on these issues has involved rediscovering and calling attention to the texts that did exist. Katherine Capshaw’s Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks (2014) provides another example of this kind of work. Both Martin and Capshaw see the 1950s and 1960s in the United States as crucial periods for the development and dissemination of more authentic texts by and about African Americans, as much because of the political and social revolutions going on during that time as for the texts we can trace to those decades, such as Rose Blue and Tom Feelings’s A Quiet Place (1969). The 1960s also saw some significant acknowledgements of the need for more racial diversity within the field: in 1962 Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day was the first book featuring a Black child (albeit created by a white author) to win the Caldecott Medal, in 1965 Nancy Larrick’s critique “The All-White World of Children’s Books” was published in the general-audience magazine Saturday Review, and the Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC) was founded in the same year. However, Donnarae MacCann notes that backlash to the use of anti-racist paradigms appeared almost immediately. Even within the CIBC itself, “some members believed that the pinpointing of white supremacist content in literature … was really a way to encourage censorship” (2001, p. 340). Therefore, while racial representations in children’s literature of the mid-twentieth century differ (to some extent) in their nature, variety, and visibility from those in post-1970s texts, there is a striking similarity in how the debate itself manifests in both eras, as a field dominated by whiteness begins – and continues – to grapple with ingrained racism.
English-speaking markets outside the United States followed a similar pattern of mid-century social change that hinted at a forthcoming diversification of children’s literature. In New Zealand, the publishing industry provided some opportunities for Maori artists beginning in the 1960s, particularly in the case of books by R.L. Bacon, who wrote about Maori legend and collaborated with Maori illustrator Para Batchitt (Gilderdale 1996). In Australia, texts with sincere depictions of Aboriginal culture,
