For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  But it was not only the romantic, pastoral image of childhood that inspired the “century of the child.” The Little Child in whose name so many reform campaigns were waged—for compulsory education, public health programs, etc.—was not only a symbol of the past but of the industrial future. Addressing a women’s meeting in 1898, Dr. W. N. Hailman refuted the “primitive” image of the child as either a “little animal” or “an embryo savage” and presented children as the evolutionary vanguard of the race:

  Childhood is not a makeshift to keep mankind from dying out; but it is the very abrogation of death, the continued life of humanity in its onward march to its divine destiny … It is childhood’s teachableness that has enabled man to overcome heredity with history … The very meaning and mission of childhood is the continuous progress of humanity. It, and it alone, renders life worth living.10

  The exaltation of the child for its “teachableness” and pliancy reflected a growing sense that children might be actually better suited to the industrial world than adults. Turn-of-the-century America was suffering from a massive case of “future shock.” Technology seemed to remold the world anew each day: What good was experience? How could “maturity” mean anything other than obsolescence? With the introduction of scientific management and assembly-line procedures, industry was coming to need the pliant youth more than the seasoned craftsman. The rise of the child (and decline of the patriarchal father) was probably most wrenching in immigrant working-class families: the parents often remained, in their attitudes and language, uprooted peasants; helplessly dependent on the son or daughter who had gone to an American school, knew English, and understood the ways of the big city.

  The idea that the child was the key to the future, banal as it sounds, had a definite political message. To say that the child alone held the key to social change was to say that the present generation of adults did not. That, contrary to the hopes of socialists and militant unionists, the social structure could not be transformed within a single generation. Child-centrist ideology pictured society inching toward reform generation by generation. The professional or businessman of Yankee stock and the Polish laborer might appear, temporarily, to be members of different species, but, with an “American” upbringing, there would be less of a gap between their sons, even less between their grandsons, and so forth. Social distinctions would dissolve, over time, through mass public education, while improved methods of child raising would produce a “higher” type of human personality. By concentrating on the child—rather than on, say, political agitation, union organizing, or other hasty alternatives—the just society could be achieved painlessly, albeit a little slowly.

  Thus the turn-of-the-century exaltation of the child was both romantic and rationalist, conservative and progressive. The child was “primitive” but this meant it was also malleable, hence really more “modern” than anyone else. The child was the reason to seek reforms, and also a reason to defer them. The child was the “founder of the family,” the foundation of the home; it was also the only member of the family truly prepared (by virtue of its very inexperience) for the technological turmoil of the outside world. Only the figure of the child held the key to a future that could contain both behemoth factories and nurturing hearthsides, the cold logic of Wall Street and the sentimental warmth of Christmas.

  The “Child Question” and the Woman Question

  If it was not always crystal clear how a concentration on the child would solve such social problems as labor unrest or urban corruption, it was obvious at once that the child held the answer to the Woman Question. The child was no longer “a mere incident in the preservation of the species” but the potential link to a higher plateau of evolutionary development. Since no one else was going to take responsibility for the child, it fell to the individual mother to forge that link. The Swedish writer Ellen Key’s 1909 best-seller, The Century of the Child, spelled out the new evolutionary responsibilities of womanhood:

  Women in parliament and in journalism, their representation in the local and general government, in peace congresses and workingmen’s meetings, science and literature, all this will produce small results until women realize that the transformation of society begins with the unborn child … This transformation requires an entirely new conception of the vocation of mother, a tremendous effort of will, continuous inspiration.11

  According to Key, only by dint of a total focus on children, for several generations, could women hope to bring forth “the completed man—the Superman.” Key’s proposals were radical—she argued that even monogamy should be abandoned if it got in the way of women’s selection of evolutionarily suitable mates—but other than that, her thinking was completely in tune with the establishment’s romantic line. Nothing could be more important than motherhood, President Roosevelt told a gathering of women:

  The good mother, the wise mother—you cannot really be a good mother if you are not a wise mother—is more important to the community than even the ablest man; her career is more worthy of honor and is more useful to the community than the career of any man, no matter how successful, can be …

  But … the woman who, whether from cowardice, from selfishness, from having a false and vacuous ideal shirks her duty as wife and mother, earns the right to our contempt, just as does the man who, from any motive, fears to do his duty in battle when the country calls him.12

  Many women agreed, either because they were proud to find themselves in such an important career, or because, as the President warned, the only alternative was contempt. An American female speaker told an international conference on motherhood in 1908:

  With clear eyes we must see the goal of our effort and with unfaltering steps journey towards it. The goal is nothing less than the redemption of the world through the better education of those who are able to shape it and make it. The keeper of the gates of to-morrow is the little child upon a mother’s arms. The way of that kingdom which is to come on earth, as in heaven, is placed in the hands of a child, and that child’s hands a woman holds.13

  In the reflected glory of the child, motherhood could no longer be seen as a biological condition or a part-time occupation; it was becoming a “noble calling.”

  So stridently does a “century of the child” cry out for a cult of motherhood that it would be easy enough, in retrospect, to dismiss the whole fixation on children as just another advertisement for female domesticity. In part it was: a woman’s home can have no sturdier gatekeeper than a tiny child. Yet something else was going on too: the discovery of the child was, in one sense, a discovery of the power of women. In the official ideology of the time, woman was already sequestered in the realm of private life, which was, after all, “her sphere.” Here, because of the triviality of domestic concerns, she was even allowed to “reign,” just as the man supposedly did outside. But now it is as if the masculinist imagination takes a glance over its shoulder and discovers it has left something important behind in “woman’s sphere”—the child. This child—the new child of the twentieth century—is not valued, like the child of patriarchy, simply as an heir. This child is conceived as a kind of evolutionary protoplasm, a means of control over society’s not-so-distant future. This child cannot be left to women.

  It follows that if children must be left with their mothers, they must not be left alone with them. A new figure will enter the family tableau—a man equipped to manage both children and mothers and to direct the interaction between them—the scientific expert in child raising.

  The rapid rise of the child-raising experts reflected the growing prestige of experts in other areas of women’s lives. The male takeover of healing had weakened the communal bonds among women—the networks of skill and information sharing—and had created a model for professional authority in all areas of domestic activity. But the terrain that the psychomedical experts began to chart with the “discovery” of the child was, if anything, more ancient, more essentially female, than healing had been. Healing itself is an outgrowth
of mothering, a response to the exigencies of childbirth, sick babies, winter colds, etc. When the experts enter the area of child raising, they step into what had been, for better or for worse, the irreducible core of women’s existence, the last refuge of her skills and dignity.

  The Mothers’ Movement

  The experts did not, however, come uninvited. The “modern” educated young woman near the turn of the century refused to see child raising as something instinctive, like appetite, or automatic, like uterine contractions. Everything else was coming into conformity with the industrial age and becoming “scientific”—why not the ancient activity of child raising? In 1888 a group of upper-middle-class New York City mothers constituted themselves the Society for the Study of Child Nature and set out to explore every facet of child “nature”—from music appreciation to the concept of private property. These women, according to historian Bernard Wishy, “were eager to defer as much as possible to the best ideas, but they now wanted their information directly from experts trained in child study rather than from popular writers.”14 Within the next decade, the idea of women gathering to study and discuss child raising caught on throughout the country. Child study and mothers’ clubs sprang up by the score, child study lecturers toured the land, pamphlets and articles proliferated—as if American womanhood was busily cramming for the upcoming “century of the child.”

  The “mothers’ movement”—for they did consider themselves a movement—was a response to some of the same forces which brought forth the domestic science movement. If, in the pre-industrial farm home “housekeeping” had never been an issue, neither had child raising. The mother-child relationship had been shaped by the round of daily tasks; it was always in part an apprenticeship relationship. “Child raising” meant teaching children the skills and discipline required to keep the home industries running. It was not something that one did, so much as it was something that happened, or had to happen, if the family’s work was to be done.

  But within the Domestic Void of the modern home, there is no longer any “natural” way to raise children. There are fewer and fewer skills to acquire in the home, and those that there are bear little relation to the skills that the child (especially the male child) might eventually need in the outside world. Learning to help Mother pick up around the house will not help Johnny excel on the SATs or teach Susy to type. With the separation of home and work, private and public realms, the standards for “success” in child raising came to be set outside the home, beyond the mother’s control. Paradoxically, the “better” the mother—the more singlemindedly home-oriented she is—the less experience she will have had in the outside world where her efforts will eventually be judged. In the sexually segregated society built by industrial capitalism on the ruins of the Old Order, there is, in the end, no way for women to raise men.

  The mothers’ movement, like the domestic science movement, was an attempt to make a dignified response to this difficult and contradictory situation. In the setting of the Domestic Void, housekeeping priorities were unclear, child raising was baffling. Women were naturally drawn together to discuss domestic issues, share information, and study whatever scientific advice was available. In their recognition that child raising was not a matter of instinct, or mere supervision, they had made real progress over the women (two generations earlier) who had no time to think of children as anything but miniature assistants. But if the women who gathered in the turn-of-the-century mothers’ clubs were prepared to confront the problems posed by their new situation as mothers, they were not prepared to challenge that situation itself. The domestic science leaders who had gazed, with horror, into the Domestic Void, did not propose to abandon the home. And the mothers’ movement was not about to suggest that there might be more congenial, collective settings for child raising.

  In fact, when the mothers’ movement took institutional form as the National Congress of Mothers in 1897, its concern over the preservation of the home seemed almost to outweigh its concern for children. For example, in the Congress’s 1908 Declaration of Principles the word “home” appears four times in the first four principles: “child” or “children” only twice. The opening principles begin, “Whereas, the home is the basis of society …” continuing:

  Whereas, the God-given function of parenthood is the highest, most far reaching duty of humanity, and the performance and sacredness of marriage is the foundation of society …

  Whereas, All students of social conditions seeking the causes of crime and disease trace them to inefficient homes …

  Whereas, Homes are inefficient because there is nothing in education to fit young people [i.e., women] for wise home makers.…15

  The national mothers’ conferences did give women a chance to hear from the few child-raising experts of the day—G. Stanley Hall and the Rockefellers’ pediatrician Emmett Holt (see Chapter 3)—but to judge from the conference proceedings, the real issue at hand was the Woman Question. As Mrs. Birney asked at the first conference, “… How, I ask, can we divorce the woman question from the child question?”16 Neither the movement’s leaders—upper-class women like Mrs. Adlai Stevenson and millionaire Phoebe Hearst—nor the rank and file which consisted of middle-American clubwomen—were in any sense feminists. If anything, the National Congress of Mothers represented a contemporary backlash against feminism, like the antiabortion movement of the late twentieth century. “We need not care who makes the laws,” one speaker asserted, “if we, as mothers, will make them what they should be.”17 Mrs. Birney, the Congress president for several years, expressed her faith that the inherent Anglo-Saxon love of home (see Chapter 5) would “eventually turn back into the home the tide of femininity which is now streaming outward in search of a career.”18

  But contemporary feminists, as we have already seen, were as thoroughly committed to the cult of domesticity as were their more conservative sisters in the mothers’ movement. “Woman is the mother of the race,” gushed Boston suffragist Julia Ward Howe, “the guardian of its helpless infancy, its earliest teacher, its most zealous champion. Woman is also the homemaker, upon her devolve the details which bless and beautify family life.”19 A more scientific approach to child raising promised to elevate the status of woman’s traditional occupation, and the higher the status of woman (in any role) the stronger the argument for female suffrage. What’s more, feminists could use the “mother heart” as an excuse for almost every area of female activism—social welfare and reform, even the suffrage struggle. “The age of Feminism,” declared feminist Beatrice Hale, “is also the age of the child. The qualms of the timorous should be allayed by this fact, which proves that women, in gaining in humanity do not lose in womanliness.”20 And feminists had good reason to try to disguise their activities as an expanded form of mothering: the tenor of the times was such that even the National Congress of Mothers was criticized for drawing women out of their homes.

  In a speech which both feminists and antifeminists (or perhaps we should say suffragists and antisuffragists) could probably have agreed with, a Mrs. Harriet Hickox Heller expressed her confidence at the second annual National Congress of Mothers that higher education would not destroy the maternal instinct:

  … all the “isms” and “ologies” known, all the languages living and dead; all the caps and gowns; even all the eyeglasses, are not sufficient to eradicate from any feminine heart the desire to nurture the young of her kind.21

  Yet, she admitted, higher education could somewhat attenuate that instinct. Child care was not sufficiently challenging to the woman who had had a taste of “isms” and “ologies.” If it was to absorb the whole woman, it would have to be redefined, amplified, and enriched. Just as the domestic scientists had declared their intention of filling the Domestic Void, Mrs. Heller exhorted: “Let us discover the lens that will focus all a woman’s power upon her motherhood.” [Emphasis hers.]

  The immediate solution—exactly as in the case of housework—was to reinterpret motherhood as a profession. �
�It seems to me,” National Congress of Mothers’ president Birney told the second annual convention

  that we should all perceive what intelligent parenthood means for the race, and that to attain it is as well worth our effort and attention as the study of Greek, Latin, higher mathematics, medicine, law or any other profession.22

  A writer in Cosmopolitan magazine urged that motherhood be formally instituted as a profession, open only to those who could demonstrate “fitness.” “Doctors and lawyers and teachers and clergymen fit themselves to have charge of human lives. Why should not mothers?”23 And even Charlotte Perkins Gilman was arguing, though from a feminist perspective, that mothering must become “brain work and soul work” rather than “brute instinct.”24

  The idea that motherhood was a profession, potentially requiring advanced degrees and licenses, may have been unsettling to the average, uncredentialed mother. But there was also something reassuring about it. To insist on the need for “professionals” rather than old-fashioned amateurs was at least to admit that child raising had indeed become a tricky business. The mother who felt isolated, confused, and irritated reminded herself that her occupation was known to be a difficult and challenging career. She was confined to her home but within those confines she could be as purposeful and rational as any enterprising man of the world. And indeed, given the contradictions built into child raising in this privatized and strangely peripheral setting, she would have to be.

  The Experts Move In

  But the birth of the “professional mother” was shadowed, from the start, by the simultaneous birth of another kind of professional—one who would make it his specialty to tell the mothers what to do. The new child-raising experts would be drawn of course from medicine, but also from the brand-new discipline of psychology. In less rigorous days, medicine had blithely pursued the workings of the uterus or ovaries into the nether reaches of the psyche; it discoursed with equal comfort on fractures and fantasies, tissues and tantrums. But medicine lacked the tools to dissect the intangibles of personality and feeling. When psychology entered the scene in the eighteen eighties and nineties, medicine was forced, for official purposes, to retreat back down below the neck. Psychology claimed the psyche; medicine was left with the hard-core soma (the material body). In practice this division of labor left both disciplines free to talk about those areas which happen to involve both body and mind, such as child raising, family life, and most other aspects of human social and biological existence.