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Judith Sealander

Sealander book explores ‘The Failed
Century of the Child’

IIn her newly published book, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America’s Young in the Twentieth Century, Judith Sealander, history, explores an unprecedented American effort to use state regulation to guarantee health, opportunity and security to the nation’s children. The achievements envisioned in the decades between 1900-2000 were enormously ambitious. “Their failure is somewhat a product of their ambition,” Sealander says. They do deserve recognition for their attempt to improve the lot of those who were previously “enslaved or ignored,” she affirms.

They also reflected entrenched, but self-contradictory, values and Americans’ inconsistent expectations of government. “People expected more of government but also placed more restraints upon government,” she says. As such, a “failed” century, Sealander argues, deserves a mixture of rebuke and cautious admiration. “In the words of E. M. Forster,” she says, "'Two cheers are quite enough. There is no occasion to give three.’”

Released simultaneously in hardcover and paperback editions by Cambridge University Press, the scholarly book offers cautionary tales that are well worth noting by a broad audience and is written in accessible language.

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