Bambine e bambini nel tempo

Since the 1960s, the experience of childhood across time has emerged as an important field of historical research. Historians’ engagement with the children of the past has revealed the complex and multifarious meanings of childhood and the very different experiences associated to this phase of life in different historical contexts. Throughout history, gender has represented a crucial dimension of childhood, and our main aim here was to explore how boys and girls have been understood and socially constructed through time, giving particular attention to the role of play, toys, and children’s literature. In this issue of «Genesis», we try to explore the crucial relationship between the effort of regulating children and the “agency” that children are able to express, particularly in the context of a children’s peer culture, in which play (broadly understood) has a central role. In the Introduction we discuss possibilities and limits of the attempt to examine how gender norms and gender models have been formulated and propagated through play and literature and we interrogate how those models have been appropriated, contested and subverted in different historical, geographical and cultural contexts. We argue that gender and childhood provide us with a critical perspective on the past essential to the understanding of broader processes of cultural and political change and we discuss the specific challenges and possibilities of the effort to recover the voices of the children of the past.