For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Nothing disturbed Watson more than the possibility of irrational, emotional elements in the mother-child relationship. In fact the spectacle of spontaneous affection was enough to push Watson to the brink of an emotional outburst himself:

  If you expect a dog to grow up and be useful as a watch dog, a bird dog, a fox hound, useful for anything except a lap dog, you wouldn’t dare treat it the way you treat your child. When I hear a mother say “Bless its little heart” when it falls down, or stubs its toe, or suffers some other ill, I usually have to walk a block or two to let off steam.45

  By the nineteen twenties, when Watson’s synthesis of behaviorist child-raising theory, The Psychological Care of Infant and Child, appeared, the mothers’ movement was dead, the National Congress of Mothers itself had been absorbed into the newly organized National Congress of Parents and Teachers. The century had begun with middle-class mothers organizing to search out the “science” of child raising. Now, that science had been found, or so it seemed, and there was very little room in it for mothers. “It is a serious question in my mind,” Watson wrote,

  whether there should be individual homes for children—or even whether children should know their own parents. There are undoubtedly more scientific ways of bringing up children which probably mean finer and happier children.46

  For despite the neuter wording of this statement Watson grasped that vexing problem: How could women raise men? The middle-class mother had not been tempered by the discipline of the outside work world. How could the child-raising expert, remote in his university office, trust her to control her perverse impulses to cuddle, fondle, and otherwise corrupt the young? Without supervision how could she produce anything but a generation of “lap dogs”? Watson bemoaned the unaccountable “mores” that stood in the way of fully scientific, motherless, child raising:

  The home we have with us—inevitably and inexorably with us. Even though it is proven unsuccessful, we shall always have it. The behaviorist has to accept the home and make the best of it.47

  While Watson was manfully accepting the limitations of the middle-class home, an even more serious menace lurked in the neighborhoods of the poor. The mothers’ movement and its attendant experts had paid scant attention to the “lower” classes, partly on account of the middle-class prejudice that the poor should not be bearing children in the first place. Certainly, if the mothers’ movement’s dream of professionalization had been realized, the average working-class woman would never have qualified for a license to raise children. Watson himself disqualified the poor with the simple rule that no one should have a child until she could afford to give the child a room of its own. But poor and working-class people defiantly went ahead and had children, and at a greater rate than the better-off WASPs. This posed a serious problem to the would-be reformer: if the middle-class woman could not always be counted on to follow instructions, she could at least be counted on to read the experts’ books. What about the woman who did not read English, or did not read at all? What about the working mother who had no time to attend mothers’ meetings or lectures by experts? Furthermore, it was widely known, or suspected, that the poor were more impulsive and affectionate with their children than the “better” classes. A settlement-house worker had reported disapprovingly in 1900 that in the homes of the poor “there is no meal hour and no bedtime, the children retiring late with the parents and eating where and when they please.…48

  Lillian Wald, the famous nurse and settlement-house worker, observed:

  We are not always mindful of the fact that children in normal [i.e., middle-class] homes get education apart from formal lessons and instruction. Sitting down to a table at definite hours, to eat food properly served, is training, and so is the orderly organization of the home …

  Contrast this regulated domestic life with the experience of children—a large number in New York—who may never have been seated around a table in an orderly manner, at a given time, for a family meal.…49

  As a product of the “disorganized tenement home,” Wald cited seventeen-year-old Emil. Emil was an able high school junior who managed to support himself by teaching his fellow immigrants at night. But he betrayed his lowly origins one weekend by arriving embarrassingly late for a party at the country home of one of the settlement workers. The problem: he had not realized that trains only leave at definite scheduled times—an obvious consequence (to Wald) of irregular childhood habits.

  Inevitably the challenge of the working-class child attracted the interest of wealthy and powerful forces. If the baby Emils ate when they wanted to, what were the chances that they would ever get to work on time as grown men? Or follow the instructions of the foreman? The industrial line on child raising, buttressed by behaviorist psychological theory, seemed to offer an irresistible key to future productivity. Methods existed, or were about to be discovered, in modern psychological laboratories, for instilling workers with obedience, punctuality, and good citizenship while they were still in the cradle, and long before they had ever heard of trade unions or socialism. Vistas of infallible social control, with the techniques developed in psychological laboratories finding instant application in factories and slums, stretched before the Rockefellers and like-minded men.

  In the early twenties the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation turned its attention to the problem of child raising. Set up by John D. Rockefeller as a memorial to his wife, the foundation’s overall goal was to promote “scientific” solutions to social problems. As the foundation’s final, summary report put it in 1933:

  It was felt that through the social sciences might come more intelligent measures of social control that would reduce such irrationalities as are represented by poverty, class conflict, and war between nations.50

  Beardsley Ruml, director of the L. S. R. Memorial, had always had a special interest in psychology as a potential tool for social control51 and child raising was an obvious point of intervention. If the “irrationalities” of poverty, class conflict, etc., were to be abolished, then why not begin with the irrationalities of child raising? According to the L. S. R. Memorial final report, “the management of the child in the home and the school” suffered from a basic ignorance of child-raising techniques and a lack of psychological insight. The only way to rationalize and standardize child raising, given that it was carried out in the privacy of individual homes, was to train a battery of experts, skilled in scientific methods, to reach out to all the ignorant and isolated mothers.

  Between 1923 and 1929 the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation spent over seven million dollars to achieve its vision of standardized, expert-controlled child raising. Money went to set up “institutes” and “research stations” at universities across the country; to bring together experts from many disciplines (fifteen hundred of them met for a full week in 1925 at a Rockefeller-sponsored conference); to train home economists and teachers to be “parent educators” on the side. A late-twenties’ survey found seventy-five “major” organizations involved in parent education, thanks largely to stimulation by the Rockefeller money. These included government agencies (the federal government had begun sponsoring mass education in housekeeping and child raising in 1914), public colleges and schools, voluntary social welfare agencies, religious organizations, nursery schools, health agencies, and national organizations such as the Child Study Association of America (descended from that little group of New York mothers who first met in 1888).52

  Orville Brim, the historian of the parent education “movement,” gives the Rockefeller foundation credit for rapid “professionalization” of the child-raising business in the twenties. But the new professionals were not, as the early mothers’ movement might have hoped, mothers themselves. Where there had been a mothers’ movement, there were now the twin disciplines of child study and parent education. Where there had been gatherings of mothers—ordinary lay women—there were now formal conferences of academic experts. No one thought of mothers as potential research assistants any more, much less as profession
als themselves. But the parent educators, the demi-experts who distilled the works of psychologists and physicians into popular pamphlets and courses, were already organizing themselves into an independent profession complete with credentialing, professional publications, and research on new techniques of reaching the grassroots mother.

  The financial crash of 1929 brought the Rockefeller-sponsored parent education movement to a sudden halt. Without foundation funding, parent education could not become an independent profession, supplying educators to fan out across the country, penetrating the most recalcitrant homes. The Rockefeller vision of standardized child raising, in tune with corporate needs, guaranteeing a future free of social “irrationality”—was temporarily abandoned. But the efforts to make child raising more “scientific”—beginning with the mothers’ movement and leading up to the professional- (and foundation-) dominated parent education movement—had by no means been wasted. There existed, by the twenties, a nationwide apparatus for diffusing expert advice on child raising to the working class, as well as to the educated and wealthy, to the small towns as well as to the cosmopolitan cities. And, thanks in part to the early organizing by the mothers’ movement, there existed a mass demand for whatever the experts had to say. The Lynds, in their classic study of “Middletown,” a small midwestern city in the twenties, noted:

  The attitude that child-rearing is something not to be taken for granted but to be studied appears in parents of both groups [working class and “business class”]. One cannot talk with Middletown mothers without being continually impressed by the eagerness of many to lay hold of every available resource for help in training their children.…53

  In their search for guidance, Middletown mothers turned to doctors, home economists, government pamphlets, church-sponsored lessons on child raising, popular women’s magazines (which increasingly featured expert child-raising advice), and books such as Emmett Holt’s still trusted Care and Feeding of Infants. Looking back on the growth of maternal reliance on experts, Dorothy Canfield Fisher recalled in the nineteen fifties how her own older relatives mocked “mothers who bring their babies up by a book!” But times were changing fast, and by the second and third decades of the twentieth century, Dr. Holt’s “name was revered by the young mothers as much as it was mocked at by their grandmothers,”54 who no doubt could not comprehend how difficult and anxious an endeavor child raising had become.

  These then, were the achievements of the “century of the child” in its first three decades: mothers had not become professionals; child raising had not become “scientific.” But it had come to be seen as a more challenging, all-engulfing activity than ever before. “I accommodate my entire life to my little girl,” one business-class mother told the Lynds.55 “Life was simpler for my mother,” observed another Middletown mother. “In those days one did not realize that there was so much to be known about the care of children.”56 The Little Child had provided what seemed to be an effective and final answer to the Woman Question, but the child had not, in the process, been given over to women. For the other great achievement of the early “century of the child” was the creation of the child-raising expert, and his installation in the home as a new source of patriarchal authority.

  SEVEN

  Motherhood as Pathology

  The goal of scientific motherhood, according to the experts, had been to “bring the home into harmony with industrial conditions.” Mothers were supposed to seek their ideals as well as their methods in the laboratories and commercial centers of the “outside” world. If the home could attain industrial standards of discipline, efficiency, and thrift, then its little child–products would be able to roll effortlessly along the conveyor belt leading from the family into the big world of business. A mother’s success would be measured, ultimately, along a yardstick calibrated in a distant factory.

  But in the course of the twentieth century, a major cultural inversion takes place: private life becomes an end in itself, and effort in the outside world becomes merely instrumental to greater private fulfillment. From the nineteen twenties on, the “progressive” mother would no more think of looking to the factory or office for her standards of child raising than she would look to the old-fashioned ideas of her grandmothers. Child raising comes unhinged from any external goals—an end in itself which will invite women to enter deeper and deeper into a shadow world of feelings and suspected feelings, guilt, self-analysis, and every nuance of ambivalence.

  In this increasingly self-enclosed world of the nursery, the expert looms larger and more authoritative than ever before—yet over time even he ceases to represent an “objective” external standard, scientific or industrial. It is as if he himself were drawn into the intense, interiorized life of the family, to become the pivotal figure in the new mid-twentieth century drama of the Mother, the Child, and the Expert. In this chapter we are concerned with the character of the expert as it unfolds (through his published advice) from the late twenties to the sixties: beginning with a spirit of good-natured optimism and—as his task becomes more and more frustrating—giving way to undisguised horror at women and punitive outrage toward children.

  The new spirit which would dominate the multiplicity of twentieth-century child-raising techniques was permissiveness. In the broadest sense, permissiveness was about much more than child raising—it was like a national mood, a wind of change that swept through everything. The American economy was becoming more and more dependent on individual consumption—of cars, housing, and an ever-expanding panoply of domestic goods—and the ethos of permissiveness flourished in the climate of consumption. The experts who had been concerned with discipline and self-control now discovered that self-indulgence was healthy for the individual personality just as it was good for the entire economy.

  Corporate leaders and psychological experts alike agreed on the need for drastic reshaping of the American character. The old Puritan habits, work hard and make do, were obsolete and had to be replaced by new “antihabits” of consumption and leisure. The period of deprivation imposed by the Depression and World War II was only an anticipatory pause as people got used to the idea that deprivation was as unnecessary as it was unpleasant. Commercial prosperity now required that people attempt to gratify themselves through individual consumption, and anyone who saw it differently was factually wrong, possibly un-American, and worst of all—“old-fashioned.” Throughout the century, the steadily climbing index of consumer spending would be matched by a decline in the old inhibitions—in sex, in dress, in attitudes and etiquette.

  The new emphasis on personal enjoyment was inevitably fatal to feminism and the other reform efforts which had occupied middle-class women in the first decades of the twentieth century. In Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group, Mrs. Renfrew, a member of one of the earliest crops of Vassar graduates, reflects on the “gulf between the generations” to her daughter, Dottie (class of ’33), who is about to make a marriage of convenience to a rich man:

  “… Women in my day, women of all sorts, were willing to make sacrifices for love, or for some ideal, like the vote or Lucy Stonerism. They got themselves put out of hotels for registering as Miss and Mr. when they were legally married. Look at your teachers, look what they gave up. Or at women doctors and social workers.” “That was your day, Mother,” Dottie said patiently. “Sacrifices aren’t necessary anymore. Nobody has to choose between getting married and being a teacher. If they ever did. It was the homeliest members of your class who became teachers—admit it … Sacrifice is a dated idea. A superstition, really, Mother, like burning widows in India. What society is aiming at now is the full development of the individual.”1

  But the female individuality which would be developed in the “age of enjoyment” would be as relentlessly domestic as anything Ellen Richards had ever imagined. The home, which rationalist feminists had once been able to criticize as a backwater, out of the mainstream of change, was now clearly at the center of things—economically and socially. By 1929, more than
80 percent of the family’s needs were satisfied by purchases by women. There was no need to rush off to the world of male endeavor if that world only existed to supply the home with the goods, the cash, and the information it needed. From now on the energies of mothers would pour into the job of nurturing the kind of American youth who, from the cradle on, would fit the mold of the consumer society.

  The Expert Allies with the Child

  Permissiveness in child raising represented a 180-degree turn away from early-twentieth-century theories. The change came so fast that it could make a mother’s head spin. Many women found themselves replacing their methods in the middle of their child-raising careers. One mother described her sudden recognition—one evening at dinnertime—of how her ideas had changed: “I was serving a new vegetable to the boys. Suddenly I realized that I expected Peter, the oldest, to clean his plate. Daniel, the middle one, didn’t have to eat it but he had to taste it. And little Billy, as far as I was concerned, could do whatever he wanted.”2 Even Dr. Spock and his wife changed horses in midstream, their first child was raised according to the rigid schedules of behaviorism.

  The behaviorists had seen the child as a piece of raw material to be hammered into shape. Its natural impulses—to eat when and what it liked, to play, etc.—had to be suppressed as firmly as bed-wetting and thumb-sucking. On the contrary, the permissivist proclaimed that the child’s spontaneous impulses were good and sensible and that the child, instead of being a tabula rasa, actually knew, in some sense, what was right for itself.

  Lawrence Frank, an executive of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fund and a leading policy maker in the foundation world, warned parents that children were better advised to adapt to their peers, rather than their elders, if they were to succeed:

  It should never be forgotten that youth must follow its own group, for it is within this group that mating, social life, and economic status must be achieved. When this is blocked or prevented by parental control, devastating conflicts are often set up.… 3