Babysitter

An American History

Miriam Forman-Brunell

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780814728956
• eBook ISBN: 9780814727867
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

On Friday nights many parents want to have a little fun together—without the kids. But "getting a sitter"—especially a dependable one—rarely seems trouble-free. Will the kids be safe with "that girl"? It's a question that discomfited parents have been asking ever since the emergence of the modern American teenage girl nearly a century ago. In Babysitter, Miriam Forman-Brunell brings critical attention to the ubiquitous, yet long-overlooked babysitter in the popular imagination and American history.
Informed by her research on the history of teenage girls' culture, Forman-Brunell analyzes the babysitter, who has embodied adults' fundamental apprehensions about girls' pursuit of autonomy and empowerment. In fact, the grievances go both ways, as girls have been distressed by unsatisfactory working conditions. In her quest to gain a fuller picture of this largely unexamined cultural phenomenon, Forman-Brunell analyzes a wealth of diverse sources, such as The Baby-sitter's Club book series, horror movies like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, urban legends, magazines, newspapers, television shows, pornography, and more.
Forman-Brunell shows that beyond the mundane, understandable apprehensions stirred by hiring a caretaker to "mind the children" in one's own home, babysitters became lightning rods for society's larger fears about gender and generational change. In the end, experts' efforts to tame teenage girls with training courses, handbooks, and other texts failed to prevent generations from turning their backs on babysitting.

1

The Beginnings of Babysitting

Steer clear of “high-school girls” who “take charge” of children, warned the authors of Wholesome Childhood in the mid-1920s, more than a decade before the concept of the “babysitter” and suspicions about her became widespread.¹ That active and athletic girls attended sports events and flirted with men on street corners, especially in front of the innocent babies they trundled about, led the authors of this new child-rearing manual to disparage adolescent girls and to dismiss them as acceptable child-care providers.² This early critique of babysitters signaled the emergence of a struggle over girlhood between adults and the first generation of American teenage girls whose “modern” beliefs and behaviors now openly challenged established ideals about what it meant to be a girl. The experts’ emergent estimation of female adolescents as a social problem would lead to the soon-dominant evaluation of girls as bad babysitters.

In this chapter I argue that what led these child-care experts to issue their caution was the convergence of anxieties about the generational and gender changes that were reshaping girlhood. In the years after women won the right to vote, worries about female autonomy filtered throughout American culture and society. Many adults felt unsettled by the “modern” customs and values spreading rapidly among young women and trickling down to high school students. In the private as well as in the public spheres, girls had begun to contest the reigning ideal of female innocence in highly visible ways. By wearing makeup, reading popular magazines, attending movies, and “petting” at parties and in automobiles, teenage girls in the process of creating a commodity-based youth culture challenged traditional gender ideals and redefined female adolescence.³ In the process of forging their own social identity, however, girls also fueled adults’ ire.

Though it would still be more than twenty years before babysitters would become familiar figures in American communities, culture, and conversation, evolving perceptions of girls as unpredictable and their teen customs as unfathomable shaped adults’ fears about those they relied on to babysit. During the 1930s, adults’ critical assessments of girls abounded as youth culture widened, babysitting spread, and traditional gender conventions weakened. To employers and the experts who advised girls during this period of profound social disruption, babysitters’ skimpy clothing and other staples of the girls’ teen culture that flourished in American high schools signaled disrepute and disorder. The fear that teenage girls threatened the future of American family life led experts to establish a blueprint followed by succeeding generations: to provide girls with advice that appealed to their desire for autonomy yet affirmed their femininity.

The numbers of increasingly “sassy” teenage girls widened the cultural conflict between adults and adolescents at odds over what it meant to be a girl. Because many felt taken advantage of by parent-employers who overworked and underpaid babysitters during the Depression, girls sought out other jobs during World War II. Influenced by the proliferation of home-front teen culture that advanced the transformation of girlhood in ways that further unsettled adults, girls mingled with girlfriends and male acquaintances rather than “mind the children.” Anxious to restore gender conventions and generational codes disrupted by the war, educators and experts reached out to girls. Though adults promulgated babysitting as patriotic, high school girls on the home front nevertheless left “child minding” to those in elementary school.

The Challenges of Motherhood in the 1920s

The 1920s was a new era for women voters but not for mothers with young children. Following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, everyone from experts to advertisers promoted the traditional notion that self-fulfillment for women could only be found in caretaking, consumption, and cleaning. That the percentage of wives between the ages of twenty and thirty-five who worked for wages increased stirred anxieties about the independence of women. Marriage expert Ernest Groves was not alone in expressing his opinion that “when the woman herself earns and her maintenance is not entirely at the mercy of her husbands’ will, diminishing masculine authority necessarily follows.”⁴ Fears about the future of the family gave rise to the glorification of motherhood, an ethos that was rife with expectations and riddled with frustrations for mothers. On the one hand, middle-class wives living in the newly established “streetcar suburbs” that sprang up on the fringes of American cities enthusiastically purchased up-to-date electrically powered household appliances.⁵ On the other hand, housewives ended up spending more time inside their Cape Cod bungalows than outside them. Even though advertisements promoted electrically powered washing machines, irons, and vacuum sweepers as “time saving,” rising standards of cleanliness and the exaltation of housework meant that mothers spent twice as much time completing household chores as their grandmothers.⁶

Although the size of the American family decreased from 3.6 children in 1900 to 2.4 by 1929, mothers also spent more time raising their children. The era’s experts urged mothers to practice more intensive and extensive child-rearing procedures. Many mothers followed the narrow and repressive practices of psychologist John B. Watson, who pioneered the theory of behavioral psychology that sought to rigidly standardize the habits and behaviors of children.⁷ Along with children, mothers were also bound to minute-by-minute schedules of child care. Competing notions based on Freudian theories and the pioneering research of psychologist and pediatrician Arnold Gesell also produced a new vigilance about children’s psychological development. Being charged by experts with shaping the personalities of their little ones and by advertisers with expressing their love through cleanliness added to mothers’ already heavy load.

Mothers’ full-time responsibilities to the child-focused family and suburban home mounted just at the time when recreation acquired a new cultural primacy. A broad acceptance of play in the social and psychological lives of all Americans led to the widespread availability of new leisure activities, commercial amusements, and playthings. For children, new notions of play meant an unprecedented number of toys, games, and fun-filled activities.⁸ But mothers seeking to enjoy their leisure were often taken to task by advertisers and experts for shirking their maternal responsibilities. For example, the coauthors of Wholesome Childhood (1924) criticized middle-class mothers who were “prone to hire young girls to take charge of their little ones, every afternoon, so that the mothers may play Ma Chiang, run into the near-by city, shop, gossip, or even sew, bake, and clean house to their hearts’ content, with no children on their minds.”⁹

In fact, finding someone to mind the children and clean the house had become a serious problem for middle-class housewives by the 1920s. Hiring a nurse or governess with “both the cultural background and the wholesome personality needed” was not easy, explained Ernest and Gladys Groves in Wholesome Childhood (1924).¹⁰ Simultaneous with the expansion of the middle class was the further contraction of white, working-class household workers. Conditions for middle-class mothers in need of household assistance worsened as new immigration restrictions limited the availability of replacements and native-born women sought better employment opportunities.¹¹ Many middle-class mothers compounded their own problems by refusing to hire African American women, who increasingly dominated the field of housework, and by relocating too far away for most day workers to commute from cities to suburbs.¹² Consequently, middle-class mothers had no choice but to follow the Groves’s advice that they take care of their own babies.

Previous generations of mothers had relied heavily on girls (and sometimes boys as well) to help with the children. In colonial New England Puritan girls had little choice but to take care of younger siblings. On southern plantations, enslaved African American children—girls as well as boys—were forced to attend to younger children—both free and un-free. Adolescent girls from middle-class Victorian families facing financial hardship cared for cousins or worked as governesses attending to the children they tutored.¹³ Working-class children in the urban Northeast looked after siblings as well. By the turn of the century, a new generation of immigrant girls (dubbed “Little Mothers” by reformers) cared for siblings on front stoops, sidewalks, and city streets. Simultaneously, girls not yet in their adolescence pushed perambulators for well-to-do mothers.¹⁴ More like babysitters today, these “baby tenders” and “baby-walkers” shared in the consumer culture that flourished at the turn of the last century. As middle-class notions of children as “emotionally precious” rendered girls “economically useless,” “Little Mothers” and “baby tenders” soon vanished from the cityscape.¹⁵ That concepts of childhood were changing along with notions of girlhood would give rise to an increasingly dominant view: adolescent-aged girls with “little conception of the needs of small children” posed a danger to both.¹⁶

High School Girls “Taking Charge” in the 1920s

The vast majority of middle-class girls did not look to babysitting for their “spending money.” For their discretionary income most relied on the weekly allowance doled out by parents who did not generally encourage their daughters to work for money. Only 9 percent of the hundreds of high school girls in Muncie, Indiana, surveyed for the sociological study Middletown (1929) earned all their own spending money. Just 5 percent earned money and got an allowance.¹⁷ Most parents hoped that if they provided daughters with spending money, girls would regulate their consumer desire and control their spending habits.¹⁸ But increasing numbers of teenage girls who went to the movies, bobbed their hair, or bought makeup, cigarettes, magazines, and “waistless” dresses liked to spend their allowance on things “teenage.”¹⁹

While the topic of babysitting was too new to elicit much comment, adults already had lots to say about teenage girls in the process of contesting conventional notions. Girls’ own parents were among the many adults who grumbled about the growing insolence and independence of the younger generation, which pushed feminine respectability beyond traditionally acceptable borders. Unlike generations of female adolescents before them, those from middle-class families insisted on going out at night during the week and on weekends. Frustrating their own parents as well as others needing someone to “mind the children,” girls made it plain that they had neither the time nor the inclination to sit at home or at the neighbors’.²⁰

For girls exuberantly exploring their autonomy and mobility, the flourishing of a new social morality and consumer culture, the ascendance of peer influence, and the erosion of parental authority nurtured their interest in buddies, not babies. Modern girls who shunned decorum and domesticity now found “dull” the traditionally gendered activities of “helping their own mothers” and “doing for others.” So did Ella Cinders, the comic strip character who debuted during the middle of the decade. Though a domestic, she eschewed the endless housework that was expected of her with the moxie that was characteristic of adolescent girls, who also enjoyed the 1926 movie comedy Ella Cinders.²¹ Sporting a dutch-bob haircut, speaking slang, and creating havoc in the movie, Ella Cinders nevertheless babysat for the neighbor’s children in order to raise the three dollars she needed to enter a beauty contest and win a Hollywood career.²²

Instead of spending their free time helping out at home, many teenage girls routinely spent half their evenings out with friends.²³ According to a 1929 study on the interests of high school girls published in the Journal of Home Economics, girls made “[p]ersonal appearance and self improvement” and the attentions of boys and their school “crowd” the focus of their lives.²⁴ The heterosocial world that flourished in high schools, where adolescents shaped each other’s tastes and shared styles, facilitated girls’ sexual expression and experimentation.²⁵ At high school, now attended by the majority of adolescents, girls also explored their independence and asserted their individuality.²⁶ Increasing to include about half of all American youth by the late 1920s, high schools became incubators for the innovative teen principles and practices that defied the vestiges of Victorian girlhood and defined “modern” female adolescence.²⁷

While earlier in the century experts had hoped that high schools would keep youth off the streets, they came to realize that educational institutions had not successfully pre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Beginnings of Babysitting
• 2 Suburban Parents and Sitter Unions
• 3 The Bobby-Soxer Babysitter
• 4 Making Better Babysitters
• 5 Boisterous Babysitters
• 6 Vixens and Victims: Porn and Horror
• 7 Sisterhoods of Sitters
• 8 Coming of Wage at the End of the Century
• 9 Quitter Sitters: The Fall of Babysitting
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author