This module traces the shifting ways that age of consent laws have been defined, debated and deployed worldwide and from the Middle Ages to the present, and explores how such laws figure in debates over the nature of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, in campaigns against prostitution and child marriage, and teenage pregnancy, as well as struggles to achieve gender and sexual equality.
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Isaac Taylor Headland (1859-1942), a resident of Beijing and a scholar at Peking (Beijing) University, joined other contemporaries interested in both popular culture and folklore in collecting and transcribing Chinese children's rhymes. The rhymes… [more]
Issac Taylor Headland (1859-1942), a resident of Beijing and a scholar at Peking (Beijing) University, joined other contemporaries interested in both popular culture and folklore in his own study of daily life in China. He was particularly concerned… [more]
This image offers an artistic view of a household celebrating the New Year's holiday. Here we find children at play amidst a scene of domestic joy and prosperity for an elite family of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). The detail of the image is rich in… [more]
Many adult voices advocated the need for a good moral upbringing as part of a rigorous education for children during the later Ming and Qing dynasties, an aspect seen in the primers that were repeatedly published during this period. Yet other realms… [more]
French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the philosophical treatise Emile, or On Education in 1762. In it, he imagines a situation in which a young tutor devotes 20 years to raising a single child. In the process, Rousseau lays out many of… [more]
This graph shows us the average year of menarche, a female's first menstrual cycle (often considered the beginning of puberty), from 1860 to 1980 reported by adult female patients at maternity clinics in Norway. It also includes data from Oslo school… [more]
Folktales have been used for generations to teach moral tales to children. They have shifted over time depending upon the generation and location of the tale but remain part of the childhood experience for many young people. "The Red Shoes" published… [more]