CHAPTER 7

“IS THAT A GOOD WAY TO RAISE CHILDREN?” VIOLENCE IN THE ADVICE COLUMNS, 1940–1969

Reading your letter one expects to hear you talking about bread buttered with soap, like in the day of Aurore the child martyr.

– Janette Bertrand, Le Petit Journal, 22 November 1964

After 1940, as before, violence inside the home showed up in the advice columns, the files of the Juvenile Delinquents’ Court, and newspaper reports. We will analyse these three sources in turn in order to bring out the extent of each, though they are in fact indissociable. The first offers the additional advantage of providing information about the advice given by columnists — not a negligible feature of the discussion about parenting.

In the years after World War II several newspapers followed the example of La Presse and began to offer a column similar to Colette’s. We have chosen them to represent as accurately as possible the Francophone population of Quebec as a whole (see Table 20). The daily newspapers La Presse and La Patrie were sold in Montreal and beyond — indeed the former had some subscribers in the United States. La Terre de chez nous, a weekly published by the Association catholique des cultivateurs, addressed a rural readership. Le Petit Journal and the Sunday edition of La Patrie were sold all throughout the province.

THE COLUMNISTS

In La Presse, Édouardina Lesage (Colette), who turned sixty-five in 1940, remained active until 1956. Laure Cornez-Hurteau, who took over from her, was born in Belgium shortly before 1900. After training as a teacher she accompanied her family to Canada in 1912. She married a lawyer and had three children before joining La Presse in 1922 as a reporter and head of the women’s department. After her retirement she would write two books: L’École de la vie and La Vie à deux.¹ She would be succeeded by Claire Dutrisac (“Nicole”), and later Pauline Lamy.

Besides the “conversations” with Laure Hurteau, La Presse published a column by Father Marcel-Marie Desmarais. Born in 1908, the eldest of ten children, this Dominican held doctorates in philosophy and theology and a diploma in psychology and literature from a Paris university, making him the most highly educated of the columnists. He was initially active in religious broadcasting between 1939 and 1944, and in 1955, he answered listeners’ letters on the program “La Clinique du cœur,” which was broadcast twice a day, five days a week. He enjoyed a stunning success, receiving over 600 letters during the first three months. The cases considered the most interesting appeared first in La Presse and were later published in ten volumes, selling over 605,000 copies. This program would subsequently be shown on television. He also wrote fifteen or so works of popular psychology inspired by actual events, like Adam et Ève dans le monde d’aujourd’hui and Le Bonheur, cet inconnu, intended to spread Catholic morality among modern couples while giving them practical advice on how to be happy.²

At around the same time La Patrie published a column by Françoise Leduc (Annie) and later Huguette Proulx. The latter, who was married with children, had studied Social Sciences and at the Conservatory. In addition to replying to letters in various popular weeklies³ she was an actress and program host, and was awarded the title of “Miss Radio-Télévision” in 1960. Another letter column in La Patrie intended for men was written by Yves Thériault. A well-known Quebec writer, the author of several novels and plays, he stood out for the humorous, sometimes sarcastic manner in which he replied to the letters.

In Le Petit Journal, Janette Bertrand answered readers’ letters, clearly relying on her experience as a wife and mother. Like Father Desmarais she published some of her replies in Le Refuge sentimental,⁴ in addition to writing one or two books for adolescent girls. Her reputation as an actor, program host, and writer for television helped to make her the most popular of these columnists since Colette. Her column and Yves Theriault’s stood out for their non-religious character: unlike their colleagues they never advised readers to ask for divine help to solve everyday problems.

La Terre de chez nous used three columnists between 1950 and 1968: Marthe Beaudry (“Marie-Luce”), a social worker; Michelle Roy, who would later become a journalist with Le Nouvelliste; and Rosaline Désilets-Ledoux (“Marie-Josée”). The latter, born in 1931, had studied at the Nicolet teacher’s college before becoming secretary of the Fédération de l’Union catholique des cultivateurs in the same diocese. When she launched “Le Courrier de Marie-Josée” in 1965 she was married with three daughters.⁵

None of the columnists in the popular newspapers specialized in child-rearing, unlike those who wrote in the family magazines. Nevertheless, they did act as intermediaries between the experts and the general public. Two of them, Claire Dutrisac and Pauline Lamy, contributed to L’École des parents as well as to La Presse, while the others regularly advised their readers to listen to the radio programs and read the periodicals for parents. Colette and Annie spoke of L’École des parents, Janette Bertrand mentioned Dr Spock’s book, Michelle Roy recommended a book by Thérèse Gouin-Décarie, and Marie-Josée the book by Françoise Cholette-Pérusse. Father Desmarais read all the works of practical morality he could get his hands on.⁶ Above all the columnists took their inspiration from these readings while interpreting them in their own way.

Did those who wrote in actually use the advice they were given? In fact, it matters little. As a French psychologist, Professor Lagache, explained to Janette Bertrand, “What counts is for the writer to see the problem printed in its entirety. He [sic] will then have the necessary distance to take the required decisions.” This opinion is quite reminiscent of Dr Spock’s: “It relieves [a mother’s] feelings to recognize them so clearly and to blow them off in talk. It also helps her to see what she has been putting up with and to be firmer in putting a stop to it.”⁷

THE LETTERS IN STATISTICS

During the period between 1940 and 1969 the advice columns as a whole printed 311 letters dealing with violence toward children (see Table 20). After 1940, as before, the great majority of letters came from girls and women (see Table 21). Even half of those sent to Yves Thériault, who in theory catered to men, came from women.⁸ So this was mostly a female topic, with the columnist playing the part of confidante and mother substitute: “I want you to speak to me like a mother,” wrote one young woman to Colette; “I have decided to open up my heart to you as if you were my mother,”⁹ a teenager told Janette Bertrand.

Letter writers chose the column that best suited their aspirations. Father Desmarais, for instance, mostly received letters from married women. On one occasion, when a teenage girl complained to him that her parents kept too close a watch on her and did not allow her to kiss boys, he wondered if a good spanking was not what was needed to bring her to her senses. Even if this reply won him a mother’s approval¹⁰ it is understandable that girls of that age turned instead to Janette Bertrand.

Mothers were most numerous among those who wrote in, followed by girls; then came female neighbours, aunts, and grandmothers (see Table 21). Although most were describing their situation at the time of writing, thirty or so evoked childhood memories, generally unpleasant ones. The customary anonymity in advice columns makes it impossible to determine whether the writers constituted a representative statistical sample of the population as a whole. However, we do know that they came from different backgrounds: four individuals said they were well-off or lived in luxury, while others referred to financial difficulties. Those who mentioned their occupations were farmers’ wives, elementary school teachers, nurses, domestic servants, or students.

The majority of these writers were aged eighteen or older (78%) but the number of teenagers gradually increased. In the 1930s they totalled only 3%, rising to 15% in the following decade, 25% in the 1950s, and 37% by the end of the period under study. Another indication of this trend toward youth as time went by is that in the 1930s the youngest letter writer was sixteen years old, while over the two following decades the age of some writers fell to fifteen and thirteen respectively, reaching twelve after 1960. There were no letters from children under twelve.

Table 21 Authorship of Letters to the Advice Columns Dealing with Violence against Children, 1925–1969

PRESENT SITUATION
Mother	174
Adoptive mother	1
Father	8
Stepfather	1
Daughter	106
Son	6
Grandmother	9
Grandfather	1
Children’s aunt	9
Cousin	1
Female relative	1
Male neighbour	1
Female neighbour	12
Female friend	1
Male friend	5
Childminder	1
Female elementary teacher	1
Reader	1
Witness	3
CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
Women	35
Men	2
Total	379

Table 22 Persons Committing Acts of Violence, According to the Advice Columns, 1925–1969

Father	136
Mother	107
Both parents	29
Stepfather	3
Stepmother	4
Adoptive father	2
Adoptive mother	7
Two adoptive parents	4
Brother	15
Sister	14
Uncle	1
Aunt	8
Maidservant	1
Childminder	1
Grandmother	4
Grandfather	8
Grandparents	1
Indeterminate	8

Note: This table includes all types of violence, both accepted and condemned at the time. The total comes to 353 since some of the 379 letters dealt with corporal punishment in general without describing a particular family.

Who resorted most to violence toward children?¹¹ If we believe the evidence of the letters, it was fathers: they possessed the authority and were responsible for discipline in the family¹² (see Table 22), as we have already seen from the records of the juvenile court. The columnists justified this situation. According to Colette, mothers generally represented indulgence, mildness, and affection, while fathers embodied rational judgment, discipline, and a warranted severity. Ten years later Janette Bertrand confirmed that a single mother had great difficulty getting her children to obey. This was why the two columnists advised that women not intervene when their husband was punishing the children. A man to whom his wife refused the right to beat his children would even feel deprived of his authority.¹³

Mothers came second in the use of violence. Some older sisters did claim the right to punish younger siblings because they were expected to assist their mother, but the columnists took them to task, as they did all others who tried to assume this parental prerogative. Step-parents, despite their reputation for severity toward the children of a first marriage, did not represent a significant proportion of the cases: just seven. Violent actions were on the whole attributed slightly more often to males (52% of cases).

The offspring who were subjected to violence ranged in age from one month to 30 years [sic]. The first group was that of younger boys aged between two and twelve — the “little fiends” who were blamed for the largest number of misdemeanours. But some parents treated boys harshly with the explicit purpose of “making men of them.”¹⁴ Violence directed at girls peaked between the ages of thirteen and seventeen (see Table 23).¹⁵ Despite the female bias in the documentation (seventeen times more letters came from girls than from boys), the situations described in the columns were very similar to those found in the archives of the juvenile court (see Table 13).

The group of young adults between eighteen and thirty who were still being beaten consisted almost entirely of girls: twenty-two out of twenty-four. These young women tolerated the situation because they were penniless, lacked employment, or were in poor health — in short, they were unable to earn a living. Emotional constraints were also a factor: “Betty Ann,” who was still being spanked at eighteen, was reluctant to leave her adoptive parents, fearing they would be heartbroken.¹⁶

Table 23 Distribution of Children† Subjected to Violence, by Age and Sex, from the Advice Columns, 1925–1969

Note: The total comes to 395 because some of the 379 letters mentioned more than one child.

† The words “children” and “child” are used with the broad meaning of “offspring.”

Did parents tend to strike children of their own sex more often? The difference mostly depended on the children’s ages. Until they were twelve, boys were subjected to violence slightly more often by fathers than by mothers (twenty-eight cases versus twenty-five), while young girls mostly felt a mother’s hand (nineteen cases versus seven).¹⁷ Once children turned thirteen fathers were twice as likely as mothers to strike them, whatever their sex (nine cases versus four for boys, and fifty-three versus twenty-one for girls). This was partly because “disciplining” adolescents required considerable physical strength.¹⁸

There were several levels of violence, ranging from a light slap to a thrashing, that left physical and psychological traces into adulthood (see Table 24). In 37% of cases the writers used vague terms such as “strike,” or “beat.” Among the beatings with a bare hand, the columnists generally disapproved of the taloche, or cuff, meaning a blow delivered in a moment of impatience, which in their eyes had doubtful educational value. It had to be distinguished from a gifle, or slap across the face, for the writers found it much more humiliating to be struck in the face. Severe punishments were administered using a strip of leather (a strap or similar) rather than with a hard object such as a stick, perhaps to avoid injuries.

Table 24 Types of Violence Described in Letters to the Advice Columns, 1925–1969

GENERAL
Hitting, striking	149
Disciplining, corporal punishment	16
Thrashing, hiding†	11
Beating on the buttocks†	30
STRIKING WITH THE BARE HAND
Cuffing	38
Hitting	19
Slapping, hitting on the face	23
Pinching	1
Pulling hair	2
BEATINGS WITH AN INSTRUMENT††
Whip, leather strip, belt, various kinds of strap	23
Stick	7
Various: garden fork, flyswatter, hosepipe	4
Blows drawing blood	4
OTHER FORMS OF ABUSE
Kicks	13
Punches	7
Blows to the head	7
Shaking at arms’ length	1
No explicit description	49

Note: This table includes all the forms of violence, from so-called moderate beatings to outright abuse. Several forms of violence were sometimes described in the same letter, which is why the total comes to 404 for 379 letters.

†   There is nothing to indicate whether these beatings were administered with the bare hand or with an object.

†† To avoid duplication we have counted these forms of discipline separately from the spankings and beatings.

Some parents thought that baring skin was part of corporal punishment, for it added humiliation to physical pain. Two teenagers (a girl and a boy) complained that their mother and their stepmother set out to humiliate them.¹⁹ One mother confirmed this intention: “When I punish them, I beat them on their bare skin to make them ashamed.”²⁰ But this well-meaning mother added, “Is that a good way to raise them?”

Colette and the other columnists included certain forms of violence in the category of ill-treatment (eighty-seven cases): striking babies aged under two, kicks, punches, blows to the head, drawing blood, beating a child when drunk, without a valid reason, or too frequently. They were also informed of some unusual and sometimes dangerous punishments: to teach cleanliness to a child of two its adoptive mother ran cold tap water over its buttocks, and a grandfather was concerned to see his son-in-law holding out his little girl of three and shaking her like a mat.²¹ Some excessively violent acts, such as striking a baby, were as frequently committed by a mother as by a father. But in others, especially kicks, punches, and the more severe thrashings administered by irascible or overly harsh individuals, it was much more often the father. In total, ill-treatment was attributed twice as often to fathers (fifty-five cases) as to mothers (twenty-seven cases) or other family members. We can understand a woman who confided to Annie, “My husband has such a violent temperament that I avoid telling him when the children disobey for fear of a stormy scene.”²²

The reasons for the violence were provided by the parents, children, or other witnesses. Statements made by the first two groups allow us to grasp the family dynamics by comparing the points of view of both parties (see Tables 25 and 26). From the parents’ point of view, restlessness and unruliness played an important part in the kinds of behaviour that led to corporal punishment, followed by a litany of misdemeanours committed by children who lied, stole, were bad-tempered, or were even afflicted by “all the vices and all the faults” – an expression that tell us more about the parents’ feelings than the children’s behaviour. But all that was nothing compared with two capital sins, the disobedience and stubbornness of which mothers complained.²³

Table 25 Reasons for Beatings According to Parents, from the Advice Columns, 1925–1969

CHILD’S OR ADOLESCENT’S BEHAVIOUR
Disobedient, stubborn, rude, “answering back”	71
Restless, unruly, destructive, aggressive	20
Quick-tempered	5
Lying	4
Sullenness	5
Stealing	4
Depravity (infantile sexuality)	2
Bed-wetting	1
Fighting with siblings	1
Going out and interest in boys	3
“All the vices,” “all the faults”	2
Peccadilloes, trifles	9
PARENTS’ BEHAVIOUR
Mother: nervous, impatient, perfectionist	32
Father: impatient, quick-tempered, violent	30
Alcoholics	8
Animosity toward the child	12
Motives not specified	14

Note: More than one motive could appear in the same letter.

Table 26 Reasons for Beatings According to the Children,† from the Advice Columns, 1925–1969

CHILD’S OR ADOLESCENT’S BEHAVIOUR
Going out (lateness, disobedience)	32
Discipline (“answering back,” “arguing”)	10
Controlling wages	2
Brutality of an older brother	6
Disputes among siblings	9
Bed-wetting	1
Sexual curiosity	1
Peccadilloes, “or no good reason”	17
PARENTS’ BEHAVIOUR
Parent(s) severe, harsh, short-tempered	21
Alcoholic parent(s)	16
Favouritism — injustice	7
Animosity toward the child	6
No reason given	29

† The word “child” is used with the broad meaning of “offspring.”

A surprising fact is that only two letters mentioned bed-wetting, though this was a frequent problem. Our Informant No. 4, who was married around 1940 and the mother of twelve children, resolved it in the following way. When her children reached “a certain age” but were still wetting the bed, on the first morning she would give them a single stroke on the buttocks with a strap, two strokes the following day, and so on. “And it didn’t take long to train them,” she said. However, Informant No. 1 disapproved of this approach, saying “If one of the children had a kidney infection it would have been cruel to beat it.”

Adolescent girls confirmed the importance of the disciplinary issue, especially beginning in the 1950s. Eager to meet boys, they wanted to go out in the evenings, while the parents, haunted by the fear of the “great misfortune” (an extramarital pregnancy), preferred to maintain the custom of an invitation to the home, which was easier to supervise.²⁴ The figures reveal the frequency of conflicts of authority settled — or embittered — by the use of force. Indeed some parents felt that their children’s misbehaviour was deliberate provocation. “You would think they were doing it on purpose to make me angry,” wrote the mother of some unruly offspring. “A good beating cured her forever of trying it on with us,” said another about her daughter of fourteen who had been disobedient.²⁵ Teenage girls also complained about the harshness of parents who did not love them, beat them for no good reason, or showed favouritism toward one of the siblings. The columnists did not always take these complaints seriously, though they were confirmed by letters from mothers.

The by now familiar stereotypes of parental violence recurred in the advice columns. First, the drunken father: twenty-four of the twenty-five cases of violence related to drunkenness were due to men.²⁶ In 1966 as in 1943 writers complained of an alcoholic, violent father or husband. One adolescent also related how he had to confront his drunken father to protect his mother and younger siblings. This letter drew tears from Father Desmarais²⁷ and convinced one listener to immediately join the temperance movement.

The stereotype of the wicked stepmother also persisted. In 1942 a sixteen-year-old girl described to Colette the abuse that her stepmother was inflicting on her little brothers and sisters. Twenty or so years later a thirteen-year-old boy complained that his stepmother beat him and caused his father to beat him. However, the sympathetic reply given by Huguette Proulx provoked the wrath of another stepmother who rejected the unfounded reputation bestowed on those in her position.²⁸ Yet despite their persistence, these stereotypes did not represent the majority of cases brought to the columnists’ attention.

FUNDAMENTAL CAUSES OR JUSTIFICATIONS OF VIOLENCE?

Most of the situations described in the advice columns were identical to those brought before the juvenile court. The originality and interest of the former source consists in the fact that mothers confided to the columnists with apparent sincerity the reasons why they (or their husbands) beat the children. Some did so to confess and others to justify their behaviour, but almost all wanted to obtain advice. This makes it possible to look past the pretext for corporal punishment and understand the deeper cause of violence.

“It’s because I Love Him”

The justification expressed in the form “I beat him for his own good because I love him” had not entirely disappeared, for it was still found in a dozen letters from between 1940 and 1969. This sort of approach sometimes led to conflict between the parents. One mother was devastated to find marks left by beatings on her sons of nine, seven, and five. “My husband claims he loves his children: he’s is always blaming me for being so soft with them.” A “suffering mother” described the opposite situation: it was she who spanked a disobedient little five-year-old, and she could not make her husband (who preferred to spoil the child) understand that she was doing it for the child’s “future good.” But the parents could also be in perfect agreement. A twenty-two-year-old “apprentice mother” resorted to spanking to make her little three-year-old girl better behaved and more obedient: “My husband and I both love our child and we don’t want to be ashamed when we go out with her.”²⁹

“It’s because I Hate Him”

At the opposite pole from parents who displayed the best of intentions, sixteen others (eight mothers and eight fathers) beat the children because they disliked them. Confessions of this kind began to appear in 1942 and continued to the end. There were of course different degrees of animosity.

First, fatigue and nervosity took a heavy toll on maternal feelings. After giving birth three times and two miscarriages, a single mother described herself as so worn out that sometimes she almost came to detest her last-born: “As soon as I hear him crying I become edgy and I want to beat him really hard.” Another woman, married in this case, was unable to make her children pay attention to her without resorting to the fly swatter: “There are times when I hate everybody, even my children. Everything gets on my nerves.” As François Mauriac wrote, “It is not always easy to tell the difference between exasperation and hatred.”³⁰

Two correspondents attributed their aversion to faults in the child. The first complained about a fourteen-year-old son who had become so intolerable that she could not bear him, and even came to hate him. The second was trying in vain to love a four-year-old she had adopted. She could not find any good qualities in the little girl, whom she described as “restless and very difficult to control.” The same problem was described in “La Clinique de l’École des parents.” A woman who had married a widower claimed she had loved her husband’s children as if they were her own until the day when the seven-year-old boy began to steal small items in school. “This vice was so repugnant to me that I was as if turned to ice in the little boy’s presence. I cannot treat him like a normal being, and only the fear of going too far stops me from telling him how hateful I find him. He has become hard and uncommunicative … unbearable.”³¹ This letter shows how hatred provoked by a child’s misbehaviour can lead to a true vicious circle, for if a child feels rejected by his parents his behaviour can only become worse.

Two other women admitted that though the child had no particular fault they found everything he did extremely disagreeable. They suffered on account of this antipathy and were trying to overcome it, but in vain. One of them wrote to Father Desmarais: “I am weeping as I write to you. Without anonymity I would not dare confess to you something so terribly abnormal. I imagine that your readers’ hair must stand on end when they read the confession of such an unnatural mother.… So am I a monster?”³²

Yet this woman said that she wanted what was best for her child and that she would care for him as best she could. She was especially worried about the harm she might do him. The same cannot be said of a final correspondent who gave free rein to her hatred. Aged twenty-seven, married for eleven years, and the mother of eight children, she was able to list six that she liked, but no more than that, and one that she adored because “it is my spitting image.” The problem was her last-born, a nice, well-behaved baby of fifteen months that everyone but she found adorable:

I can’t bear its presence. I hate it with all my strength. I just have to look at it and I want to beat it until it is all covered in bruises, and not just now and then but all the time. I even go as far as to wish it wasn’t there. I am sorry it was ever born, you can’t imagine how much. I don’t know if it’s because of my successive pregnancies, or maybe because of everything I suffered when I was carrying it and when it was born … but I hate it. I hit it for everything and for no good reason, and when I strike it I feel happy, satisfied. Yet not altogether, because I would like to hit it hard, even harder, harder and harder.

I do not know what to do.

I Hate It³³

If the columnist and readers of Le Petit Journal had never realized that a biological mother (and not just a stepmother like Marie-Anne Houde) could hate her child to death, this letter must have come as a revelation. (Leontine Young described the identical case of an American mother who loved a little girl who resembled her, while ill-treating another that she hated.)³⁴ Since Janette Bertrand’s correspondence was unknown to the social services, this baby was seriously at risk of being beaten to death — unless writing the letter allowed this woman to see her situation clearly and take steps to resolve it.³⁵

Some fathers could also hate their children, but since none confessed to this (at least not in our sample), it was left to their wives to describe the situation. As in the case of mothers, this hatred could also be a reaction to faults in the child. A woman in Dolbeau explained that her husband had come to hate her son who was nervous, sly, and a thief. Another beat his little boy whom he detested because when he was born he would have preferred a girl. But the cause that was evoked most often was a so-called shotgun wedding — one precipitated by a premarital pregnancy in order to legitimize the child and save the mother’s honour. Some men, furious that their hand had been forced in this way, took their revenge on the child, holding it responsible for the situation. “At the age of two this child was getting such thrashings that he would carry the bruises for weeks,” wrote one mother. Now he was eight: “His father is never satisfied, he shouts insults at him and kicks him around.” Today specialists know that unwanted children are at greater risk than others of being abused.³⁶

“It’s because I’ve a Short Fuse”

The cases of parental hatred were fortunately a minority in the advice columns. The most frequently invoked cause for violence was simply impatience.

Between 1940 and 1969 thirty-six mothers were described (or described themselves) as “nervous.” On the other hand, only one man was described thus. Depending on whether it was committed by a man or a woman, an impulsive act of violence would not be explained in the same way. In the former case the reference would be to anger, harshness, or brutality, while nervosity was reserved almost entirely for the female sex. The stereotype of the weak woman with fragile nerves became sufficiently widespread to inspire advertisements. For instance, those vaunting the merits of “Postum” depicted mothers who shouted and struck their children, ostensibly because their nerves were on edge as a result of coffee drinking (see Illustration 15).

In two-thirds of cases (twenty-five out of thirty-seven), nervous tension resulted in violence, though the shouting and blows did nothing to improve children’s behaviour. Articles in family magazines had long pointed this out, as letters to the advice columns confirmed. One mother of four wrote to Colette, “I lose my temper a lot, I lash out, I shout, and they end up not obeying me any more.” Others noted that such behaviour only made the children as nervous as themselves.³⁷

Some others blamed their nervosity on a husband who treated them and their children too harshly, or on the difficulties of daily life, but most blamed the children instead. One described her little boy of five as a “little fiend,” and another her daughter of four as a “little demon,”³⁸ both saying their nerves were in tatters and finding relief in what were sometimes very vigorous blows.

Whether or not they were able to find attenuating circumstances, all these women deplored their lack of self-control. One wrote to Father Desmarais, “I admit it, much to my shame, but not a single day goes by that I don’t catch myself with a belt in my hand and cries welling up in my throat. My repeated resolutions to control my urges melt like butter in the pan.” Another, who had been unable to get her children to obey since the death of her husband, compared herself to a wicked stepmother who shouts and curses as she brandishes a stick.³⁹

To a certain extent these guilt feelings were aggravated by parenting experts who advised against corporal punishment. A mother who described herself without any indulgence as “uncontrollable” wrote to Colette on this subject in 1948:

I am the mother of four children aged between six months and five years, and though I love them more than anything in the world I am bringing them up very badly. All the experts say that you should not strike children, but I am always hitting mine, and very hard, for I lose patience with them and get my temper up. I want to stop, but I can’t; I have promised myself to use persuasion and reasoning instead, but “bam!” a clout as soon as they don’t listen to me. I’m afraid that later on my little ones won’t love me any more.⁴⁰

Illustration 15 “Postum for Your Nerves”

Are you a good mother or a cranky one?

MISTER COFFEE NERVES Heh! Heh! She’s angry, but I’m glad because I’m the one that put her in a rage!

Don’t let “Coffee Nerves” spoil your life!

– Use POSTUM!

Sleep better, look better, feel better! Drink POSTUM! It’s the perfect way to avoid the caffeine in tea and coffee. POSTUM contains no caffeine — so it can’t upset your nerves, your sleep, or your digestion. You’ll also like the delicious grainy flavour! Easy to make instantly — right in the cup. Order POSTUM today! Postum also saves you money!

SIDE PANEL Postum costs only about 1/2 as much as coffee!

MISTER COFFEE NERVES Curses! Beaten by POSTUM again!

A product of General Foods

Source: Terre de chez nous (11 Nov. 1953), 12.

So even parents who loved their children risked ill-treating them in a moment of impatience. A letter to Father Desmarais was even more explicit:

I have three children who are very unruly and not always obedient.

Sometimes I realize that I am too severe and expect things of these poor little ones that even adults would find difficult. I also wonder if I don’t shout too loud and too often. The more I intervene the more restless and ill-behaved they become. Sometimes I give in to my anger and discipline them harshly. The next night I can hardly sleep. I blame myself for ill-treating these little defenceless beings.

I would like to bring up my children in a Christian way and teach them to be virtuous by not satisfying their every whim. But I am aware that I often go too far. I would like to be able to control myself.

Brokenhearted⁴¹

Unwittingly, this woman was exposing causes for ill-treatment that social workers would deal with later: unrealistic expectations and a lack of self-control that turned physical punishment into abuse.⁴²

How did columnists react to the letters from these women so ready to blame themselves for being quick-tempered and violent? Colette continued to lecture them without pulling any punches: “One of the first duties of a mother is to control her nerves, and no one should think that impossible. You could manage it in no time at all, even without medical help, if you loved your children as you ought, in other words for their sake more than for your own. Think about this: later they will judge you.” We recall that in 1954 Colette was seventy-nine, and that she had never brought up a child, which possibly explains her intransigence. Yet L’École des parents’ psychologists expressed themselves in almost the same way: “It is not your little girl you need to reform first, but yourself.”⁴³

Janette Bertrand (who was a mother) and Father Desmarais (who had no doubt learned in the confessional not to indispose his penitents)⁴⁴ showed more understanding and gave more practical advice. The former, without blaming the “despairing mother,” suggested that she should stop hitting her “angel with horns” but send her to her room instead. The second recommended relaxation exercises, getting as much rest as possible, organizing games to channel children’s energy, and, naturally, prayer. Both of them occasionally encouraged their correspondents to ask their doctor for a mild tranquillizer. Medications for tense and tired mothers had existed since at least 1920, but their consumption increased greatly in the 1950s and 1960s.⁴⁵ One man who wrote to Father Desmarais deploring the irascible temperament that caused him to inflict great suffering on his family was given the same advice, except for the medication.⁴⁶

Unconscious Causes of Violence

So some women were clear-sighted and sincere enough to admit that they beat their children, not “for their own good” as the consecrated formula had it, but out of impatience or animosity. There were other motives for violence that letter writers did not admit to because they were unconscious, but which columnists were able to discern.

One such motive, analysed by Alice Miller, was the propensity of certain adults to reproduce the violence that they had experienced in their own childhood, but by inflicting violence instead of suffering it. One mother, who wrote to Laure Hurteau to describe how her husband disciplined their daughter, ended by stating that she had been brought up with the same kind of severity, but that she had never felt any resentment toward her parents.⁴⁷ Yet such rationalizations could hide desires more difficult to admit, as Janette Bertrand became aware while reading a letter from a fourteen-year-old girl:

Q. Imagine, at my age my mother still takes the strap to me. You would think she was doing her best to humiliate me. When she beats me I have to take off my dress and petticoat: she makes me lie across her knees and she never gives me fewer than a dozen strokes. You have no idea how it hurts. According to her, that is the best way to punish me: she says her own mother beat her even more often than she beats me, and the strap doesn’t kill you. Do you think she’s right to beat me like that?

A. Your mother has the right to bring you up as she thinks fit; she has the right to make you an enemy for life. If, on the other hand, she wants to maintain a relationship of love and friendship with you she will stop avenging on you the beatings she was given as a child.⁴⁸

In another letter, the educational justification for beating was even less well-founded. An Anglophone girl of eighteen, a student nurse, revealed a “problem” to which she was subjected by the aunt who had adopted her:

Q. She spanks me. I don’t deserve it, I’m sure, but my aunt always finds a reason. I have tried to discuss this with her, but she won’t listen, saying that I just have to get used to it because she is going to spank me at least once a week until my twenty-first birthday. She claims that all young girls should be disciplined like that. What do you think?

A. Your aunt is an obsessive who derives her pleasure (very likely sexual) from spanking you. Resist with all your eighteen years. If it is normal to spank a young child who has done something wrong, it is abnormal to give a regular spanking to a girl of eighteen who has done nothing to deserve it.⁴⁹

The punishments administered by this woman had a regularity about them that revealed “the most perverse premeditation,” as Tardieu wrote in 1860.⁵⁰ Furthermore, this girl stressed that she found it most humiliating to be treated like a ten-year-old. Later, American teenagers would also say that they hated being punished like children.⁵¹

Sometimes punishments were truly meant to humiliate. To discipline a fifteen-year-old who wet his bed, his parents obliged him to come to meals wearing only a diaper. One day they displayed him on the veranda wearing a diaper and a skirt. If he protested he got a drubbing from his father. The columnist found it difficult to believe that parents could be so lacking in common sense. “Reading your letter one expects to hear you talking about bread spread with soap, like in the day of Aurore the child martyr.”⁵²

After receiving numerous letters of this kind Janette Bertrand finally declared her total opposition to teenagers being beaten: “It is too often mingled with a morbid, ugly, degrading satisfaction, as much in those who give the spankings as in those who receive them.” The columnist correctly identified the risk of sadomasochism inherent in corporal punishment, first studied by Kraft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud and later by the historians Ian Gibson and Philip Greven and by sociologists. Yet she still found it normal to spank a young child. As Philip Greven has remarked, people find it shocking for one adult to inflict painful punishment on another, but find the same practice perfectly normal when it is inflicted on children.⁵³

EVOLUTION OF THE COLUMNISTS

Over a period of thirty years the opinions of the columnists naturally underwent a certain evolution. The most senior of them, Colette, remained implacably attached to a few basic ideas. She always advised parents to maintain unity of command, so that if the wife found her husband too severe she should resign herself and leave him to act rather than diminish his authority by contradicting him in front of the children. She also supported parents, for “order is needed in the world and parents’ authority is a primary element of that order.” Consequently, when girls of seventeen or eighteen complained of being slapped, she would lecture the “little girls [sic] who think they know better than their mother and want at all costs to do whatever they wish.”⁵⁴

On other points Colette’s ideas did evolve. Up to 1944 she would give a moralistic explanation of children’s propensity to steal and lie and would refer to “deadly germs” and “vicious tendencies.” From that year on, however, she turned to a psychiatric explanation, advancing a theory she had mentioned cautiously in 1935: “An immoral child is a sick child and therefore can be cured. It is possible that the instinct to lie arises from this special pathology.”⁵⁵ She advised against corporal punishment in such a case because it could only embitter the child and lead to further dishonesty.

After 1943, Colette also gave up citing the example of heroes and saints who had been raised with the rod. Occasionally, she would still say that unwarranted tolerance was more harmful than beating and that many children had benefited from a severe upbringing,⁵⁶ but in general she considered that beating children had had its day. Won over to the modern approach to child-rearing advocated by specialists in Mental Hygiene and by L’École des parents, she declared that corporal punishment should be used rarely, and only in exceptionally serious cases.

This idea spread among the other columnists. In La Patrie, Françoise Leduc (Annie) published the same text on three occasions in order to convince parents they should replace corporal punishment with more refined methods:

Q. My wife and I are a childless couple and have agreed to bring up a niece who was orphaned last year. But this child, who has just turned twelve and has been very spoiled, is proud and obstinate with us, and we find it very difficult to make her obey. My wife thinks that only corporal punishment will overcome a nature like hers, but I maintain that such an approach will only make the child deceitful and uncommunicative. What is your opinion?

A. Corporal punishment, which can have an excellent effect on very young children when used judiciously, is, on the contrary, harmful to older children, especially at an age when they are trying to assert their personalities. It could happen that your niece, wounded in her self-esteem, would find nothing better than to turn inward and enclose herself in a fierce obstinacy that you will never be able to overcome by such means. Without becoming discouraged, try to reason with her instead, appeal to her feelings, and make every effort to retain her trust.⁵⁷

At the same time as they were advising that corporal punishment be used as little as possible, the columnists became more aware of the problem of abuse. The letter written by the “brokenhearted”⁵⁸ mother showed Father Desmarais what a thin line there was between the two. Another one, in 1958, attracted his attention for longer. The writer began by remembering some advice Colette often gave to parents: “When one of you is punishing the child, the other should keep out of it.” Then this woman described her husband’s behaviour. Returning from an evening of skating, his little boy of nine had eaten three crackers, though his father had forbidden it. The latter went to him in his room, and there “I heard him beat [the child] mercilessly. I know that he always hits him on the head, saying it is his head that is to blame.” When the mother went to make sure that the child had not lost consciousness, her husband swore at her, accusing her of encouraging disobedience. The next day the little boy suffered from headaches and dizziness. The mother, being “very worried,” wondered what to do, especially since her husband struck her in the same way. Outraged, Father Desmarais first tried to find the cause of such violence.

First possibility: your husband is mentally ill. I hope with all my heart that is not the case. It would really be too terrible to have to commit the father of seven young children. Watch him nevertheless, and if he shows signs of insanity alert the authorities to protect yourself and your children. Recently, near Montreal, a father smothered his baby because it was crying too much at night. Someone mentally ill like that should be in an asylum.

Second possibility: this is a monstrously cruel man. If that is so, the police should be told. Here again I hope it is not the case. For how would you manage, my poor lady, if your husband went to prison?

Third possibility: your husband is normal, but harsh and unthinking. This is the most likely hypothesis. In that case, have a very serious talk with him. Try to reason with him. If he will not listen, threaten to go to your parish priest.⁵⁹

This analysis indicates that Desmarais possessed a level of knowledge similar to that of social workers and probation officers, who around this time also distinguished between violence arising from mental illness and violence due to cruelty or excessive severity. He also understood why women dealing with such problems were reluctant to complain to the police, for how would they survive without their husband?

Father Desmarais then set the limits that for him separated corporal punishment from abuse:

Cold-bloodedly striking a child for a trifle is serious enough. Striking him on the head is inadmissible. It risks killing him or making him mad. Certain fleshy regions are best suited for punishing without any danger. Even in those conditions, a father must never forget to moderate his strength.

As we can see, Father Desmarais did not condemn corporal punishment outright. He was content to denounce abuses and recommend measures to protect the child, and thought spanking less risky than hitting on the head. As for the risk of eroticization, he did not consider it any more than did the Jesuits of Collège et famille.

In other answers Father Desmarais spoke of spanking as an appropriate punishment on occasion. This aroused the indignation of two women readers. The first declared that “beating children is bestial, barbarous, vile, cruel, brutal, savage, abominable, criminal, culpable, inhuman, and anti-Christian.” The second, more restrained, thought that he was recommending an excessively harsh approach to parenting. Instead she wanted children to preserve sunny memories of their childhood and adolescence. A third, on the other hand, agreed with him completely. The mother of four children, she rejected the opinion of “so-called experts on parenting” who argued that a young person should never be beaten. Her experience had taught her that reasoning was sometimes useless and that there was nothing like a good thrashing to enlighten a stubborn child.⁶⁰

Father Desmarais was obviously very content with this “good common sense reaction and Christian instinct in rejecting certain fashionable theories.” He, too, rebelled against “so-called experts” according to whom one should never upset children for fear of provoking complexes and repression. He agreed with Abbé Évely: “Fearing they will create complexes and repression, parents no longer practise constraint,”⁶¹ and also with an American psychiatrist: “This excessive indulgence on the part of parents arises from the concern not to create any complexes in the child — the most fearsome of evils.” In fact, in 1932 Freud had already expressed a warning against excessive liberalism in child-rearing,⁶² but obviously not everybody was aware of this development in his thought.

Desmarais then explained the underlying principles of what he called the “traditional methods,” which were in fact very close to the modern theories. First, parental love was essential to children’s development. However, true love entailed the imposition of discipline. This included sanctions, and in certain circumstances, corporal punishment. This was how children’s moral awareness was formed: initially they learned to repress their negative tendencies for fear of punishment while later they would develop more understanding and act out of respect for God’s law. Desmarais concluded with a reminder that corporal punishment should be moderate, and used only in exceptional circumstances.⁶³

In addition to these arguments “based on psychological data,” Father Desmarais referred to his personal experience. In the school he had attended as a child, his teacher, a nun, was very severe and demanding, and resorted to physical punishment. But her pupils preserved an excellent memory of this austere regime. “We had a vague but very profound recognition that she wanted what was best for us and loved us with all her heart.” This kindergarten was a seedbed for religious vocations, he concluded, proving that her rigorous approach was the correct one.⁶⁴

Father Desmarais added the testimony of another priest who had contributed the preface to Maryse Choisy’s book. Father Poucel remembered the spankings administered with a slipper by a very beloved grandfather. Far from producing any “dangerous repression,” he insisted, the administration of such justice was instead perceived by the guilty conscience as settling a debt of honour. Father Poucel was careful to point out that this punishment was very rare and not at all like the behaviour of some modern parents who instead obeyed the promptings of their mood.⁶⁵ Father Desmarais saw this as a confirmation of his own ideas: it was not spoiled children who loved their parents the most, but those who were raised in an austere atmosphere of justice and with genuine love.

The letter that launched this discussion (or another, almost identical one) would appear two months later in Laure Hurteau’s column. But this columnist expressed a different point of view. She too thought that parenting was a labour of love requiring patience and generosity. She also felt that severity was necessary, but that it should not become brutality. She insisted on the drawbacks of physical punishment, especially the humiliation it caused. In this she was basing herself on the opinion of social workers who found that many young delinquents “would never have reached the point they are at if they had not been acquainted with the whip and felt the shame of being treated worse than a dog.” Laure Hurteau went further, putting the merits of that kind of punishment entirely into question:

I do not believe in the therapeutic value of spanking, for the correction frees the child from himself. When he has been beaten he feels that having paid for his misdemeanour his debt has been paid. Fear of punishment will not stop him if he is tempted to commit another grave offence. He will hope to avoid it. If he fails, he will put it down to bad luck, and in that way he will learn to conceal things better, to become more devious, but not to behave well.⁶⁶

Reading this passage gives the impression that the columnist was totally opposed to corporal punishment. However, that was not the case. A few weeks later another mother told her how her husband punished their fourteen-year-old daughter who, though her parents had forbidden it, had spoken in the street to boys she did not know:

My husband set out to look for his daughter. He led her back by the ponytail. He gave her a beating that cured her forever of defying us. Having witnessed the scene, her sister learned what to expect if she disobeyed. Their father demonstrated once and for all the meaning of paternal authority.⁶⁷

Three years after this incident, the two girls were “well behaved and reserved,” according to their mother, who saw this as an example that proved the case for corporal punishment. She therefore invited parents “not to be taken in by untried methods of child-rearing, or be influenced by talk of complexes.” This time Laure Hurteau cried “Bravo!” for the father and hoped that his action would become an example, for “he exemplifies the way one has to crack down hard in order to be listened to when repeated warnings have failed.” In her opinion, “when the era of complexes is over, no doubt we will return to using a strong hand, which in proper doses has never harmed anyone.”⁶⁸

This about-turn by Laure Hurteau is largely explained by her desire to see fathers, take a more active part in raising their children⁶⁹ and by the mother’s assurance that her daughters were subsequently well behaved. But this letter should be compared with the case of Mme Chartier, analysed in Chapter 5: after being beaten by her mother for going out against orders, the daughter confided to the probation officer that she had had sexual relations with boys despite her mother’s strict supervision.⁷⁰

Among all the letters addressed to the advice columns only two correspondents (including the author of the letter cited above) were glad they had been brought up strictly, while thirty-five others criticized their parents for beating them. As well, dozens of adolescents asked the columnists for information and advice that they did not dare to ask of their mother because, clearly, there was a lack of trust within the home.

THE END-POINT: THE 1960S

By the early 1960s the columnists and experts on parenting had almost reached a consensus on the question of corporal punishment, namely that it should be used as little as possible, while psychologists specified that it was only acceptable to punish with the bare hand. However, a rearguard action was still being conducted. In 1964, in La Terre de chez nous, Michelle Roy wrote to one mother:

You think your husband is strict.… But perhaps it is you who are too indulgent. Do not be too alarmed at the occasional spankings given your eldest. If he beats him too often, or for a trifling offence, or brutally, perhaps it would be best to intervene. But a good spanking has never killed a child and has set many on the right path, while excessive indulgence often brings poor results. Everything depends on how it is done.⁷¹

This advice is almost identical to that offered by Colette in the 1930s and 1940s. In addition, Michelle Roy often told teenage girls (perhaps jokingly?) that they deserved a good spanking.⁷²

Some letters revealed a change in parenting methods. The debate carried on in Collège et famille in 1949 and the protests addressed to Father Desmarais in 1959 show that there was no longer unanimity about corporal punishment. Two years later a teenage girl complained about the spankings she had received: “People don’t do that any more today, it seems to me.” Others recorded the kinds of ill-treatment they considered typical of a barbaric era but unacceptable in modern times. “Only stepmothers of the past did those things,” wrote one correspondent, while Janette Bertrand referred to the “bread spread with soap like in the day of Aurore the child martyr.”⁷³ Taken together, these testimonies show that violence done to children was becoming less and less acceptable in Quebec society.

English Canada seems to have undergone a similar evolution. A survey of 200 individuals born between 1910 and 1950 carried out by Neil Sutherland showed that those who grew up after World War II experienced less severe and less frequent corporal punishment than members of the preceding generation.⁷⁴

The readers of the advice columns also seemed ready to intervene to protect these children. In the case of a boy mistreated by his stepmother, one of them wrote to Huguette Proulx, “This case comes under the law on abuse and could be investigated by the police authorities,” while another asked Janette Bertrand where she could report parents who were ill-treating their small children.⁷⁵

Toward the end of the 1960s interventions by the social services seem to have become a fact of life. One woman was aware of this when she wrote, in 1968, “My husband was raised being beaten with a garden fork, so I can tell you that if there had been a social service in those days there would have been quite a to-do.”⁷⁶ The columnists played a part in this development by advising their correspondents to go to their local social services centre, or to their priest if they lived in the country.

___________

During the period between World War II and the Quiet Revolution those responsible for the advice columns helped to change methods of child-rearing by spreading modern ideas and encouraging their readers to read works of popular psychology. Yet none of them went as far as to say that it was never appropriate to beat children.⁷⁷ Father Desmarais ruled out striking on the head, but not punishment applied to “certain fleshy regions.” Janette Bertrand was against spanking teenagers, but she thought that a child of two needed an occasional spanking.⁷⁸

Some backward steps were also taken in the debate about corporal punishment. In 1955, the psychologist Monique Béchard and her husband wrote, “We find it excessive and even not quite Catholic to attribute religious vocations to the ‘hidings’ received in youth. Criminals could say the same thing.”⁷⁹ But four years later, as we have seen, Father Desmarais would argue that these methods, used in the school he attended, had actually helped to develop some religious vocations, a statement very similar to those made by Colette in the 1930s and 1940s.

Columnists could choose as they pleased among the range of opinions put forward by the experts on parenting, as Father Desmarais did. With Maryse Choisy’s book at hand he ignored her total opposition to spanking, preferring the opinion expressed in the preface to the book by Father Poucel, who recommended the practice. Likewise in Sélection du Reader’s Digest, Philip Wylie stated he had gained the respect if not the love of a little boy by spanking him.⁸⁰ An extract from a statement by Dr Lebovici, quoted in a box, confirmed the need for firmness in raising children. But the author and his editor took care not to add that the famous psychoanalyst was opposed to spanking because of the danger of eroticization that accompanied it.⁸¹ It shows that from their reading Father Desmarais and Philip Wylie retained only whatever confirmed their already strongly held opinions.

Many readers must have done likewise. Around 1960 our Informant No. 5 was unable to make her little boy of three remain lying down for his afternoon rest. To get him to obey she gave him a good spanking on three occasions. “I stopped because it was useless. I wasn’t going to kill him, all the same.” But her sister-in-law, Informant No. 1, instead defended the method advised by a physician in the advice column of an English-language newspaper, which was to bare the child’s behind and beat it with a stick or a strap to make the punishment more effective. We should point out that Informant No 5 had only a primary education, while her sister-in-law was an elementary school teacher. This reflected a state of affairs that American sociologists would later be surprised to discover: that the less educated were not necessarily the most violent.⁸²

The hundreds of letters written to the columnists also cast fresh light on different aspects of violence within the home. First, the violence ascribed to excessive nervosity in mothers. This reaction was already mentioned in the files of the juvenile court from 1925 and in family magazines from 1935 on, but, in addition to the exploitation of this image in advertising during the 1950s, the frequency with which women described themselves as nervous suggest it was a stereotype. Other revelations of the advice columns were the feelings of hatred to which certain mothers admitted and the description of new forms of violence, especially toward very young children, such as holding them up and shaking them. The latter corresponded to the “shaken baby syndrome” that would be discovered by pediatricians a few years later.

The columnists did what they could to help protect children. They first declared certain forms of punishment considered normal by parents to be unacceptable. Then they encouraged mothers to obtain the psychological help that they or their husbands needed. Finally, they encouraged witnesses to report cases of abuse. In the 1960s the general public clearly became more aware of the violence inflicted on children, and interventions to protect them by the social services became taken for granted. The advice columns encouraged this change by allowing parents and teenagers to express themselves, and by putting the ideas of specialists within reach of a broad public.