Floyd Dell, a leading writer of the twenties and thirties, seconded Frank’s advice: “… it is fatuous,” he wrote in Love in the Machine Age, “for parents to suppose they can set the style for their adolescent children.”4
The one area in which it would seem that parents might have played an authoritative role, even from the experts’ point of view, was in preparing youth for family life. But even here the experts were distrustful. A subcommittee report prepared for the 1932 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection found, paradoxically:
There is indisputable evidence that the home today, laboring under disadvantages imposed upon it by modern conditions, cannot alone cope with the problem of teaching its children how to adjust themselves to family living.5
Starting in the second decade of the twentieth century, the weight of expert opinion had it that all the details of home life—from tooth-brushing to parent-child relationships and dating—could only be successfully taught outside of the home—by experts in the schools. Children and experts turned to each other in agreement: How could parents who were themselves products of the old child raising ever hope to know how to raise the children of the new child raising? Here is an excerpt from the record of a teenage discussion group in Middletown on the topic “What’s Wrong With the Home”:
Boy: “Parents don’t know anything about their children and what they’re doing.”
Girl: “They don’t want to know.”
Girl: “We won’t let them know.”
Boy: “Ours is a speedy world and they’re old.”
Boy: “Parents ought to stand together. Usually one is easy and one is hard. They don’t stand together.”
Boy: “Parents ought to have a third party to whom they could go for advice.”
(Chorus of “Yes”)6
It was not only teenagers to whom the new permissiveness in child raising applied. Teenagers were the first to reap the benefits, but the change in attitude soon trickled down to the smallest infant. Martha Wolfenstein studied the government’s Infant Care bulletin (a fair guide to the state of expert theory) and found that in the editions released between 1914 and 1942 the baby had undergone an “extreme transformation” from a fierce little animal to a mellow and temperate creature:
The earlier infant was described as one afflicted with dangerous and harmful impulses, such as the practices of masturbation and thumb-sucking … The mother must be ceaselessly vigilant; she must wage a relentless battle against the child’s sinful nature. She is told that masturbation “must be eradicated … treatment consists in mechanical restraints.” … The mother’s zeal against thumb-sucking is assumed to be so great that she is reminded to allow the child to have his hands free some of the time so that he may develop legitimate manual skills.…”7
But by the later date:
… the baby has been transformed into almost complete harmlessness … the intense and concentrated impulses of the past have disappeared.… Instead we find impulses of a much more diffuse and moderate character. The baby is interested in exploring his world. If he happens to put his thumb in his mouth, or to touch his genitals, these are merely incidents, and unimportant ones at that, in his overall exploratory progress … Everything amuses him, nothing is excessively exciting.8
Gone were the wicked urges that the behaviorist had sought to tame. In this late-model baby, what the baby wants is what it needs. Crying is no longer due to “contrariness” but to a specific need—for food, drink, or attention. Play, which was once an activity strictly confined to certain times of the day, has become the “healthful development of motor activities.” Thus the babies, like the teenagers, no longer need their mothers to limit them, to teach them discipline or to set a model that they could aspire to—instead, they need their mothers only to follow them around and meet their needs for stimulation, play, and nurturance. From now on, the child itself would set the pace of child care. Diligent mothers found more and more of their time given over to keeping up with their children on the one hand, the experts on the other. As a Middletown mother said:
I have given up church work and club work since the children came. I always like to be here when they come home from school so that I can keep in touch with their games and their friends. Any extra time goes into reading books on nutrition and character building.9
The Doctors Demand Permissiveness
In Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group two mothers (Vassar, class of ’33) are following their toddlers through Central Park. “Have you heard about Gesell’s studies at Yale?” one asks. “Finally we’re going to have a scientific picture of the child.”10 If the permissive mother’s job was to indulge her child’s wishes, it was the task of science to translate seemingly incomprehensible childish behavior into a pattern of cues for the mother to follow. Dr. Arnold Gesell, researcher, pediatrician, and authority to the later authority Benjamin Spock, took the decisive step of placing the child itself in the laboratory. With support from the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, Gesell set up a guidance nursery at the Yale School of Medicine, where teams of professionals studied children’s every move as they played in rooms flanked by one-way mirrors.
The result was a theory of stages of development—source of the commonplace “He’s just going through a stage.” In each stage a child followed perfectly predictable patterns of behavior. Thus Gesell could lay out a two-year-old’s “behavior day” with all the detail of a screenplay:
BEHAVIOR DAY
The two year old child wakes somewhat slowly at, say 7 o’clock in the morning. He is happy to wake but not interested in getting out of his crib at once. He wakes wet but tolerates this condition and plays contentedly for about half an hour. He has a ready greeting for his mother, who toilets him and puts him in a bathrobe for an interim. He likes to go into the bathroom during this interim to watch his father shave. He is also content when he is returned to his room where he munches a cracker and plays behind the closed gate. At breakfast he accepts considerable help from his mother but contributes in small dabs of self-help. (He will take over more completely at the noon meal.)11
With this self-determined baby, the function of the mother is never to “mold,” and hardly even to “influence”:
First of all, recognize your child’s individuality for what it is and give up the notion that you either produce (except through inheritance) or that you can basically change it. Recognize it, understand it, accept it.…12
The ideal mother of scientific permissiveness applies her understanding of the vicissitudes of child development, encouraging certain behaviors and discouraging others, with inexhaustible patience and always through indirection—showing her “willingness to use endless techniques to get around rigidities and rituals and stubbornness.”13 Sensitive mothers follow the child’s lead, never bucking a “phase.” The moody seven-year-old, for example, has good days and bad days. “An aware teacher will shift her intellectual fare on these different days. And a wise mother will keep her child at home if his bad day starts the minute he gets out of bed, as it so often does.”14
Gesell and his colleagues suggested techniques of “household engineering” through which the well-organized mother could simply eliminate family conflict. As Gesell Institute authorities Ilg and Ames explained:
A factory manager doesn’t simply tell his workers that they ought to produce more. Instead he tries to arrange things so that higher production is possible. Similarly, a little creative thinking about some of the most ordinary household routines can often result in improved behavior on the part of the child.15
“The possibilities, of course, are endless,” they wrote:
For instance, suppose that two brothers or sisters cannot be together for any length of time without fighting. You may, if you wish, try to deal with this problem by warning, scolding, punishing. Simpler and more effective is to separate them physically. If you don’t have the space to do this, you can often work wonders by rearranging their schedules. Hours of naps can be s
hifted. Sometimes it even pays to have children eat separately.16
The idea of “household engineering” recalls the crusades of Ellen Richards and the domestic scientists to turn the housewife into a professional domestic “engineer,” economizing on time, money, and work. Transformed by the permissive ideology, household engineering has come to mean that the mother can, through hard work, planning, and diligence, save not time—not money—but stress. Her child’s stress, that is. The imperative which faces her now is: no effort should be spared which might smooth the way of the free and natural child. For example they suggest the following set of “General Rules to Help Children Enjoy Food”:
1. Serve food attractively
2. Give small helpings
3. Serve food without comment
4. Do not stress amount of food to be eaten.…
5. Try to maintain a calm, unworried attitude.…17
In the early-twentieth-century “scientific” phase, the mother had been the representative of the expert in the home, imposing his regimens on the child. But now it is the child who acts as a junior field representative of the expert, instructing the mother in the routines of daily life.
Gesell recommended that the spontaneity of the infant be recorded, twenty-four hours a day, on specially designed charts with appropriate symbols for the taking of orange juice, for sleep, for elimination, crying, dreaming, etc. The adoption of the “self-demand” policy of feeding, he wrote, “creates a favorable atmosphere for the kind of observation which will enable the mother to really learn the basic characteristics of her infant”:
Instead of looking at the clock on the wall, she shifts her interest to the total behavior day of the baby as it records itself on the daily chart … It simply comes to this: She has made the baby (with all his inborn wisdom) a working partner. He helps her to work out an optimal and a flexible schedule suited to his changing needs.18
The scientific mother who once speculated on the nature of childhood, and who saved her observations for G. Stanley Hall, has been reduced to a painstaking—but essentially passive—marker of charts.
Libidinal Motherhood
The child of permissiveness had no use for parental authority or even guidance. Gesell’s toddlers developed to the ticking of an internal clock, which parents could not hope to reset. Frank’s teenagers followed their impulses—and their pals—into a future that adults could neither understand nor control. But, according to the experts who developed the theory of permissiveness further in the thirties and forties, there was one thing that the child did need from its parents (read “mother”), and that was love—unquestioning, spontaneous, warm, all-enfolding love.
In fact, love was the necessary condition, the essential premise, of permissiveness. As Dr. Spock, the world-wide popularizer of permissiveness, put it, “children raised in loving families want to learn, want to conform, want to grow up. If the relationships are good they don’t have to be forced to eat, forced to learn to use the toilet.”19
Only an atmosphere of loving approval could allow a child to develop into a well-adjusted member of the new consumer society. Therefore, mothers must provide not only a deftly managed stress-free environment, but loving encouragement to each childish impulse. To the child-raising experts of the thirties and forties, to love is a mother’s job.
The love demanded by the permissive experts was not the measured love of the scientific mother, the austere love of the morally righteous mother, or the long-suffering love of the martyred mother—or any other variety of love to be found in nineteenth-century maternal iconography. It was a force of nature, an instinct. Even Gesell, so quantitative and rationalistic when it came to child development, seemed to lose his scientific grip at the thought of mother-love. Describing appropriate motherly attributes, he lists “a pleasing voice … nimbleness and manual facility … leisureness of tempo combined with quickness of reaction … a fundamental knowledge of the theory and principles of child development” and other traits that presumably a dedicated woman might attempt to develop. But after all the analysis is said and done he allows that mothering is a “natural aptitude” and goes on to make the astonishing claim that:
It is also well known that among the colored race there are many women who are supremely endowed with almost unique emotional equipment which makes their services ideal for infants and young children.20
The black woman—impressed in Gesell’s imagination as a warm and simple soul, a nanny—symbolized for him the primitive essence of mother-love.
It would take another kind of expert—the psychoanalyst—to claim mother-love as an area of scientific expertise. The psychoanalysts discovered the maternal instinct in much the same spirit as if they had isolated a new chemical element to be found only in women. Obviously, love is the only ingredient of child raising which cannot be mechanized, merchandised, or farmed out to outside institutions. It is the intangible core of the mother-child relationship, the glue that alone could hold the mother to the child and the woman to the home. Psychoanalysis now took up the project which nineteenth-century gynecology had attempted earlier: To anchor female domesticity in the bedrock of female biology: “Mothering behavior,” declared psychoanalyst Therese Benedek, “is regulated by a pituitary hormone.”21
The psychoanalysts agreed with Gesell that it was a mother’s job, not to attempt any outright molding of the child, but to provide a perfectly nourishing environment. However, the psychoanalytically oriented experts observed with kindly disapproval, marking charts all day long would help her to accomplish this not one bit. Child raising, from their point of view, would be better described as being like an extension of pregnancy. If a woman was healthy, her maternal aura would contain all the proper, precious nutrients as naturally and miraculously as her body had nourished the child in her womb.
The psychoanalysts had constructed the ideal mother to go with the permissively raised child—one who would find passionate fulfillment in the details of child care. Through her newfound biological instincts, this new “libidinal mother” was an even better match than the “household engineer” for the liberated child of permissive theory. Not only would she naturally fulfill her child’s needs, but she would find her own fulfillment only in meeting the needs of the child. The libidinal mother would rejoice in pregnancy and breast-feeding. She would seek no richer companionship than that of her own child, no more serious concern than the daily details of child care. She instinctively needed her child as much as her child needed her. She would avoid outside commitments so as not to “miss” a fascinating stage of development, or “deprive” herself of a rewarding phase of motherhood. No longer would motherhood be reckoned as a “duty,” or child raising as a disciplined profession. Instead, mother and child could enjoy each other, fulfilling one another’s needs perfectly, instinctively, as if Nature in her infinite wisdom had created them, two happily matched consumers consuming each other.
The theory of libidinal motherhood left the field of rational interpretation as the sole province of the professionals. The child-guidance books now told women simply to trust their instincts—though of course, they insisted on defining for women exactly what those instincts ought to be. No need for scientific study, comparing notes with other mothers, or “keeping up” with the latest developments, the books exulted. The good mother is the instinctive mother. Just—relax!
Education—or even thought—was once again viewed as a threat to motherliness—not because it caused “atrophy of the uterus” but because it would alienate a woman from her instincts. Norinne, in The Group, was educated enough to understand this:
“Our Vassar education made it tough for me to accept my womanly role … The trouble is my brains … I was formed as an intellectual by Lockwood [a Vassar professor] and those other gals.” Priss was surprised … Brains, she thought to herself, were supposed to help you organize your life more efficiently … “You really feel our education was a mistake?” Priss asked anxiously. Sloan [her husband, a pediatricia
n] had often expressed the same view, but that was because it had given her ideas he disagreed with. “Oh, completely,” said Norinne. “I’ve been crippled for life.”22
So the gulf between the scientific expert and the instinctual mommy opened, and the gap between mother and child closed as their natures came to appear markedly similar.
Psychoanalysts like Therese Benedek did not flinch from the realization that this romantic bond, the mother-infant love affair, could only be based on maternal regression—or reversion to a childlike state. Regrettably, she thought, in our culture many women may develop an “active, extroverted ego-ideal” before marriage. Since this conflicts with the “natural, intuitive” ease with which she should care for her baby, she theorized that a woman would have to “undo” her masculine ego-ideal:
In order to become a mother, women experience a biologic regression with each phase of their reproductive physiology. Men, in contrast, have to overcome their regressive tendencies to assert their virility in the heterosexual act and they have to integrate active extroverted psychic potentials to fulfill the role of father as protector and provider.23
In psychoanalytic parlance, motherliness had become “a normal characteristic of woman’s psychosexual maturity.” Yet, this “psychosexual maturity” began with regression: women could only “grow up” by becoming more infantile!* The explanation for this paradox, according to the psychoanalysts, was that only through regression could a woman overcome her girlhood penis envy. The regression allowed her to unconsciously accept the baby as the symbolic “gift” of a penis, compensating her for her own long-resented “castration.” Conciliated at last, the woman is able to accept her femininity and submit without envy to her husband’s love:
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women Page 26