It’s hard to say where my parents got their parenting advice, living far from their own parents in a community of other novice moms and dads. They likely used the most popular baby care books of the time, either directly or through doctors, friends or neighbors. The two most available sources of advice were Infant and Child in the Culture of Today (1943) by Arnold Gesell, Frances Ilg, and Louise Bates Ames, and Benjamin Spock’s Common sense book of baby and child care (1946). I don’t remember seeing either of these in our house, but the name “Spock” was familiar to me long before Star Trek. Benjamin Spock was a regular contributor to Ladies’ Home Journal, which I know my mother read. It’s clear that she didn’t always heed his advice; years later, she admitted having made a mistake letting us “cry it out” when it wasn’t time for a scheduled meal, and Spock advocated “on demand” feeding. Mom, a former pediatric nurse, was following the lessons learned in her training from just a few years earlier. This is just a warning not to assume that the newer experts don’t always cancel out earlier advice. Whether feeding schedules or learning about gender, cultural practices never change all at once; several layers of new and antiquated beliefs usually coexist.
So what were these experts telling our parents about me? How did it compare with the “common wisdom” of their own parents’ generation? My parents, like my grandparents, probably believed that men and women are inherently different, but they didn’t expect newborns to be masculine or feminine, and they did not dress them differently. My parents, born in the early 1920s, wore white dresses until they were toddlers. Baby Boom boys like my older brother and my husband wore baby dresses only for the first month or two. The abandonment of white dresses was just one or several changes that happened to boys’ clothing in the first half of the 20th century, reflecting the heightened concern about male homosexuality promoted by early psychologists. The drive to “teach” sex roles to little boys was alive and well in 1949, but training baby girls to be feminine was just being added to the agenda when I was born.
All of these authors were strongly influenced by Freudian theories of identity development and believed children’s sexual identities were determined by physical factors. Defying or blurring the natural binary would result in neurosis, or worse. Explicitly citing Freud, Gesell and Ilg made clear throughout their books that they believed that boys and girls are intrinsically, innately different in
“temperamental disposition, in psychomotor demeanor, and in developmental timing… The differences may not be great, but they can be decisive and they cast doubt on any hypothesis that ascribes sex differences in personality solely to psychological or cultural factors.”
Dr. Spock, though also also deeply steeped in the theories of psychoanalysis, never mentioned Freud by name. In Baby and childhood, he was cautious about increasing parental anxiety by scaring them with warnings of negative outcomes. Still, his underlying theoretical assumptions were the same: in order for children to develop a healthy adult superego, they needed to model themselves on the parent of same sex.
For this generation of experts, physical and psychological milestones, or “growth characteristics” as fixed, immutable, and predictable stages of normal development. Parents needed to anticipate and recognize their children’s readiness in order to provide guidance and support at the appropriate times. This education not only included learning to how to feed themselves and use the toilet, but also understanding and correctly performing their sexual identities as males or females.
Gesell and Ilg suggested that the ideal time for children to establish their sexual identity was between ages two to six, (according to Freud, when the infant graduated from the “anal” stage to the “genital” stage of pleasure). In a readiness chart of milestones, they offered clues for recognizing when the child was “ready”. For example, one early indicator of the shift to the genital stage was the emergence of female “coyness” - a flirtatious head tilt in girls, expected around about 40 weeks. Other signs of readiness included being able to differentiate between the sexes by observing differences in clothing, hair, voice, and urination, which should normally happen by the age of two. Seeing other children naked, during a diaper change, using the toilet, or bathing, was important to their development because it would draw their attention to the genitals.
Based on my earliest childhood memories of sharing bedrooms, bathrooms, and even wash tubs with my brother, my parents got the message, wherever it came from.
Next week: Cultural panic comes to girlhood