Caught between Common Sense and Science: The Cornell Child Study Clubs, 1925-45

Abstract

A 1930 report of a rural New York Child Study Club meeting conveys the dubiousness with which many mothers have regarded using books to raise babies. In the words of the group's secretary: “One mother, at a certain point in the discussion, quoted, half in fun, the much-abused ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ adding, That's in the book.’ (We have had quite a bit of fun about things being or not being ‘in the book.”) ‘Oh, but that's in the old Book,’ some made answer, and to that another said, ‘I guess you have to mix the two!”” This ironic dialog highlights women's ambivalence and confusion about the use of the “book” in child-rearing and about the sources of expert advice which have contended for authority in the child-rearing enterprise. Before the twentieth century, mothers who raised “baby by the book” were often ridiculed, with the assumption being that the care of children constituted common knowledge; however, in this century, middle-class mothers have avidly consumed child-rearing manuals. American parents have been inundated with baby books, from the free Infant Care pamphlets dispensed by the U.S. Children's Bureau in the early decades of the century to Dr. Benjamin Spock's 35-cent paperback Baby and Child Care, which was distributed to millions of mothers by physicians and nurses in the 1940s and 1950s.