Saturday's Child by Robin Morgan

one for animals—whose representatives on the set looked you over for any visible bruises (but didn’t asked you to undress in case there were hidden ones), then went on their way. In my day, for New York kid actors in television or on Broadway, theProfessional Children’s School was thought to be the solution to bothersome education requirements. The PCS was most obliging: it overlooked undone homework and absentee attendance, and bestowed passing grades despite an abysmal scholastic reality. Fortunately for me, my mother and aunts shared an Ashkenazic reverence for education, so they scorned the PCS in favor of a small, serious private school and, when I got older, tutors (and therein lies a tale, about which more later). 6
    I wish Paul Peterson and his group all the best. They’re doing much-needed work. But the experienced political activist in me knows that better legislation, while a crucial component of any battle for progressive social change, doesn’t solve oppression. The strands are too varied, the knots too tightly woven to be unraveled quickly or simply—and it takes a long time to saw through them. Whenever habitual denial is threatened, it feels to the denier as if the world were about to explode. Though often unacknowledged, it feels this way to the powerless as well as to those who wield power over them. This is true of adults and even more so of children. Thanks to the research of such psychologists as Alice Miller and Jennifer Freyd, we now know a bit more about how deep the influence of early imprint really goes.
    Having responsibility but lacking authority is a fatiguing, contradictory kind of power, and the child performer lives a fatiguing, contradictory reality. Seduced into collaborating with one’s own commercial salability while ignorant of one’s own human value, proud of the talents and skills one has while mortified at the use they’re put to, unable to break free of the shame-pride-guilt-responsibility dynamic, an intelligent child develops a sophisticated sense of irony so keen it teeters on the edge of self-disgust.
    That’s when it’s time for the perks and rewards to kick in.
    Like the dolls.
    1 Originally published in France as L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1960); English edition, Jonathan Cape, 1962; U.S. paperback edition, Vintage Books.
    2 The late Simone de Beauvoir summed up this position most succinctly in writing that the Roman Catholic Church “reserves its most uncompromising concern for child welfare to the child in fetal form.”
    3 Action for Children , vol. 1, no. 3. See also Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (W. W. Norton, 1989) and The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism in Four Dimensions , 2d ed. (W. W. Norton, 1994). In June 1999, the International Labour Organization (ILO) finally adopted a treaty intended to abolish the most hazardous forms of child labor. Under pressure from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands, however, the ILO compromised, not prohibiting people under age eighteen from enlisting in the military, although the treaty bars “forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict.” As trade unions, most human-rights organizations, and such countries as Canada, Denmark, and Norway note, military service is hazardous, whether the participant has gone compulsorily or voluntarily. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that more than 300,000 children under age eighteen are serving as regular soldiers, guerrillas, spies, cooks, sexual slaves, and suicide commandos in current conflicts in approximately fifty countries. By trying to raise the recruitment age to eighteen, UNICEF is attempting to change the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which set fifteen as the minimum age for military recruitment at the insistence of the United States and the