Julia M. Gossard won the 2017 prize for the best article published in the Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth for “Tattletales: Childhood & Authority in Eighteenth-Century France.”
Her article was selected from the sixteen articles published in volume 10 by a committee consisting of Peter Stearns (chair), Patrizia Guarnieri, and Shurlee Swain. The article explores how the Church and the French state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used charity schools to press children to report on the misdeeds of parents and neighbors. The committee noted Julia’s very imaginative use of sources, along with her solid analysis of children’s motives and behaviors, which suggested considerably more complexity in parent-child relations in this period than had been realized. Julia is assistant professor of history at Utah State University. Her first book, Coercing Children: State-Building and Social Reform in the Early Modern French World, is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press.
The committee also noted the excellence of Lynne E. Curry’s “‘A Sick Child Deserves Its Rights’: Law, Religion, and Children’s Medical Care in the United States, 1870-1910.” Lynn is professor of history at Eastern Illinois University and author of The DeShaney Case: Child Abuse, Family Rights, and the Dilemma of State Intervention and Modern Mothers in the Heartland: Gender, Health, and Progress in Illinois, 1900-1930.