Porcelain Dolls and Marble Balls: The Role of Toys and Play in the Gendered Socialization of Enslaved Children

Summary

Children comprised a large portion of the enslaved population on plantations in the American South, but their lives are often overlooked or ignored in archaeological studies of plantation life and discussions of changes in how children were viewed in American society. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a shift in how children and play were viewed, from miniature adults for whom play was utilitarian, to a separate life-stage where play was children’s primary purpose and necessary for proper socialization. This paper examines the inclusion of enslaved children within larger shifts in conceptions of childhood in 18th and 19th century America through manufactured toys provided to enslaved children. Toys recovered from fifty-two slavery related archaeological sites in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, cataloged into the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), show that toys given to enslaved children by white slave owners, and potentially enslaved parents, provided an important source of gendered socialization and are evidence of the inclusion of enslaved children within larger societal shifts in the meaning of childhood

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21361