For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women
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Unlike medicine, psychology had no commercial past. It was born a science (becoming implicated in commercialism only later on). According to historian Eli Zaretsky, the need for a full-scale science of psychology reflects the split between public and private spheres of existence.25 The interior life of the individual could no longer be assumed to be a simple reflection of what went on in the observable world “outside.” Real people were not like the fully rational, calculating men assumed by economists to inhabit the Market. Real people have quirks, they make errors of judgment, they do not always do things out of clear-cut self-interest—they do things, as we say, for “psychological” reasons. The rupture between the world of the Market and the world of private life thus revealed human nature itself to be something anomalous and unaccountable—something to be studied, analyzed, and if possible, controlled.
Potentially, this was the most daring step yet taken by science. Evolutionary theory, if viewed without comforting overlays of religious moralism, had revealed a natural history of pitiless and probably purposeless struggle. Now psychology proposed to take as its object of study nothing less than the soul itself. Subjected to the ruthless inquisition of modern experimental science, would not “man’s” higher nature turn out to be mere biology—mere matter—like the body itself? This, in fact, was the project of psychology: to take feelings, sensations, ideas, etc., and reduce them to a matter of nerve impulses; to take the traditional material of philosophy and seize it for biology. William James, the first American psychologist, realized this with considerable personal anguish (resolved by his philosophical construction of a special preserve where religious feelings, mysticism, and other transcendent experiences could dwell without fear of scientific pursuit). President Gilman of Johns Hopkins realized it when he made G. Stanley Hall, the university’s first professor of psychology, promise to keep his researches strictly away from the subject of religion—lest the trustees take offense.
As it turned out, there was not much to worry about. The great achievement of early psychology (and this applies, to an extent, right up to the present) was not to transform philosophy into biology, but the reverse: to transmute biology into a kind of generalized philosophy. The necessary stage setting for this bit of twentieth-century alchemy was the modern experimental laboratory. Recall what laboratories had done for medicine. By acquiring laboratories (among other reforms of course) medicine became “scientific” and gained absolute authority to speak on anything related to the human physical condition. At roughly the same time, psychologists acquired laboratories and gained the authority to speak on anything related to the human condition—period. The laboratory bench metamorphosed itself into the speakers’ podium, from which the psychologist could hold forth on sexuality, criminology, ethnic differences in intelligence, industrial productivity, child raising, labor unrest—to give just a few of the areas to which early twentieth-century American psychologists lent their expertise.
There is some dispute over who established the first psychological laboratory and thus launched American psychology. William James set up a lab at Harvard as early as 1875, but it is not clear that he ever used it. By his own admission, he “hated” experimental work. Credit for the first working American laboratory should probably go to G. Stanley Hall, the former theology student, English tutor, and lecturer on education who had studied with the great German experimental psychologist Wundt in Leipzig. Returning to the United States to take a position at Hopkins, Hall proceeded to organize, first his laboratory, and then the entire profession of psychology. His prime concern was to make psychology as rigorous and quantitative a discipline as, say, physics. Under Hall’s influence “a wave of laboratory-founding swept over America” and the laboratory became, as someone cunningly put it, the “hallmark” of American psychology.26 Even William James, who was as eager as anyone to see psychology established as a sound scientific discipline, felt Hall took the laboratory fetish a little too far, describing Hall as
a wonderful creature. Never an articulate conception comes out of him, but instead of it a sort of palpitating influence making all men believe that the way to save their souls psychologically lies through the infinite assimilation of jaw-breaking German laboratory articles.27
Hall himself did no experimental work of any note. By the late eighteen eighties he had already abandoned the tedious empiricism of the lab (measuring reflex times, spatial perception, etc.) to found the new field of child study. His experimental efforts in this field were, by ordinary scientific standards, little short of ludicrous. In one study, he attempted to take an “inventory” of the six-year-old mind by, of course, asking six-year-olds about everything. In an even more ambitious study, he mailed out 102 questionnaires to parents, asking about their children’s moods, fears, dolls, imagination, speech, religious sentiments, affection, games, sense of self, and—as if that weren’t enough for one questionnaire—inquiring about the parents’ own feelings about old age, disease and death, ownership vs. loss, pity, menstruation, education for women, and religious conversion.28 (No results were published.) E. L. Thorndike, one of the younger generation of psychologists raised in the experimental tradition which Hall himself had created, recalled with a shudder:
The possibility that the pseudo-scientific pretensions of the child-study movement might be mistaken for educational psychology was too horrible to contemplate.29
Yet to the educated public near the turn of the century, Hall was a man of science par excellence, his name indelibly linked with the image of the psychology laboratory. As a popular lecturer, he awed his audiences with glimpses into mysterious Germanic investigations, and simultaneously reassured them with his verbose reverence for childhood, motherhood, adolescence, nature, etc. The mothers’ movement adored him. In fact, in the long relationship between the American mother and the child-raising expert, it was Hall who did the initial courting. His presence at the National Congress of Mothers meetings, seemingly trailing faint emanations of laboratory chemicals, promised a glorious union of science and motherhood. Whether he described his own research, or gave practical advice (such as that children need exercise), or simply exhorted the mothers to be more “scientific,” women in the mothers’ movement found him uplifting. As one mother wrote, reflecting the influence of Hall and his colleagues in the child study field:
Scientific motherhood means more than a casual thought can grasp. It means a grander, nobler race, an altruistic humanity which shall fit the earth for the Saviour’s advent. It means the reformation of the drunkard, the redemption of the criminal, the repentence of the murderer, the abolition of asylums for the blind, dumb and insane … the elimination of selfishness, the death of oppression, the birth of brotherly love, the uplifting of mankind through true spiritual Christianity.…30
But in a way it was the very absence of scientific content that gave “scientific motherhood” dignity. If child raising was to be a science, then the “laws” of that science had not yet been discovered. Experimental psychology had nothing to offer, neither did medicine. This meant that the mothers themselves could be scientists, or at least assistants to the real scientists, in the effort to discover the scientific laws which could govern human development. In Hall’s view, the truly scientific mother did not simply raise her child, she studied it, making notes which could serve as field data for the male academic experts. Hall urged mothers to keep a “life book” for each child, recording “all incidents, traits of character, etc., with frequent photographs, parental anxieties, plans, hopes, etc.”31 Mrs. Emily Talbot, of the American Social Science Association, established a “Register of Infant Development” to college parental observations and make them available to academicians.32 To the “professional” scientific mother, “… the child was no longer merely a beloved offspring or the nation’s future in microcosm but a home-laboratory experiment as well.”33
The mother’s career as a scientist—taking notes on her child’s behavior, comparing observations with those of other mothers
, etc.—was bound to be short-lived, however. Psychologists like Hall and his colleagues welcomed the partnership of mothers, at least as data gatherers. But the younger generation of experts in the early nineteen hundreds was not interested in the amateurish contributions of mothers. As far as they were concerned, only scientists could gather the data and formulate the rules: all that was left for mothers was to follow the instructions. Consider this stern observation from Dr. Holt, whose 1896 book The Care and Feeding of Infants made him the Dr. Spock of his period:
If a man wishes to raise the best grain or vegetables, or the finest cattle or horses, all admit that he must study the conditions under which alone such things are possible. If he is in doubt regarding these matters he may apply to the Agriculture Department at Washington, and be furnished with the reports of the best scientific work on these subjects by experts who make these matters their study under government supervision. But instinct and maternal love are too often assumed to be a sufficient guide for a mother.34
What could be simpler? The uncertain mother, like the farmer aiming to produce “the best grain or vegetables,” had only to send for the latest scientific information and apply it faithfully.
Early-twentieth-century child-raising experts like Holt drew their prestige from science, but the content of their advice—what they actually had to tell mothers—came much less from the laboratory than the factory. Hall had romanticized youth; he wanted its spontaneity and openness protected from the ugly realities of the adult world. But the vulnerability of the child aroused very different impulses in most child-raising experts of the time. If the child was pliant, then the child could be molded. And if the child could be molded, why not begin shaping it at once to fit the “real” world of modern industry?
The goal was industrial man—disciplined, efficient, precise—whether it was his lot to be an industrial laborer, a corporate leader, or another expert himself. The key to producing such a man was regularity. It was never too early to introduce the child to the rhythms of industrial life, as Dr. Winfield Hall explained at the Chicago Child Welfare Exhibit in 1911:
This period of early childhood is the period during which the child is acquiring habits which may last him through life … and many a mother will begin almost with the first day of the life of her infant to guard its habits and to introduce the element of regularity into its life.…35
The federal government’s twenty-five-cent pamphlet Infant Care, which was the best-selling publication of the Government Printing Office during the late teens, counseled similarly:
In order to establish good habits in the baby, the mother must first be aware what they are, and then how to induce them. Perhaps the first and most essential habit is that of regularity. This begins at birth, and applies to all the physical functions of the baby—eating, sleeping and bowel movements.36
In the interests of industrial regularity, spontaneity would have to be strangled in the cradle. “The rule that parents should not play with the baby may seem hard,” advised the government pamphlet cited above, “but it is no doubt a safe one.” Inciting a baby to laugh in “apparent delight” was to impose a dangerous strain on its nervous system. Picking up a baby between scheduled feedings was to invite future mental disease or at least moral laxity. Dr. Winfield Hall painted a lurid picture for the indulgent mother:
Eating a thing because it tastes good, or drinking a thing because it tastes good, is doing a thing that gratifies the sensual! Mothers, if you begin that way with the child on these simple senses of taste and smell, and the flavor of food and drink, what are you going to do fifteen years later when the primordial urge gets into that young person’s blood and he looks out at the world and turns to the right and to the left for other forms of sense gratification?37
The industrial approach to child raising met with instant approval from domestic science leaders. In one of her rare mentions of children Ellen Richards wrote:
Most powers are the result of habits. Let the furrows be plowed deeply enough while the brain cells are plastic, then human energies will result in efficiency and the line of least resistance will be the right line … To the woman, the home worker, we say, “You must have the will power, for the sake of your child, to bring to his service all that has been discovered for the promotion of human efficiency, so that he may have the habit, the technique.”38
Besides, scientific housekeeping was incompatible with anything but the most obedient, well-programmed child. Christine Frederick described how her children, ages two and four, accommodated themselves to her schedule:
Some of my friends laugh at what they call my “schedule babies” because their hours of sleeping and feeding and play are quite regular. Most normally healthy babies can be trained easily to regular habits.39
The development of the industrial model of child raising automatically undermined the professional aspirations of the mothers’ movement and contributed to the movement’s decline in the teens. Mrs. Helen Gardener, speaking at the 1897 National Congress of Mothers convention had asked:
What profession in the world, then, needs so wide an outlook, so perfect a poise, so fine an individual development, such breadth and scope, such depths of comprehension, such fullness of philosophy as the lightly considered profession of motherhood? 40
But how much depth of comprehension or “fullness of philosophy” did one need to follow instructions that usually included the exact times for waking, feeding, bathing, etc.? Gone too, in the industrial scheme, were the ennobling side effects of contact with children that the mothers’ movement had celebrated. (“Would you know yourself? Would you understand the human race? Go, read your child.”)41 The child was not an exemplary human being to be studied, but the object of the mothers’ work—raw material to be molded and channeled. And the work itself was not that of a professional—but that of a semi-skilled employee with punched-card instructions to follow.
The industrial approach to child raising finally achieved a scientific footing in the late teens, with the development of “behaviorism.” John B. Watson, one of the first of generations of psychologists to begin his academic career with the study of rats in mazes, formulated the new theory at Johns Hopkins in the early nineteen hundreds. Behaviorism, as he developed it, was not so much a theory devised to explain certain facts as it was a flat assertion about the nature of human nature. Briefly, Watson’s behaviorism abolished mind, soul, subjectivity, consciousness, and all other shadowy philosophic notions. Only the observable exists and only behavior is observable. Subjective experience is simply the “behavior” of various muscles and chemicals. For example, he suggested that feelings would turn out to be the “tumescence and detumescence of genital tissues”; thought would turn out to consist of “tiny laryngeal movements,” producing an inaudible monologue.42 (It did not seem to bother him that these hypothetical “tiny movements” were not observable themselves, any more than thought itself was.)
Other expert proponents of the industrial model of child raising had insisted that the child could be trained to behave like a machine, or at least to fit into a world requiring machinelike regularity and discipline. Watson added the “scientific” assertion that the human person was in fact a machine—a thing: the problem in child raising was simply to program the little machines to fit into the larger industrial world. They could, he noted, be programmed to fit any given culture; as a behaviorist, he was concerned only with the practical problem of fitting them into the culture they were actually born into. This particular culture demanded stoicism, independence, and iron discipline—presumably the qualities to which Watson attributed his own success. The ideal child, he wrote, is
a child who never cries unless actually stuck by a pin, illustratively speaking … who soon builds up a wealth of habits that tides him over dark and rainy days—who puts on such habits of politeness and neatness and cleanliness that adults are willing to be around him at least part of the day … who eats what is set before him—who sleeps and rests when put t
o bed for sleep and rest—who puts away two year old habits when the third year has to be faced … who finally enters manhood so bulwarked with stable work and emotional habits that no adversity can quite overwhelm him.43
The production of these model children would require a very different kind of mother from the one who had been celebrated by the National Congress of Mothers. The mothers’ movement had conceded that instinct could not provide a practical guide to child raising, but still clung to it as the underlying emotional force behind all the activities of motherhood. Their ideal mother, for all her efforts to be “scientific,” was a woman driven by uncontrollable maternal instincts and given to melting fits of tenderness at the invocation of the Little Child. All this was anathema to the behaviorist:
There is a sensible way of treating children. Treat them as though they were young adults. Dress them, bathe them with care and circumspection. Let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning.…44