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Since World War II, the American discourse around children and science has been held in the form of a postmortem: a series of diagnoses pointing to a commitment gap that never seems to be fixed. The formation “Children don’t love science like they used to” points to an imagined past, full of the joy of experimentation and discovery. Although some now argue that we no longer actually face a scientific “manpower shortage,” the popular belief that we do is deeply ingrained, coming, as it does, from this vision of a lost time of utopian explorations. This book, a twentieth-century cultural history of the “science kid,” asks what the stakes of this belief might be. It argues that the nostalgic vision of “a time when American kids loved science” tends to represent these “science kids” as male. If we’re stuck associating the qualities of a potential young scientist—curiosity, mischievousness, a certain free way of thinking that sometimes borders on the antisocial—with masculinity, what effect might this persistent set of associations have on the attempt to recruit women into STEM fields?

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This chapter uses the example of the child’s chemistry set to explore the way that American children’s material culture has shaped, and been shaped by, changing perceptions of acceptable risk in the home environment in the twentieth century. Chemistry sets, first sold in the United States in the 1910s, changed over the twentieth century, as companies worried about lawsuits have excluded potentially dangerous elements and presumed less initiative on the part of the child chemist, while calling for enhanced parental supervision. These alterations were first welcomed by parents in the 1960s and 1970s; now, for some, the defanged chemistry set embodies the undesirable unexpected consequences of the quest for new levels of safety in children’s material environments. This chapter follows the potent symbol of the chemistry set through the century to ask how the American movement to keep children safe in the home came about and to identify key cultural explanations for the early-twenty-first-century backlash against these efforts.