In the past two decades the historiography of the child has paid increasing attention tothe voices and experiences of children in the past, gradually letting go of the so-called'adult gaze' and learning to study children as historical actors in their own right. Buildingupon these insights, this article will assess the influence of adult bourgeois norms on theworld and self-perception of children in nineteenth-century Belgium from a strict children'spoint of view. lt will contribute to our knowledge of the mechanisms underlyingchildren's socialization in the past, arguing that rather than being the passive recipientsof adult norrns, children actively internalized the ideas and ideals with which they werebrought up. More concretely, the article will take the form of a casestudy and investigatehow the influential ideal of domesticity that emerged in the late eighteenth-centuryshaped the developing gender identity of two teenagers living in early nineteenth-centuryBelgium. Hence, it will contribute to the budding historiography of family and child inthe regions of present-day Belgium.
