… one of the hundreds of Creative Playthings that psychologists say can help add 20 points to your child’s I.Q. rating before the first day of school. What a true Christmas blessing to give your child.92
For the older child, there should be a smorgasbord of extracurricular lessons and activities, gentle pressure at homework time, and a chemistry set for Christmas.
Experts suddenly found themselves prizing some of the very characteristics they had denounced in the domineering mom: properly channeled into I.Q. production, even the “penis envy” of the frustrated middle-class housewife could turn out to be an asset in the Space Race. Meanwhile the black mother, who had seemed to be a “natural” to Gesell in the days of libidinal mothering, fell out of favor: now it appeared to the experts that the black mother did not provide her children with enough of the right kind of “stimulation.” According to the logic behind Project Headstart (a federally sponsored day care program), poor black children required a year or more of remedial stimulation to make up for the “cultural deprivation” they suffered at home.
But by this time we have moved well into the sixties, the decade in which the expert and the child will have their final falling out. The great concern of the fifties and early sixties had been whether American kids would have what it takes to face the Enemy. Korea revealed that American youth was soft; Sputnik showed it was stupid. At the beginning of Kennedy’s New Frontier, the director of the newly formed Peace Corps program confessed that many public figures, here and abroad, had expressed doubts that American youth had the physical stamina or moral dedication to carry out their Peace Corps missions.93 President Kennedy revealed that five out of seven men called for army service had to be rejected as physically or mentally defective.94 Clearly American youth was unfit to face the Enemy. Then the movements of the sixties came along and revealed that youth was the enemy.
Anyone who—like most of our child-raising experts—followed “the movement” on TV or from a safe distance in an academic office, would not have seen the years of community organizing, the endless discussions, the door-to-door campaigns, the thousands of “alternative” projects that built up a mass radical movement in this country. Instead they would have seen what looked like a headlong rush to violent insurrection: the black movement seemed to leap from Civil Rights (which was respectable enough in the North), to mass rioting, to the disciplined and openly revolutionary activities of the Black Panthers. The antiwar movement, which began with staid teach-ins, came to a media climax in the late sixties with bombings, bank burnings, and building takeovers. Then there was the GI movement, which made the Korean War turncoats look almost patriotic by comparison. U.S. soldiers refused to fight, fragged their officers, and even threw their medals away at demonstrations. It seemed like a “black revolution,” a “student revolution,” and a “sexual revolution” all at once. “We are the people our parents warned us against,” proclaimed the demonstrators. In the nervous middle-aged and middle-class imagination, the black nationalist, the antiwar activist, the hippie, the homosexual, and the subteen groupie, all merged into a composite figure threatening political and moral chaos.
If there was one thing that all the miscellaneous strands of the movement did have in common it was youth. For anyone who couldn’t or didn’t want to understand the issues that motivated the movement there was the convenient explanation of the “generation gap.” And it seemed to make sense. Middle-aged black leader Bayard Rustin had no more in common with Panther leader Huey Newton than, say, veteran white liberal Michael Harrington had with SDS leader Mark Rudd. What’s more, youth was beginning to identify itself as a class, with its own interests, its own culture, and a unique ability to change the world.
The age dimension allowed the experts to psychologize away a watershed shift in cultural politics. Calling the problem a “generation gap” made it sound as though the whole thing was a family dispute, an unexpected Oedipal flare-up. Freudians found that when young people demonstrated they were really committing “symbolic patricide” (father murder), and that they couldn’t be expected to control themselves because their “driving energy came from unconscious sources.”95 But the specific historical explanation—why the movement happened when it did—as any street-corner psychologist could tell you, was that American child raising had been too permissive for the last two decades. (Actually, “the movement” drew about as many people from authoritarian families as from permissive ones.) Campaigning in 1968, Spiro Agnew repeatedly lashed out against the “permissiveness” he found in the homes, in the schools, and in the Democratic administration. The activists, he charged, were “spoiled brats who never had a good spanking.”96 In Spokane, when a young man interrupted Agnew with shouts of “Warmonger!” Agnew intoned paternally (as police beat the heckler to the ground), “It is really tragic that somewhere somebody in that young man’s life has failed him.”97
The finger of blame inevitably turned to the stately, white-haired figure of Dr. Benjamin Spock, the original giver of pediatric “permission” to the world’s children. The New York Times summarized the criticism of Spock: He “… turned out a generation of infants who developed into demanding little tyrants. And now the world is reaping a whirlwind, they say. The small monsters have grown up to be unkempt, irresponsible, destructive, anarchical, drug-oriented, hedonistic non-members of society.”98 Critics called the youthful rebels the “Spock-marked generation,” as if they had been inflicted in infancy with a disfiguring disease. And when Columbia students seized the campus’s main buildings to protest the university’s complicity in the war and its racist policies toward the Harlem community, university vice-president Dr. David Truman blamed the whole thing on the elderly physician.99
Dr. Spock’s own behavior in the sixties only confirmed the conservatives’ worst suspicions about the link between permissiveness and subversion. He had always been a humanist (though not, as we have seen, a feminist), and he had expressed the anguish he experienced in the fifties over America’s lack of “values.” In the early sixties he had campaigned for disarmament. The Vietnam War—with its scorched villages, napalmed children, and pregnant women impaled on bayonets—was too much for Dr. Spock. With an agility deemed unusual in anyone over thirty, much less sixty, he leaped the generation gap and joined the rebels. When The New York Times asked him if it was true that his influence had helped create the “youth rebellion,” he responded: “I would be proud if the idealism and militancy of youth today were caused by my book. I would be delighted. But I think the influence in that way is very small.”100 Young activists welcomed Dr. Spock to their ranks. He had been their champion in infancy; he was one of their heroes now. His name, a comforting household word for more than twenty years, now appeared on demonstrators’ posters as
Very few prominent child-raising experts followed Dr. Spock into active resistance to the war. There was an initial reaction of confusion and panic: the experts began to bicker in public over what had gone wrong. One exonerated parents, pointing to China’s rebellious Red Guards who, being Communists, could not have been raised permissively.101 Another suggested that parental authoritarianism could be as much a problem as permissiveness.102 Yet another got the experts off the hook by proposing that mothers had not been reading child-raising advice books carefully all these years; they had just picked out what they wanted to hear.103 The experts were breaking rank. It became almost a literary convention to preface child-raising advice books with a disclaimer of all previous “expert” theories.
By the end of the sixties the experts’ mood hardened into outright hostility to kids. Bruno Bettelheim, an elder statesman of the child psychiatry establishment, sounded the new note of punitiveness. His long work with disturbed children, his studies of collective child raising in Israel, his many academic and lay publications, gave him a stature in the academic community far greater than that of popularizers like Spock. He had always been a political liberal, but he had no sympathy for the new activists. Some student protesters, h
e told a congressional subcommittee on education, “had not matured emotionally beyond the temper tantrum level.”104 Because they had never experienced authoritarian guidance in their own homes, they now looked to Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-Tung as “strong fathers.” In their fanaticism, he told Congress, they bore a sinister resemblance to the Hitler Youth. (He did concede, however, that the fact that Nazi youth were racist while American youth were fighting racism, might be “an important difference.”) To bring youth back into line, parents would have to take on the responsibility of implanting “inner controls” at an early age. By this he did not mean just an ordinary sense of right and wrong. The violent “crack-up” of modern youth had discredited liberal approaches to child raising. In April 1969, one year before the shootings of students at Kent State and Jackson State, Bettelheim argued that little children would have to be taught to fear.105
The antichild mood of the late sixties quickly found its way into the child-raising advice literature. Where there had once been some tentative talk about “limits,” there was now a frank demand for law and order. Titles like Power to the Parents! [1972], Raising a Responsible Child [1971], and Dare to Discipline [1972] began to crowd the fading copies of Spock and Ribble on suburban library shelves. Commonly they began with a little synopsis of the failure of permissiveness, with reference, in varying degrees of explicitness, to the supposedly resultant dope addicts, homosexuals, and revolutionaries. Then the reader was reassured that there was a technique, set forth in that book, by which children could be managed without resort to brute force. For example, the inside cover of You Can Raise Decent Children tells us:
Some leaders still flatter “the Kids” of the Spock-marked generation, but most parents are worried sick. Is it possible to raise children who won’t turn into hippies, drug freaks, radicals or dropouts? Two eminent doctors say yes, and show us how. They spell out, in words any parent can understand, the importance of discipline; how to discipline firmly and with love; why permissiveness spawns violence; the foundations of masculinity and femininity; and how parents can reinforce them in these days of Women’s Liberation and open homosexuality.…106
It is almost as if we had come full circle back to the days of “scientific motherhood,” when experts joined mothers to manufacture upright citizens out of unruly infants. But things never quite repeat themselves. Five decades of historical twists and turns—in the political atmosphere, the economy, and in the content of science—had warped the old mother-child-expert triangle beyond all recognition. For one thing the experts had lost status. They had quarreled too often, and they had changed their minds too often in the memory of living women. First there was industrial-style behaviorism, then permissiveness, and finally the reaction against it in the fifties and sixties. “Science,” applied to child raising, began to look like a chameleon which could match any national mood or corporate need.
The other thing that had changed was the status of the child. Remember that this began as the Century of the Child: The Child was the hope of the future, the mechanism of evolutionary progress, the symbol of America, the goal and the purpose of all women’s lives. But the “failure” of youth in the Korean War, followed by their “betrayal” in the Vietnamese War, raised the disturbing possibility that perhaps, after so many decades of official child-centrism—children could not really be trusted with the future. Certainly, after the long parade of youthful turncoats, radicals, homosexuals, juvenile delinquents, etc., through the establishment media, it was getting harder to argue that a woman could have no more exalted destiny than the raising of children.
The cultural image of children changed swiftly after the sixties, as the endearing kid stars of the forties and fifties—Margaret O’Brien, Ricky Nelson, Beaver Cleaver, the Mouseketeers—gave way to child-figures who were either possessed by the devil, employed by the devil, or fathered by the devil. Rosemary’s Baby [1970] depicts a female dilemma that would have been unthinkable twenty years earlier—to have wanted a baby, like any normal young wife, and find yourself carrying a fetal Satan. A later film carries the horror of children one step further: “There’s only one thing wrong with the Davis baby,” said the ads about this precociously homicidal infant, “it’s alive!” This was a criticism which, seemed to reflect America’s feelings about millions of real-life children. By 1970, the Century of the Child was over thirty years ahead of time.
* The psychological idea that female maturity is accomplished through regression is an uncanny echo of the nineteenth-century biological theory that for females evolutionary advance meant sinking into an ever more primitive animalistic condition.
† Evaluating anthropological reports on child raising in many other cultures, sociologist Jessie Bernard reports that the isolation and exclusivity with which American mothers raise their children is both historically new and culturally unique.29
‡ Levy echoes nineteenth-century evolutionary theory [see Chapter 4] in his belief that reproductivity links women more closely than men to animals. He looked forward to the day when science would prove the hormonal basis of all maternal behavior, but doubted that similar findings would be made about the other human drives, which are shared by the two sexes. He speculated, “It may be true that the maternal drive, a drive so basic to survival, has a higher degree of resemblance in man [i.e., woman] and animals than the sex drive.”40
§ Actually, Levy’s research methodology is so sloppy by conventional scientific standards that it’s impossible to tell what the long-term results of “overprotection” might be. His twenty overprotected children are not compared to a control group of any kind (though admittedly it would be hard to select a control group for a sample as heterogeneous as the overprotected twenty). Furthermore, the psychiatric evaluations of these twenty as adults are extremely biased. The research team tended to give “normal” ratings to subjects who had attained white-collar jobs, and to rate as only “partially adjusted” subjects who did blue-collar work. “Normal” type ratings went with judgments such as “reliable, stable, industrious” and “partially adjusted” ratings went with judgments such as “stupid.” One subject was described in the case summary as a “good-natured, lazy, genial fat man.” 41
‖ Women, of course, had never had the hard muscle that goes slack. Women were to be envied or dismissed, because they so easily escaped the bureaucratic transformation of the work world. For example, in Growing Up Absurd Paul Goodman addressed himself to “young men and boys” “… because the problems I want to discuss … belong primarily, in our society, to the boys: how to be useful and make something of oneself. A girl does not have to, she is not expected to, ‘make something’ of herself. Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children …”54 Riesman also ignored women. He noted that the change from the inner-directed to the other-directed personality was more marked in men than in women, but without troubling over the reasons for the difference, he concluded that “characterological change in the West seems to occur first with men.”
THE FALL OF THE EXPERTS
EIGHT
From Masochistic Motherhood to the Sexual Marketplace
While the experts were worrying that children had been overfed with permissiveness, no one noticed that one member of the family—Mom—had never even had a taste of it. Permissiveness was for the kids, and secondarily for Dad. The kids were free from adult rules and schedules, and (at least in the mass media’s ideal family) Dad was free to relax—have a few beers, pitch a few balls, and perhaps contemplate the need for a new lawn mower. But the lotus scent of permissiveness which wafted through the nursery and the den was never meant to penetrate to the kitchen. Someone had to pick up the toys when the kids didn’t feel like it and do the dishes while Dad watched TV. Not for her the cultural imperative to relax, enjoy, indulge. Even as a consumer she worked in other people’s interests, translating the family’s demands into the appropriate snack foods, home furnishings, soft drinks. By some curious asymmetry in the permissive ideology
, everyone else in the family lived for themselves, and she lived for them.
The experts clung for as long as they could to the domestic ideal of femininity. But gradually the tension between the culture of self-gratification, on the one hand, and the experts’ ideal of maternal self-sacrifice, on the other, became unbearable. To bridge the contradiction, psychomedical theory would become ever more tortured and bizarre—until once again femininity could only be explained as a kind of disease—“masochism.” By the sixties the experts’ theories would become hopelessly out of touch with women’s own aspirations. Women would be ready for a completely new self-image, and some of the advertisers and market researchers who had profited so much from the old image would even help promote the new one. The “new woman” of the sixties and seventies contradicted more than a century of the scientifically rationalized domesticity. When she came, this new woman, would be such a radical break from the old domestic ideal that she would require her own experts, her own “lifestyle.” Even the idea of “lifestyles” with its promise of freedom and gratification, was born with her.
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women Page 31