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Caught between Common Sense and Science: The Cornell Child Study Clubs, 1925–45

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Julia Grant
Julia Grant*
Affiliation:
James Madison College, Michigan State University
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Extract

A 1930 report of a rural New York Child Study Club meeting conveys the dubiousness with which many mothers have regarded using books to raise babies. In the words of the group's secretary: “One mother, at a certain point in the discussion, quoted, half in fun, the much-abused ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ adding, That's in the book.’ (We have had quite a bit of fun about things being or not being ‘in the book.”) ‘Oh, but that's in the old Book,’ some made answer, and to that another said, ‘I guess you have to mix the two!”” This ironic dialog highlights women's ambivalence and confusion about the use of the “book” in child-rearing and about the sources of expert advice which have contended for authority in the child-rearing enterprise. Before the twentieth century, mothers who raised “baby by the book” were often ridiculed, with the assumption being that the care of children constituted common knowledge; however, in this century, middle-class mothers have avidly consumed child-rearing manuals. American parents have been inundated with baby books, from the free Infant Care pamphlets dispensed by the U.S. Children's Bureau in the early decades of the century to Dr. Benjamin Spock's 35-cent paperback Baby and Child Care, which was distributed to millions of mothers by physicians and nurses in the 1940s and 1950s.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , Winter 1994 , pp. 433 - 452
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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4 Earlier scholarship, such as Ehrenreich, Barbara and English's, Deirdre For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Garden City, N.Y., 1979), has tended to assume that there is a relationship between expert advice and women's behavior. Mechling, Jay E. chastises historians for assuming that there is a relationship between prescriptive advice and parental practices in “Advice to Historians on Advice to Mothers,” Journal of Social History 9 (Fall 1975): 44–63.Google Scholar

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