Losing Kin, Choosing Kith: Child Autonomy beyond the Protectionist Nuclear Family in Operation Pied Piper

Analyzing the under-voiced perspectives of child evacuees in World War I Britain, this article takes a new look at Operation Pied Piper. In the context of middle-class family, an institution that shrunk into a “nuclear” form centered around the childhood it shaped, an enduring motif is the indirect threat of strangers like the Pied Piper, who might not just take one’s children—they can also demonstrate how parental devotion can be unreciprocated and how little control one has over one’s offspring. Stripped of sentimentality, the childhood depicted through such departures is one not just of danger but also of curiosity, freedom, and the room to be carefree, angry at, or chillingly indifferent toward one’s parents. Invoking the historical materialist perspective of family abolitionists recently revived by queer and xenofeminists, the legend of the Pied Piper and the wartime evacuation of children demonstrate possibilities for building extrafamilial bonds and identity.