“The Child” and Family Life at Midcentury
During the twentieth century, enormous changes in children’s experiences occurred across much of the world but particularly in Western Europe, East Asia, and North America. By midcentury these changes included a decisive decline in early childhood death, disease, and incapacitation; the conversion of most children from economic assets to school-goers; and the extension of the minimum age for leaving school to sixteen. Mass schooling brought together children from widely varied social backgrounds and exposed them to roughly similar routines, mores, and social attitudes. Schooling in areas sufficiently dense in population to sort children by age and ability greatly increased society’s sensitivity to age differences among children and to children’s sense of their own and others’ physical and mental developmental progress.1 Other changes that followed the establishment of mass schooling for children were the creation of more leisure time for children and, by the second half of the century, the emerging and important role of children as consumers.2 Taken together, these developments amounted to a transformation in children’s roles in their families and in the economy. Still, we place quotation marks around “the child” to acknowledge that the idea of the child is historically constructed and dynamic: that while children are observably different from adults physiologically and cognitively, their treatment as a category of persons needing protection, and their consequent separation from adults in many realms, are artifacts of the significant distinctions that many contemporary societies have drawn around children, particularly during the past two centuries.3
CHILD DEVELOPMENT MEETS HISTORY
Some years ago Glen Elder, John Modell, Ross Parke, and others urged historians to think about children developmentally and urged developmentalists to think about children historically.4 They proposed that we examine, in a concrete way that acknowledges changes over time, the consequences of children’s experiences for their psychological growth. They asserted, that is, that historians should consider how children’s development at successive stages of maturation has varied qualitatively in different historical epochs as a result of large-scale social, economic, or political changes—changes that are reflected in factors such as children’s mortality or their relative vulnerability to disease; the fertility rate and spacing of births; gender norms; and children’s changing engagement with the institutions that sustain, nurture, or even abuse them. To consider just a few examples: compare the child in late nineteenth-century southern Italy who from the age of five or six helped on the family farm with the child in early twentieth-century Japan who attended school six days a week and whose mother devoted most of her attention through the child’s adolescence to helping him master his school lessons.5 Or a child growing up in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s in a family of five children with that of a female child in China—a society that has traditionally strongly favored males since the institution of its “One Child” policy in the late 1970s.6
The study of children’s development in historical time contains a paradox. Because the dominant aim of the emerging field of child psychology by the twentieth century was to predict the normal progression of human cognitive capacities always and everywhere, time and place were rendered irrelevant and even antithetical to the study of the child as a subject of scientific inquiry. The application of history to children’s development, however, poses a contradictory proposition—that social, cultural, and political forces at any given historical moment may affect an otherwise predictable path of physiological and cognitive growth for children. Because historical inquiry is above all concerned with what is contingent and contextual, and psychological inquiry has been, conventionally, in quest of universals, the two fields would seem to operate at cross-purposes. Whether a concern for historical change is germane for psychology (even a psychology that is serious about context) is then a potentially contentious subject.
Over the past few decades developmentalists have been working to redress this paradox by comprehending cultural differences between and within societies. They try to account for corresponding differences in the ways that humans interact with one another and perform cognitive functions, such as perception, reasoning, deliberate remembering, and language.7 They are, increasingly, taking an inherently historical approach, assuming that questions raised and answers offered about the course of a child’s development are, in Michael Cole’s words, “locally contingent, not universal.”8 This approach, writes Cole, “assumes that mind emerges in the joint mediated activity of people” and “is in an important sense ‘co-constructed’ and distributed. . . . It assumes that individuals are active agents in their own development but do not act in settings entirely of their own choosing.”9 To this we need to add mainly the following idea, one that though now generally accepted within the discipline of anthropology was only a few generations ago unorthodox even there: models of culture that presume stasis rather than change over time distort what they seek to describe (giving us, for instance—infamously—“the primitive”).10
If it were possible to record a life history of every child at any point in historical time, we could capture the intrusion of events into the growth and outlook of every child at particular moments in the past. We could then reconstitute, as it were, the “co-construction” of their development synchronically and then generalize about predictable patterns of their development, which make them creatures of historical time. Psychologists and sociologists do something analogous to this when they seek to determine whether a life event, such as the divorce of a child’s parents, has a future impact on that child as measured by outcomes such as educational attainment, professional achievement, or even his or her relative capacity for intimacy as an adult. They posit that certain and potentially destabilizing events in a child’s life, though now relatively commonplace in American society, may be experienced as sufficiently traumatic to produce a range of predictable detrimental outcomes as child grows into adult. The more sophisticated the study, the more attuned it will be to the age of the child when the “trauma” occurred. They may also implicitly assert that these outcomes, when summed, result in social changes that reinforce the very behaviors that produced them in the first place.11
This, in effect, is what Glen Elder was able to approximate in his classic work Children of the Great Depression (1974), in which he deftly interpreted longitudinal evidence on children in Oakland and Berkeley born during the 1920s and 1930s. Since then Elder and others have examined the dialectic of historical time and life-course events for American children before and after the mid-twentieth century.12 Their chief contribution has been to show how chronologically distinguishable groups of people have experienced sweeping social phenomena in the past—personal traumas induced by large-scale social-historical events—and how these coincided with developmental stages on the path to adulthood. Our data are of a different character and don’t lend themselves to statistical measures, but they do offer a spectacular view into the psychic lives and development of children over a sustained period of time, at a historical moment seemingly unlike any other in the twentieth century.
COHORT AND GENERATION
Until Children of the Great Depression, historians studying collective social, political, or intellectual responses to large social forces tended to employ the term “generation” to describe any broad-gauged, time-bound experience.13 During the late 1960s historians began to study how patterns of everyday social experience have affected the mass of human societies. They employed the methods of social and behavioral scientists to capture social experience in the past and to understand the sources of social-historical change. Periodization by political and intellectual upheavals or movements, while not altogether abandoned, was either thrown into question or regarded as irrelevant to what were considered more significant, if longer-developing, even imperceptible historical tremors caused by shifts in forms of production, transportation, and technology.14 Social historians (and historical sociologists), who were generally critical of the imprecision of the methodologies of political and intellectual historians, discouraged the use of the concept of generation in favor of “cohort.” Cohort is a narrower, less evocative term employed by demographers when considering whether similar age-related patterns (of death, or marriage, for instance) had affected those who had been born at the same time, or had lived through common historical experiences (for example, had served in a particular war, were devastated by an economic depression, or had been stricken by a pandemic).
Historical demographers found the cohort concept a useful tool for analyzing past fertility behavior, including household composition; marriage; the use of contraception before, during, and outside of marriage; and especially by the 1970s, cohabitation.15 While demography tended to isolate the birth cohort as the unit of study in fertility patterns, by the late 1950s American demographer Norman Ryder had begun to think about how the cohort could be used more broadly to think about and comprehend contemporary social experience, as a way of anticipating the impact of demographic phenomena on the labor market, education, and standard of living in the present and future.16
The term cohort as used by historians, then, is simply a cluster of years in which people are born. But the identification of that cluster—that is, what makes it a cohort—is what happens to those people later in their lives. In other words, the collective social experience of any group over time can only be known in retrospect, and thus the action of “history” on this group is what constitutes it as a cohort. The phrase “Baby Boom generation” offers an example of a pervasive social experience that requires more careful parsing. The phrase is used popularly by marketers, journalists, and even in the scholarly literature to describe a number of experiences, attitudes, and behaviors reputedly characteristic of people born between 1946 and 1964. The group it describes is often referred to as a “generation,” when in fact it consists of two cohorts—those born between 1946 and 1954 and those born between 1955 and 1964.17 Male children of the 1950s, whose childhood has often been portrayed as idyllic, were in fact vulnerable to the military draft and service in the Vietnam War if they were born between the late 1940s and early 1950s. A male born during the later years of the 1950s or early 1960s, by contrast, escaped the military draft and the horrors of war but confronted declining occupational prospects just as he left high school or college. Females of the “first” Baby Boom cohort passed through adolescence just as the “pill” was introduced as an effective means of birth control and came of age as abortion was legalized for the first time. Yet girls born in the “second” cohort of the Baby Boom generation were more likely to reap the benefits of the spreading acceptability of contraceptive techniques. Many aspired (as their grandmothers had) to careers as professionals, in contrast to the majority of their mothers who spent their adult lives raising children rather than entering the paid labor force. But because a technological innovation like birth control was variably received depending on region, religion, ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic status, its spread was also uneven, so that adolescents of the second cohort were more likely to adopt it than were their older sisters.
To assess the child at midcentury and to appreciate the qualitative difference between the experiences of discernible cohorts in historical time, then, it is helpful to look briefly to the decades just before the 1950s. What the typical American child “looked” like, experienced, and aspired to has changed markedly over the course of the twentieth century, due not only to immigration policies and reproductive practices but in good measure to the privations of the Great Depression, the mobilization for war during the 1940s, and the prosperity and political upheavals of the two-and-a-half decades after World War II.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II
The 1930s stamped unique, often tragic impositions on children. Elder maintains that young children, because they were entirely dependent on their parents, suffered the worst effects of family strain during the Depression years. Children born during the early 1920s, however (in their early teens during the Great Depression), were relatively better adjusted later in life because they had been semiautonomous when their parents were enduring the worst effects of the economic crisis. Their hastened sense of agency enabled them to cope with their parents’ marital discord, financial privation, unstable or unsupportive family relationships, and often punitive parental behavior and anxiety, whereas their younger siblings, who were utterly dependent on parents throughout this period of profound insecurity, had comparatively greater difficulty as adults.18
Another factor that mitigated potentially detrimental long-term effects of family instability on socioeconomic outcomes was that the great majority of young people remained in high school rather than seeking employment during the Depression (as they might have done in a healthy economy) and so unwittingly enjoyed the dividends of higher levels of education than previous generations. While these same cohorts of males born in the early to mid-1920s suffered the brunt of death and casualties as combatants during World War II, those who survived the war were the beneficiaries of the G.I. Bill and the manifold opportunities resulting from the postwar economic expansion in the United States. By the same token, the 1930s economic collapse trapped the poorest teens in desperately low-paying jobs under the harshest of conditions and forced other young people to leave home as teenage vagabonds, “catching out” to ride the rails across the North American continent for months or even years at a time.19 So while many young people may have had greater agency than their younger siblings, some portion of them were also saddled with staggering responsibility.
William Tuttle’s description of family upheaval on the American homefront underscores the singularity of the wartime experience for children. Among the adjustments endured by young children at this time were the absence of fathers drafted into military service, frequent relocation as their families were moved from one military installation to another, and the daytime absence of mothers drawn into the workforce to support the war effort. Older children and adolescents often assumed the burden of looking after younger siblings, returned to an empty home at the end of the school day if their mothers worked, and grew estranged from fathers (or brothers) away at war. While none of these experiences were new to children—separation from one or both parents, coming home to a parentless household after school or work, living among grandparents or aunts and uncles, and frequent uprooting—the pervasiveness of these experiences made wartime a unique social phenomenon.20
“FAMILY BUILDING” IN THE POSTWAR ERA
The most remarkable aspect of the Baby Boom was the surge in the birth rate that began immediately after World War II. Starting at a rate of 21.1 births per thousand in 1945, the birth rate leaped during the next five-year period (1950–1954) to a rate of 24.5 births and peaked between 1955 and 1959 at 25.2. The birth rate declined thereafter, but only until 1964, the end of the “boom,” when the five-year rate settled back to 22.2 births per thousand, just above the wartime average. Other trends associated with the ideology of domesticity ushered in by the Baby Boom were not firmly established until the middle and later years of the 1950s. Historically lower ages at first marriage, an accompanying decline in the average age of entry into motherhood, an increased tendency to have a child within the first year of marriage, and the trend toward larger families took hold especially during the latter years of the decade.21
Home-owning was another important feature of the 1950s’ dedication to what John Modell has called the era’s “family building” ethos: that is, the belief that the height of personal satisfaction was to be attained not just in marriage but also in childrearing. The single-family dwelling permitted unprecedented privacy between families, as well as for children within those households. Owner-occupied homes during the period shot up from 43.6 percent of all occupied units in 1940 to 61.9 percent in 1960. Only five years after the war had ended, 84 percent of U.S. households contained fewer than one person per room. And as Kenneth Jackson has observed, “Almost every contractor-built, post–World War II home had central heating, indoor plumbing, telephones, automatic stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines.” This surge was due in large part to the Federal Housing Administration’s historically generous loan policies, which effectively subsidized new single-family home construction after the war. Between 1948 and 1958, no fewer than 13 million houses were constructed, 85 percent of them in America’s expanding suburbs, which absorbed almost two-thirds of the nation’s prodigious population growth during these years.22
The expansion of consumer credit was another phenomenon associated with both postwar optimism and neo-domesticity: between 1950 and 1960, the ratio of outstanding credit to disposable income almost doubled for Americans, while the “length of installment-credit contracts increased by 40 percent for automobile loans and 18 percent for other durables.” By 1956 consumer debt was owned by “two-thirds of American households in which the head was under 35,” and consumer debt had increased the most among young married couples with children.23
Beneath the apparent placidity of family life in the two decades after World War II, it seems, American middle-class women suffered varying degrees of inner turmoil in their marital relations. Eager to live out the kind of domestic fulfillment that had eluded their own mothers during depression and war, writes Elaine Tyler May, women often felt as though they had exchanged the previous generation’s deprivation and disruption for blunted ambitions, unfulfilled sex lives, and gaping emotional needs left unmet by unsympathetic or undiscerning partners. At the same time, depression and war gave an unprecedented proportion of married women experience in the workforce, which stimulated, ultimately, a desire for financial independence.24
A sexual revolution set in train during the 1920s quietly gathered steam with the aid of the emerging mass media during the following decades and found unanticipated outlets during World War II. After the war, “re-domesticated” women were encouraged to think of themselves as sexual creatures with natural physical longings different than men’s and every bit as worthy of professional and scholarly attention.25 Moreover, the publication of the best-selling Kinsey Reports on male and female sexual behavior in 1948 and 1949, respectively, revealed the chasm between what Americans said about their erotic lives and what they thought and practiced at midcentury.26 Once women started to take their own sexual needs seriously, they began to challenge their partners’ limited knowledge and the male-centered orientation to sexual gratification that had characterized American sexuality since the advent of the Victorian era.
A series of workshops conducted by marital advice experts Abraham Stone and Lena Levine in New York City in 1947 also showed the growing gap between men’s and women’s attitudes toward female sexual satisfaction in the postwar years. While Stone’s and Levine’s clientele were primarily white and middle class, the discussions they led suggested the depth of ignorance about women’s sexuality that prevailed at midcentury, as well as the degree of appetite for knowledge about sexual satisfaction in marital relations. Stone and Levine, according to historian Linda Gordon, stressed the importance of the fact that sexual satisfaction was something to be achieved for both partners through learned responses and practice, rather than by instinct. They also emphasized the significance of the clitoris in women’s ability to orgasm, and urged women to practice arousal on themselves even while, as physicians, they perpetuated the era’s reigning Freudian insistence that vaginal orgasm was a superior, more “mature” form of sexual climax than that achieved through clitoral stimulation.27
Thus in the middle of the twentieth century, middle-class women received conflicting messages about their sexuality and its place in marriage. On one hand, their own sexual gratification in the context of marriage was seen as increasingly important. But on the other hand, a married woman’s purpose as a sexual partner was to meet the erotic needs of her husband, even if, in the process, her individual sexual proclivities were subservient. This paradox, in part, constituted what Betty Friedan was to call “the feminine mystique.” Similarly, women’s emotional needs were both tamped down and hystericized by the ascendance of psychoanalysis as the instrument best suited to gaze into the human psyche. If a woman’s personal and professional aspirations were frustrated, in Friedan’s critique, she would be counseled by authorities of all manner to seek outlets for her stunted desires and, if necessary, psychotherapy, rather than social or political recourse.28
Middle-class men, by contrast, according to May, reported relative contentment with the satisfactions of home life: doting spouses; willing sex partners (or so they perceived); healthy, well-behaved children; stable, decent-paying jobs; and low-cost mortgages on newly constructed suburban homes—all exchanged for what the men described as the relatively trivial price of sacrificing self-indulgence and “hollow” independence. For increasing numbers of men, May concluded, home was a haven from the heartless world, whereas for women, there was no refuge. Home was work, since the workplace was the suburban home filled with growing numbers of children, however well-disciplined, poised, and hardy.29
Barbara Ehrenreich tells a complementary if somewhat contradictory tale about American men in this era. Rather than fulfillment, she argues, they experienced vague anxiety about their economic role as breadwinners and the pervasive insistence on conformity in public life, even before many American women grew restive. If “manliness” in the American past was forged in a wilderness of exploration, adventurism, and risk-taking, in the postwar mode masculinity was grounded in more prudent, sedentary, and disciplined undertakings: higher levels of educational attainment, a career as a salaried worker, devotion to one’s employer, and all the benefits accruing to the company man—job security, steady pay, predictable promotion, and the capacity to plan for a comfortable retirement.30 A well-orchestrated presentation of self was the key to being a successful “organization man.” Careful grooming and a steady affect conveyed an air of reliability that enhanced credibility in one’s professional relations and provided the infrastructure that undergirded private life. It is understandable why, after the tumult of depression and war, predictable employment would be so high on the list of American male aspirations. And yet, inwardly, observed Ehrenreich, men pulled against the shackles of convention in every realm.
The family-building ethos of postwar middle-class America, which framed cultural ideals such as “maturity” and “adulthood” as prerequisite to normative conceptions of individual fulfillment, had serious and negative repercussions for anyone who forsook marriage. Gays and lesbians took the brunt of this, to be sure, but anyone who chose not to marry because of career ambitions or family obligations was scrutinized warily as well. By extension, widows, widowers, and divorcees, once having “attained adulthood” through marriage, lived in the social netherworld of the uncoupled. If maturity could only be achieved and maintained through marriage, it left the unmarried in an ambiguous position at best.31
The status of marriage as a normative social institution served as a powerful source of pressure on women and men to form long-lasting partnerships and cast suspicions of abnormality on those who chose not to marry. Single and divorced people were by axiom considered unfulfilled and potentially mentally ill—“sick or immoral, too selfish or too neurotic to marry,” according to a study conducted in 1957. As Joseph Veroff and his colleagues put it, this “sanctioning” attitude toward the unmarried (or divorced) held up across gender lines and marital status, since even single and divorced women and men had a negative view of themselves and all other single people.32
Historians have persuasively challenged the popular memory of the immediate postwar years as a time of calm and stability in American family life, and recast it as “the way we never were.” The twin pillars of the neo-domestic regime, marital longevity and the stay-at-home-mother, were to be the first casualties of the postwar family ideal. By the end of the 1950s the divorce rate, stable from 1946 to 1955, had climbed precipitously. From its wartime trough of about 25.9 percent in 1945, the ratio of first marriages ending in divorce reached 32.2 in 1959, a 24 percent increase that alarmed contemporary observers but also pointed to the emerging acceptability of divorce in American culture. Meanwhile, workforce participation for wives with children under the age of six rose from 11.9 percent in 1950 to 18.7 percent in 1959. Again, this was the sharpened edge of a trend that would transform the shape and content of men’s and women’s expectations both as marriage partners and as parents. By the peak years of the Baby Boom, already about one in three married women were engaged in the paid workforce; twenty years later, 56 percent of married women held jobs.33
CHILDREARING ADVICE DURING THE POSTWAR YEARS
Against this demographic, economic, cultural, and ideological backdrop, there occurred a significant change of emphasis among child welfare professionals. By midcentury, as major childhood diseases came rapidly under control, concern for children’s physical health yielded to efforts to understand their psychological health and development.34 While it is always difficult to know how parents actually practiced prescriptions for contemporary childrearing, there are references to Dr. Benjamin Spock and what might be called the “child-centered” approach he advocated among all of the mothers participating in the Yale Longitudinal Study, even though their socioeconomic, religious, educational, and ethnic backgrounds varied widely. Therefore, it is instructive to be reminded of the origins of the “child-centered” approach.
Before the Baby Boom the federal government was both the primary facilitator and consumer of the most up-to-date ideas on competent childrearing. The U.S. Children’s Bureau had dispensed expert advice to parents on children’s health and childrearing as early as the 1910s, but in the postwar era, when the average family size expanded dramatically, the audience for childrearing expertise was seemingly boundless. Child-rearing experts were only too happy to have their opinions on children’s health and behavior disseminated by the U.S. Children’s Bureau, and their mutual efforts at parent education reinforced each group’s credibility and influence.35
By the early 1940s a shift in the tenor and orientation of childrearing literature had occurred according to psychologist Martha Wolfenstein, who analyzed the advice to parents dispensed by the U.S. Children’s Bureau’s publication Infant Care between 1914 and 1951. Whereas the earlier literature was concerned with helping the parent to master what Wolfenstein characterized as the infant child’s “centripetal” tendencies—its impulse to get pleasure from its own body (through thumb-sucking and masturbation, for instance)—by the 1942 and 1945 editions, a more “centrifugal” image prevailed: thumb-sucking and masturbation were now regarded as natural, ready resources for the child, and worry about curbing access was dampened by child-training experts who predicted that such formerly “dangerous” impulses would in any event become more diffuse means of gratification if the baby had other objects to play with. An earlier fear that unchecked impulses in the infant would spread beyond control later in life gave way to what she called an emerging “fun morality” in American culture and the idea, eventually, that what the baby wants is probably good for it. While Wolfenstein mildly approved of the change, she also worried about the implications of this idea as the child grew into an adult. Whereas pleasure and fun in American culture were previously regarded as potentially wicked, their rising valuation, she warned, may have created a condition in which “failure to have fun occasions lowered self esteem,” leading potentially to feelings of inadequacy, impotency, and being unwanted by others.36
Wolfenstein’s essay appeared after the release in 1946 of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, and her detection of a sea change in childrearing advice dispensed through the government’s Infant Care publications applied readily to Spock, whose best seller sold nearly four million copies in its first decade. The tendency of Americans to turn to expert advice on a range of issues had accelerated over the first half of the twentieth century, but this was especially true of advice about childrearing beginning during the 1920s, according to historian Peter N. Stearns. It was an inclination that only intensified in the postwar era, becoming, in Stearns’s estimation, almost paralyzing for many middle-class parents by the end of the century. While the soaring birth rate accounts for some of the dramatic rise in sales of Dr. Spock’s book, it is also true that there had never before been so many well-educated women entering motherhood for the first time and thus, never so many women capable of, and interested in, utilizing childrearing literature on such a vast scale.37
Spock’s “common sense” approach, which incorporated the biology of child development pioneered by Arnold Gesell, offered a corrective to the triumph of the behaviorist childrearing methods championed by psychologist John Watson during the 1920s.38 Spock, like Karl Menninger a decade earlier, and the U.S. Children’s Bureau’s experts by 1942, stressed the importance of relaxing standards that had been applied all too rigidly by Watson’s disciples, in a parenting style that regarded itself as “child-centered.” Child-centered parenting transformed the popular prescriptive literature on middle-class parenting from an emphasis on enforcing regimentation and maintaining emotional detachment, to an attitude that both parent and child are creatures of nature endowed with untapped and underappreciated instinctual wisdom. Child-centered training consisted of responding to a child’s expressed needs and desires “instead of on a time-table of developmental stimuli.” Whereas formerly a disciplined application of “culture” was prescribed to conquer the child’s natural impulses, writes culture critic and historian Nicholas Sammond, child-centered parenting considered the relationship between culture and nature as a question of proportion rather than conquest.39
The convergence of a mass appetite for childrearing advice and an unparalleled degree of interaction among researchers and practitioner-popularizers sharply delineated the period from any that preceded it. But the extent to which social scientists connected childrearing practices to specific political predispositions, observes Sammond, made the era unique. Spock was pivotal in this respect, he says, because he served as a critical link between popular and professional figures in the field of childrearing and was the common denominator among social and behavioral scientists who sought to disseminate their findings. Spock, Margaret Mead, Erik H. Erikson, Milton Senn (director of the Yale Child Study Center), and to an even greater extent, Ernst Kris—who, as we have noted, was psychoanalyzed by Freud and initiated the Yale Longitudinal Study—were all adherents to differing degrees, but they had been able to popularize their ideas to a far greater extent than Freud had been able to during his lifetime.40
After World War II a consensus emerged among many American social and behavioral scientists that the inflexible childrearing practices advocated by behaviorists might have contributed to the widespread receptivity to authoritarian political regimes in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. In response, Sammond argues, educators and social and behavioral scientists who engaged in the study of children in the United States strived to develop an approach to childrearing that could serve as “a cold-war tool for the promotion of a healthy democratic capitalism, with the power to defuse international hostilities, see past petty nationalisms, and resist psychological persuasion.”41 A number of well-respected authorities such as the anthropologist Margaret Mead, her anthropologist husband Gregory Bateson, Mead’s mentor Ruth Benedict, and the child psychologists Erik Erikson, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and Milton Senn formed associations with Spock that effectively bridged the long-standing divide between professional, research-oriented studies of children and disseminators of academic work who translated the latest literature on childrearing and broadcasted its findings.42
Mead’s significance, observes Sammond, lay in her cross-cultural comparisons that allowed Americans to distinguish between what was endemic to biological development and what was culturally constructed, particular to their own culture, and thus subject to intervention and revision.43 Both prominent and intent on extending the findings of her discipline to the American public, Mead effectively legitimized a movement to translate childrearing techniques into the “creation of an informed democratic society.”44 Erikson joined Mead and Spock in their efforts to champion the latest research on childrearing. A student and analysand of Anna Freud, Erikson was a key figure in assimilating Freudian psychology into the ascending vision of children’s social and cultural development in the United States. His “socio-psychoanalytic theory of development,” according to William Kessen, unveiled at the Mid-Century Whitehouse Conference in 1950, “epitomized the influential effect of the Conference on the future of American childhood.”45
Frenkel-Brunswik, most famous for her contribution to Theodor Adorno’s landmark study The Authoritarian Personality, was, like Erikson, trained as a psychoanalyst. She worked in child psychology, helped to establish personality psychology, and attempted to synthesize the findings of academic psychology, anthropology, sociology, and political science. As was characteristic of the Viennese prewar psycho analytic community, Frenkel-Brunswik “moved easily” among psychology, politics, and ideology.46 According to Sammond her work, in particular, represented a middle way between total permissiveness and an insistence on parental authority advocated by behaviorism, yet proponents of “permissive parenting,” who were easily caricatured, never enjoyed a robust following.47 A decade later, ironically, in the midst of one of the century’s most ideologically contentious periods, Diana Baumrind took the politics out of childrearing once again while offering a synthesis of the permissive and authoritarian approaches, which she labeled “authoritative” parenting. Baumrind served up her synthesis as a happy medium between the rigid “ethnocentrism” promoted by behaviorism and the extreme permissiveness of A. S. Neill, who professed that no adult had the right to impose authority on any child.48
Despite the best-seller status of Baby and Child Care, its impact across socioeconomic, religious, racial, and ethnic lines remains more difficult to assess. Buying a “pocket size” softcover for fifty cents and applying the principles of “child-centered” discipline are distinct actions. Charles Strickland and Andrew Ambrose’s review of the sociological and psychological literatures of the period shows that middle-class mothers before 1945 tended to be more demanding and severe than working-class mothers but that after the war their respective attitudes had reversed.49 Even in the rapidly growing suburbs, where working-class and middle-class families often intermingled, these patterns seem to have prevailed. More abundance, one historian has speculated, made full-time child care by mothers possible on a wide scale, created greater “privacy, and more permissiveness in the treatment of children . . . [as] washing machines and diaper services . . . facilitated later and more relaxed toilet training.” Central heating made more and restrictive clothing less necessary and so increased children’s physical freedom. “In short prosperity made it possible for parents to put into practice the childrearing that Dr. Spock was preaching.”50 Still, whether they did so is an open question. Working-class African American mothers proclaimed a high regard for Spock and other authorities on childrearing, but by the early 1960s “far fewer . . . had had any direct exposure to baby-raising manuals” than did white middle-class mothers.51 In studies conducted between World War II and the early 1960s, African American parents were found to be more “permissive than whites in the feeding and weaning of their children, but were more rigorous . . . in toilet training.” They were more likely to employ corporal punishment to exact obedience from their children and were “more concerned than white, middle-class parents with nudity and preventing masturbation.”52
Political conservatives by the late-1960s were to blame permissive childrearing for everything from the anti-patriotism they perceived in student radicalism and resistance to the military draft during the Vietnam War, to the rise in juvenile crime rates, to premarital sex, to the spreading experimentation with illicit drugs among adolescents and youths.53 While most studies fix the turn toward more democratic childrearing at or just after World War II, a few remain skeptical and discern a shift somewhat earlier.54 From our vantage point early in the twenty-first century, it is hard to deny Spock’s influence on middle-class childrearing. Nonetheless, in retrospect, it appears to have affected the landscape of American parenting much like the vaunted prosperity of the postwar years that underwrote the prodigious birth rate and the market for childrearing expertise. That is, its impact, like the economic boom, fell unevenly on parent-consumers. Where the psychological ground had been prepared and was accepting it took hold and flourished; where it had not, which varied by race, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status, an older folk style that predated behaviorism prevailed.55
The Yale Longitudinal Study captures the years of several children’s growth and development from birth to age ten, from 1954 to 1963, at the very apex of the Baby Boom. Our focus for this volume is the twice-weekly therapeutic interactions of a girl whose family’s evolution over the course of these years appears, at first glance, not to conform entirely to the mode of the times. Closer inspection, however, uncannily forecasts in microcosm some of the more significant forces of social change in American life during the coming decades. Links between the subjects’ life histories to larger social trends include the increased participation of married women with children in the paid workforce, the movement of middle-class families to first- or second-ring suburbs, the emergence of the child-centered family as a cultural ideal, and the increasingly problematic nature of traditional gender roles in American society. Immediately apparent in these trends are the seeds of the postwar women’s movement that would erupt by the latter years of the 1960s and pronounce the personal, “political.” We can hear echoes of this phrase in the decade-long narratives that shaped one girl’s middle childhood. And it is the transcript of her interactions with her therapist that constitute the object of our examination of the intersections between the field of child development and the practice of history. These ethnographic inscriptions permit us to “read over the shoulders” of a family and their clinicians, whose recorded reflections belong to an era steadily receding into the past.
NOTES
1. On global changes in children’s experiences during the twentieth century, see Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006); on the establishment and extension of schooling in the United States during the early twentieth century, see Stephen Lassonde, Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven’s Working Class, 1870–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); on children’s health, see Richard A. Meckel, “Levels and Trends of Death and Disease in Childhood, 1620 to the Present,” in Janet Golden, Richard Meckel, and Heather Prescott, eds., Children and Youth in Sickness and Health: A Historical Handbook and Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 3–24.
2. I’m not attributing to mass schooling the rise of more leisure time and the enlarged role of children as consumers, but rather underscoring the fact that these three changes each occurred within a few decades. On children as consumers, see Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993); on historical changes in the expansion and use of leisure time in the United States, see Douglas A. Kleiber and Gwynn M. Powell, “Historical Change in Leisure Activities during After School Hours,” in Joseph L. Mahoney, Reed W. Larson, and Jacquelynne S. Eccles, eds., Organized Activities as Contexts of Development: Extracurricular Activities, After-School and Community Programs (Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004).
3. Just as there is no such thing as a typical family everywhere and throughout time, or a typical woman, in any or all societies historically to speak of “the child” is misleading; see for example, Jane Collier, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, Sylvia Yanagisako, “Is There a Family?: New Anthropological Views,” in Barrie Thorne with Marilyn Yalom, eds., Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 31–48. See also Bonnie Thornton Dill’s classic essay on the problematic nature of an all-inclusive “sisterhood” in the women’s movement during the 1980s: Dill, “Race, Class, and Gender: Prospects for an All-Inclusive Sisterhood,” Feminist Studies 9 (March 1983): 130–49. The delineation of childhood and the division of development into discrete, sequenced stages of maturation became more highly articulated during the second half of the century in the West but also induced anxiety about individual children’s progression through development and worry in instances when the bound aries between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood were blurred; see Stephen Lassonde, “Ten Is the New Fourteen: Age Compression and ‘Real’ Childhood,” in Paula S. Fass and Michael Grossberg, eds., Reinventing Childhood after World War II (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 51–67.
4. Glen H. Elder, Jr., John Modell, and Ross D. Parke, “Studying Children in a Changing World,” in Elder, Modell, and Parke, eds., Children in Time and Place: Developmental and Historical Insights (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3–21. While this collection of essays appeared in 1993, the impulse to unite the energies and insights of developmentalists and historians had emerged by the early 1980s (vii–ix).
5. See, for example, Leonard Covello, The Social Background of the Italo-American School Child: A Study of the Southern Italian Family Mores and Their Effect on the School Situation in Italy and America (Leiden, Neth.: E. J. Brill, 1967), 265–70; Mark Jones, “Narratives of Struggle and Success: Superior Students, Entrance Examinations, and the Taishō Mass Media,” paper delivered at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, Milwaukee, WI, August 4–7, 2005.
6. See the numerous examples cited in Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), chap. 5; Susan Douglas Franzosa, ed., Ordinary Lessons: Girlhoods of the 1950s (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); and Susan Greenhalgh, “Fresh Winds in Beijing: Chinese Feminists Speak Out on the One-Child Policy and Women’s Lives,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26, no. 3 (2001): 847–86.
7. The groundbreaking work in the challenge to the developmental paradigm was of course, Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith, A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); see also Michael Cole, Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 20; R. A. Shweder, “Cultural Psychology—What Is It?,” in J. W. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, and G. Herdt, eds., Cultural Psychology (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–43; D. Matsumoto and S. H. Yoo, “Toward a New Generation of Cross-Cultural Research,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1 (2006): 234–50; and H. R. Markus and S. Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98 (1991): 224–53. On the historical development of this perspective and its implication for contemporary parenting, see Stephen Lassonde, “Age, Schooling, and Life Stages in the West, 1500–Present,” in Paula Fass, ed., The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (New York: Routledge, 2013), 211–26.
8. In the cultural-historical sciences, Cole points out, answers “depend upon the particular assumptions and point of view afforded by the culture in question, and both the method of arriving at an answer and what constitutes a problem or an answer are locally contingent, not universal. It is often suggested that cultural-historical understanding requires a process of empathic understanding which, while present in all people, is not the product of universally applicable rationale problem solving”; Cole, Cultural Anthropology, 20.
9. Ibid., 104.
10. George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987).
11. The literature in this area of research is extensive, but see Andrew J. Cherlin and Kathleen Kiernan, Parental Divorce in Childhood and Demographic Outcomes in Young Adulthood (Baltimore: The Center, 1995), available online at https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/883/WP95-04.pdf (accessed January 5, 2014); Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade after Divorce (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989); Nicholas Zill, Donna Ruane Morrison, and Mary Jo Coiro, “The Long-Term Effects of Parental Divorce on Parent-Child Relationships, Adjustment, and Achievement in Young Adulthood,” Journal of Family Psychology 7 (June 1993): 91–103; Susan M. Jekielek, “Parental Conflict, Marital Disruption and Children’s Emotional Well-Being,” Social Forces 76 (March 1998): 905–35; and E. Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly, For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered (New York: Norton, 2002).
12. Glen H. Elder, Jr., Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Glen H. Elder, Jr., and Tamara K. Hareven, “Rising above Life’s Disadvantage: From the Great Depression to War,” in Elder, Modell, and Parke, eds., Children in Time and Place, 47–72. Elder has collaborated with many other scholars to study the impact of sociohistorical events on life course choices and other outcomes, but for a sample, see Michael J. Shanahan, Richard A. Miech, and Glen H. Elder, Jr., “Changing Pathways to Attainment in Men’s Lives: Historical Patterns of School, Work, and Social Class,” Social Forces 77, no. 1 (1998): 231–56.
13. “The social phenomenon ‘generation’ represents nothing more than a particular kind of identity location, embracing related ‘age-groups’ embedded in a historical-social process,” according to Karl Mannheim in his Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 292; and see Alan B. Spitzer’s illuminating critique of the concept in his essay “The Historical Problem of Generations,” American Historical Review 78, no. 5 (1973): 1353–85.
14. There is a wealth of historiography on this topic, but see Lawrence Stone, “History and the Social Sciences in the Twentieth Century,” in Stone, The Past and the Present (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 3–44.
15. Andrew J. Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
16. As Norman Ryder wrote, “The cohort may be defined as the aggregate of individuals (within some population definition) who experienced the same event within the same time interval. . . . Cohort data are ordinarily assembled sequentially from observations of the time of occurrence of the behavior being studied, and the interval since occurrence of the cohort-defining event. For the birth cohort this interval is age”; Ryder, “The Cohort as a Concept in the Study of Social Change,” American Sociological Review 30 (1965): 844–45. See also Norman B. Ryder, “The Demography of Youth,” in James Coleman, ed., Youth: Transition to Adulthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Matilda White Riley, Marilyn Johnson, and Anne Foner, Aging and Society, vol. 3: A Sociology of Age Stratification (New York: Russell Sage, 1972); and Matilda White Riley et al., “Socialization for the Middle and Later Years,” in David A. Goslin, ed., Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1969). Social historians in the United States and Western Europe followed the example of demographers and were particularly enamored of the methods and questions posed by French historical demographers during the first half of the twentieth century. The “boom” was foreshadowed by a blip in the birthrate just as the United States entered World War II, but began in earnest in 1946. The year 1964 was the last year before the fertility rate declined once again to the level of the first year of the surge and so is considered the end of the demographic phenomenon. On the divergent economic and social experiences of “boomers,” see Richard A. Easterlin, Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), appendix, table 3.2. And when political beliefs and social attitudes provoked a clash between parents (who had experienced depression and war and who subsequently married and reproduced at such prodigious rates) and their children, who experienced crowded classrooms, joined the civil rights movement, and were either drafted into, or resisted, the Vietnam War, a “Generation Gap” was born. As Arthur Marwick notes, many of the cultural and political figures who evoke the “Sixties generation” were not part of the Baby Boom at all, having been born as much as a decade earlier, such as the Beat poets or even the Beatles, who were all born before the end of World War II—see Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, 1958–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
17. See Research and Development Council of the National Tour Association, “Current Assessment Report for the Baby Boomer Market,” 2002, available at www.agingsociety.org/agingsociety/links/car_boomer.pdf (accessed December 9, 2013).
18. Elder, Modell, and Parke, “Studying Children in a Changing World,” 7; and Glen H. Elder, Jr. and Tamara K. Hareven, “Rising Above Life’s Disadvantage,” in Elder, Modell, and Parke, eds., Children in Time and Place, 47–72.
19. Kriste Lindenmeyer, The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), chap. 4; Errol Lincoln Uys, Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move during the Great Depression (New York: Routledge, 2003).
20. William M. Tuttle, Jr., “America’s Homefront Children in World War II,” in Elder, Modell, and Parke, eds., Children in Time and Place, 32–33; Tuttle, “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992); and see the work of Aimée Dechter and Glen Elder, who show that veterans were not as uniformly successful in their career paths as men who had been retained to work in essential war industries on the homefront. Contrary to the popular perception of war as a boon to individual upward mobility, among middle-class veterans only those who had served as officers had unmiti-gated success during their postwar working lives. Aimée R. Dechter and Glen H. Elder, Jr., “World War II Mobilization in Men’s Work Lives: Continuity or Disruption for the Middle Class?,” American Journal of Sociology 110, no. 3 (2004): 761–93.
21. Easterlin, Birth and Fortune, appendix, table 1.1; John Modell, Into One’s Own: From Adulthood to Youth in the United States, 1920–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), chap. 6; Easterlin, Birth and Fortune, chaps. 3–4; Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), chap. 9; and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), chap. 6.
22. On “family building,” see Modell, Into One’s Own, 253; for construction of single-family dwellings, see U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Abstracts of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, series N 238–245 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1976), 646; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 183. Modell adds to this observation the pronounced youthfulness of this expansion, citing the fact that between 1954 and 1956, a full 76 percent of metropolitan housing occupied by families in which the husband was under thirty-five years of age was in the suburbs—Modell, Into One’s Own, 221. For the observation by Kenneth T. Jackson, see his Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), chap. 11, esp. 243.
23. Modell, Into One’s Own, 220–21.
24. May, Homeward Bound.
25. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), chaps. 11–13; and Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), chap. 11, esp. 268–74.
26. Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948); and Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1949).
27. Stone and Levine conducted their discussion groups through the counseling services of the Clinical Research Bureau in New York City; Gordon, Moral Property, 265 (on the ideological influence of Freudian psychoanalysis on female orgasm during this period, see 270–72).
28. Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (New York: Routledge, 1956) best exemplifies the influence of psychoanalysis on other fields of inquiry; and of course Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963) first outlines the political implications of turning the blame for women’s emotional discontents back on women themselves. See also Gordon, Moral Property, 257; May, Homeward Bound, chap. 9; and Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005), 251–52.
29. May, Homeward Bound.
30. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Random House, 2011).
31. Modell, Into One’s Own; Joseph Veroff, Elizabeth Douvan, and Richard A. Kulka, The Inner American: A Self Portrait from 1957 to 1976 (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 141; Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men.
32. Veroff, Douvan, and Kulka, Inner American, 147–48.
33. See Coontz, The Way We Never Were; May, Homeward Bound; and Joanne J. Meyerowitz, ed., Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). For a summary of this literature, see Stephen Lassonde, “Family and Demography in Postwar America: A Hazard of New Fortunes?” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., A Companion to Post-1945 America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 3–19; and Richard A. Easterlin, Birth and Fortune, 85, figure 5.1. See also Modell, Into One’s Own, 61; and Andrew Cherlin, “Changing Family and Household: Contemporary Lessons from Historical Research,” Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983): 60.
34. On long-term trends in children’s morbidity, see Meckel, “Levels and Trends,” 3–24. See also my essay on the rise and fall of what I have called the “developmental paradigm” in Lassonde, “Age, Schooling, and Life Stages.”
35. See Martha Wolfenstein’s essay “Fun Morality,” in which she examines changes in expert advice to parents published periodically in the U.S. Children’s Bureau’s organ Infant Care between 1914 and 1951, in Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein, eds., Childhood in Contemporary Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 168–78; see also an assessment of the dialogue between experts and parents featured in the popular press: “Bringing Up Baby on Books . . . Revolution and Counterrevolution in Child Care,” Newsweek 45 (May 16, 1955): 64–66, 68.
36. Wolfenstein, “Fun Morality,” 174.
37. On the general and increasing reliance on expert opinion in the United States during the twentieth century, see Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1960); on the “immobilizing” effect of childrearing advice, see Stearns, Childhood in World History, 108; and Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern American Childrearing (New York: NYU Press, 2003); for general treatments of childrearing expertise during the twentieth century in the United States, see Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 7; and Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice about Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). In 1940 the high-school graduation rate passed the 50 percent mark for the first time in U.S. history, and it continued to climb until the 1970s; see Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957, Series H 233 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 207.
38. Nicholas Sammond cites as Spock’s “most direct antecedent” Emmett L. Holt’s The Care and Feeding of Children (1894); see Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 263 (sales figures for Baby and Child Care can be found in chap. 5, n. 18). On Spock’s precursors, see Thomas Maier, Dr. Spock: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998). Michael Zuckerman attributes a self-serving motive to Spock’s approach, which he says appeared to bolster parents’ trust in their own instincts only to withdraw this support with his inevitable refrain to “call the doctor” in any areas of uncertainty when dealing with children’s health and discipline. The result, he concluded, was both a reinforcement of the physician’s authority and a further erosion of parents’ confidence in relations with their children. See Zuckerman, “Doctor Spock: The Confidence Man,” in Charles Rosenberg, ed., The Family in History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 179–208.
39. Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland, 273.
40. Obviously Freud preceded them in this assertion, and before the ascendance of Adolf Hitler in Europe, an entire generation of “political Freudians” formed a movement that illuminated the cultural, political, and social implications of psychoanalysis for civilization. Yet McCarthyism and the pall of political repression following the war chastened its European émigrés in the United States, forcing psychoanalysts to conceal their political leanings, thus eviscerating “political Freudianism.” Moreover, in the United States the medicalization of psychoanalysis and continued professionalization of American medicine after the war constricted the field of potential practitioners to physicians, which further depoliticized psychoanalysis; see Russell Jacoby, The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Theodor W. Adorno’s 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality, which sought to “detect the personality structure which was susceptible to the ethnocentric personality” by tracing the formation of an authoritarian political predisposition in adults to childrearing practices, was the most relevant work, but its influence waned; see Jans Baars and Peers Scheepers, “Theoretical and Methodological Foundations of the Authoritarian Personality,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (October 1993): 349; see also Martin Roiser and Carla Willig, “The Strange Death of the Authoritarian Personality: 50 Years of Psychological and Political Debate,” History of the Human Sciences 15 (Winter 2002): 71–96.
41. Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland, 255.
42. “Spock and Mead studied together intermittently at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in the mid-1930s. Spock and Erikson worked together in Pittsburgh in the 1950s,” ibid., chap. 5, n. 23; see also Thomas Maier, Dr. Spock: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998).
43. See Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein, eds., Childhood in Contemporary Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
44. Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland, 253; “Erikson also corresponded with Spock, who arranged a teaching position for him at the University of Pittsburgh [where they worked together in the 1950s] after Erikson resigned from the University of California for refusing to sign its McCarthyite loyalty oath” (265).
45. Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth, December 3–7, 1950 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1951); Kessen states that the “full-blown” version of his theory was published as Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950); Kessen, “The Baby Book” (unpublished manuscript), chap. 4, n. 11; Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland, 255.
46. Gardner Murphy, “Else Frenkel-Brunswik: Selected Papers,” monograph 31 in Nanette Heiman and Joan Grant, eds., Psychological Issues 8, no. 3 (1966), 1, 3.
47. See Else Frenkel-Brunswik, “Differential Patterns of Social Outlook in Personality in Family and Children,” in Mead and Wolfenstein, Childhood in Contemporary Cultures, 387.
48. Diana Baumrind, “Effects of Authoritative Parental Control on Child Behavior,” Child Development 37 (December 1966): 887–907. “Ethnocentrism” is Frenkel-Brunswik’s term for the political effect of “authoritarian” childrearing; see Frenkel-Brunswik, “Differential Patterns.” For more, see A. S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Childrearing (New York: Hart Publishing, 1960); and Eleanor Maccoby’s assessment in her article “The Role of Parents in the Socialization of Children: An Historical Overview,” Developmental Psychology 28 (1992): 1006–17.
49. Or more likely, working-class parenting remained consistent, while new middle-class patterns were being established. See Melvin L. Kohn, Class and Conformity: A Study in Values (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1969). For the report mentioned, see Charles E. Strickland and Andrew M. Ambrose, “The Baby Boom, Prosperity, and the Changing Worlds of Children, 1945–53,” in Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, eds., American Childhood: A Research and Historical Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 533–585.
50. Strickland and Ambrose, “Baby Boom,” 544–45, quoting David Potter, People of Plenty.
51. Ibid., 550, n. 91, summarizing Zena Smith Blau. Blau’s study of 224 mothers in three Chicago maternity wards revealed that 77 percent of white mothers had read Spock’s Baby and Child Care, but only 32 percent of African American middle-class mothers had done so; 48 percent of white working-class women claimed to have read Spock, while just 12 percent of African American working-class women had read Baby and Child Care (550, citing Blau).
52. Ibid., 550–51, nn. 92 and 93, summarizing studies by Allison Davis and Robert Havighurst, Norma Radin and Constance K. Kamii, and Frank Reissman and Marie F. Peters. Leslie Woodcock Tentler demonstrates the difficulty of inferring widespread beliefs and practices about sexuality and childrearing from attributional characteristics such as religion. She discusses the attractiveness of “child-centered” parenting among middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants and among middle-class Catholics as early as the 1930s; see Tentler, Catholics and Contraception.
53. See Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: NYU Press, 1994), 131, 143–44, 170. Ironically, Spock would become one of his own best-known critics; see Benjamin M. Spock, A Better World for Our Children: Rebuilding American Family Values (Washington, D.C.: National Press Books, 1994). For a more neutral assessment of the effects of “permissive” childrearing practices, however, see Robert R. Sears, Eleanor E. Maccoby, and Harry Levin, Patterns of Child Rearing (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).
54. Marian J. Radke, The Relation of Parental Authority to Children’s Behavior and Attitudes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1946); Duane F. Alwin, “From Obedience to Autonomy: Changes in Traits Desired in Children, 1924–1978,” Public Opinion Quarterly 52 (1988): 33–52.
55. By “folk” style I mean childrearing methods that existed primarily in the oral tradition of households—practices and beliefs preserved and passed on from generation to generation by female household members. On socioeconomic differences in childrearing attitudes, see Kohn, Class and Conformity. On pre-twentieth-century religious influences on childrearing in North America, see Philip J. Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977); and Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Impact of Physical Abuse (New York: Knopf, 1991). Catholicism, which offered a counterpoint to the “permissive” approach, was arguably at its peak influence in the United States demographically, ideologically, and culturally during these years; see Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, chap. 5.