Men Not Moms

Welcome to Spock Talk! The podcast that explores:

• What’s the deal with Dr. Benjamin Spock?
• How did Baby and Child Care become the preeminent parenting guide of the 20th century?
• Who gets to tell parents how to parent?

I’m Deborah

And I’m Katie

We’re talking Spock because we want to understand what it is about Dr. Spock’s work that endures. Why is the Spock brand around, twenty-five years after Dr. Spock died?

Last episode, we covered Dr. Benjamin Spock’s family background, and how his early advantages set him up for success. 

In this third episode of Talk Spock, we are going to talk about how Dr. Benjamin Spock’s rise to prominence was part of a societal shift that took place after Industrialization, where male experts worked to professionalize parenting advice. This shift parallels how pregnancy and childbirth were medicalized. in the 1900s, child-rearing and parenting became the province of experts, and their advice was monetized. 

And by experts, you mean specifically MALE experts, right? I mean the generations of women who had been birthing and raising babies prior to the early 1900s couldn’t possibly have been considered experts in the field.

In our first episode we talked about some of the parenting experts that preceded Spock, like Emmett Holt and John B. Watson. Let’s back up a little bit and mention parenting instruction and advice before those guides were published in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

One of Spock’s biographers, Thomas Maier, wrote that, “Before the enchantment with science in the twentieth century, most parents sought advice from the Bible and their local preacher” (p. 87). By “most parents” Maier means white colonial settlers. Which is fine, but that’s describing a very small subset of people. And I think Maier misses the target here a little bit. There was no one paternal authority. Child-rearing was like pregnancy and childbirth, the province of the domestic sphere. It was matriarchal. For a lot of human history, parents of young children lived close to, or with, their parents. Baby care was shared labor, and the knowledge of what worked was passed down informally and in a practical, hands on way.

Exactly. I can’t imagine the local preacher was consulted more than one’s mother, grandmother, sister or even any other woman with direct experience with either childbirth or childrearing. I do love the idea of parenting as an apprenticeship, but maybe that’s the wistful opinion of a rootless millennial who had her babies far from the practical, no-nonsense advice of her family. I would’ve much preferred to ask a trusted family member rather than the OB or pediatrician I saw for like a split second every few months or a book that was inevitably just as panic inducing as it was reassuring.

And also, people didn’t regard kids or conceptualize childhood the same way we do now. 

Of course, there were babies and children. But they used to be part of the family unit and incorporated into the daily work required for survival - farming, hunting, weaving, those types of tasks. But as industrialization took this kind of work outside of the home, the household was less a mini center of production (Atkinson, p. 129).

Instead of a family living and working together on, say, a farm, men went to work outside of the home, women stayed at home to do the unpaid labor of tending to the house and children and kids got to be kids. Sort of. Some kids got to be kids. Other kids had to go work at a factory for, like, 14 hours a day.

But haven’t we been seeing a bit of a renaissance on the child labor front? I, for one, welcome the opportunity for my children to put their nimble fingers to good use on the factory floor if it means I no longer have to ferry them to enrichment activities constantly. (This is a joke - I can’t forget that this is only episode 3 of this podcast, and people may not know me as a jokester. A lighthearted jokester about the most terrifying issues of our time, that’s me!)

More people moved to cities, and, in the United States, and Europe, what had previously been agrarian societies, became more urbanized. Instead of staying in one place, people were emigrating west, away from their families, they were having fewer children. Mobility disrupted the way parenting advice was passed down from grandparents to new parents.

(O’Neill)

The book Perfect Motherhood by Rima Apple, contains some numbers about declining fertility that resulted from industrialization, urbanization, and technological innovation. In 1800 the average number of children born to a white woman was 7.04. By the turn of the 20th century, the average number of children was 3.56. By the end of the 20th century it was 1.86. So, “with smaller families, girls and women had less experience with younger siblings…many women found themselves raising families in situations quite unlike their mothers’ eras, making the expertise of grandmothers less applicable” (Apple, p. 6)

All of these big societal changes worked to create a new market for parenting advice publications. And, Katie, just take a guess at who got to write the advice

  I have a feeling that - since they seem to have been granted the authority to give advice about literally everything else - the answer is rich white men, and given that the title of this episode is “men not moms,” I also  feel I have a good chance of that being correct.

I was a little familiar about this happening in the realm of medicine. Before the mid-1800s, pediatrics and obstetrics didn’t exist as medical fields. And how the vacuum of information provided an opportunity for a new professional group to really get to take over. But when men started to train as pediatricians and obstetricians, in order to establish their expertise, they wrote books and flaunted their MD designations. Or FRS, Fellow of the Royal Society, which was a distinction for outstanding science research. Also DCI. (I don’t know what that one stands for, and neither did the average reader in the 1800s).

I know we talked in previous episodes about the fact that the training in medical schools was nowhere near as rigorous as it is today, but I am both horrified and entertained that it’s the training in the thing and not the doing of the thing that qualified so many of these men as experts able to write so-called definitive books on a subject. You cannot imagine the definitive tome I was qualified to write after that Red Cross babysitting class I took at twelve.

And the same exact thing was happening to child-rearing. Male physicians were writing parenting advice, mothering advice (Atkinson, p. 130). Going beyond health issues. O’Neill writes about 19th and early 20th century mothering advice books, and sums them up as “conglomerations of pseudoscience, unreasonable demands, and authoritative statements without foundation.” (Oneill)

Ohhhhh unreasonable demands. Oh no. You’re telling me the men who were only minimally involved in the care of their own children had unreasonable demands for mothers? I’m shocked! I am trying to restrain myself from making sweeping statements here, but it is really hard. Sure, one can look at this and roll one’s eyes - men giving advice to mothers when they had no idea what they were talking about! Haha! Weren’t they actually dumb dumbs? But think of the more sinister implication here. Men writing guides for raising ideal babies - maybe not the birth of the strict and unrealistic standards of modern motherhood, but definitely a strong contributor. How could women insist on an equal place in society’s power structures if they were too busy potty training their children at 6 months?

It’s taking agency away from women, for sure! Cloaked in a promise to help women.

Let’s take a quick listen to a recording of Dr. Benjamin Spock in a Public Health Service announcement from 1965.

[we show our love for our children in different ways. We give them good things to eat. We protect them from the cold or the heat. We teach them how to get along with each other. We comfort them when they’re hurt. When they’re sick, we do our best to get them well again. Even more important, in the long run, are the things we do to keep them healthy]

Thanks to the National Library of Medicine for that clip.

It’s not controversial to want to take good care of children. But what I’m suspicious about is, who gets to say what good care looks like? Atkinson writes that “the public came to highly regard scientific information and seek expert guidance in aspects of their lives previously governed by traditional wisdom.” Let’s decode that a little bit: experts were usually male physicians. And traditional wisdom was grandmothers (Apple, p. 8-9). (Atkinson, abstract, p. 1)

I know I’m tipping toward my full on feminist rant here, but I have to take a step back and think about what you’ve taught me about Spock thus far. How does he fit into this whole trajectory? Yes, he’s benefitting from this patriarchal structure, but he doesn’t seem to be the worst actor. At least he speaks from a place of experience?

Well, he got that book deal from Pocket Books!

He took the offer and wrote the book, along with his wife Jane.. It took years. He and Jane completely gave up their social life. They spent many many evenings with Spock dictating the book to Jane, and she typed it up and added content and made suggestions, too.

The original title is a little condescending: “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care”

Yes, if there’s one thing women lack it’s common sense. With all our flighty notions, what we really needed was a man to tell us how to have common sense. Which now that I say it seems silly. Isn’t the common sense stuff the stuff you wouldn’t need to consult a book for? Riff on how it sounds like, finally a pediatrician, a MAN, brings us The common sense book…” as though we all know that women have been doing it wrong all along.

Spock claimed that he wrote all 526 pages in the first edition without consulting anything, that it all came out of his head, based on anecdotes from his medical practice. Which, this isn’t true. Jane helped write the book. 

I don’t know how to feel about this. On the one hand, I want to get advice from a medical professional who is on top of the latest professional literature. On the other hand, if what had counted for generations when it comes to childbirth and childrearing was in fact commonsensical advice based on personal experience, then this doesn’t seem terrible? I mean, of course it was terrible for him not to adequately credit his wife. That I can state with certainty.

What were Spock’s sources? Was his text seriously based only on anecdotal evidence from his personal practice? 

He does cite sources in the 1957 edition. Some books, “Babies are Human Beings” and “Feeding our Old Fashioned Children”, experiments about appetite, and 1942 experiments by Dr. Preston McLendon and Mrs. Frances P. Simsarian, on babies schedules.

When Pocket Books “offered the services of a professional indexer, Dr Spock refused,” because he said, ‘I think I know how mothers will look things up.’” (Massie 84).

Not only are we robbing grandmothers of their authority by professionalizing medicine and making childbirth and childrearing the realm of male doctors, but the “progress” of modern society means they’re being cut out of their families’ lives entirely as families become more fragmented. It’s pretty depressing.

Later in Spock’s career, when he was awarded an honorary degree at Yale, the Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr (if ever there were a more authoritative male name, right?) described Spock to an audience as “the man ‘who replaced the grandmother in the home’” (p. 264).

I almost don’t want to throw shade here, because Dr. Spock looks so grandfatherly and kind in all his old photos. But it says something about our society that we were so quick to replace this kind, wise, motherly presence and source of wisdom with a cold inanimate source - a book. Books are great at giving factual answers; they’re not always great at providing comfort. 

Yeah, this is an excellent example of how, in twentieth century America, scientific knowledge was privileged above other types of knowledge. Which, in some respects, was great! Science is good, it gave us pasteurization and vaccinations. But it also worked to promote American society as more advanced than other societies, as if all that matters is progress, progress, progress. 

Spock wrote about how, “In many parts of the world grandmothers are considered experts,. ..In our country, though, a new mother is often more inclined to turn to her doctor first,” 

The post-war period is kind of a golden era of singular experts, and Spock compares consulting a physician to all the professions that were available to help with personal problems: 

School guidance counselors, marriage counselors, social workers, psychologists, ministers.” 

Riff, we’ve mentioned Robert Needlman already. Who else does Spock collaborate with?  What about later collaborators? Who revises the later editions of the book - what are their credentials? Who are Michael Rothenberg and Steven Parker and Robert Needlman?

Spock always co-authored with men. (Spock on Spock p. 249) Michael Rothenberg was his first NAMED collaborator, co-authoring the 5th and 6th editions, published in 1985 and 1992, respectively. 

Parenthetical, let’s never forget that Jane Cheney Spock was really a co-author on the 1st edition

Rothenberg, a pediatrician and child psychiatrist from the University of Washington in Seattle. He became Spock’s collaborator through Spock’s second wife, Mary Morgan, who liked Rothenberg’s ideas about TV violence, as in, there should be less of it. 

Here are a couple fun bits of information: 1. Rothenberg once worked as a consultant on the Mr. Rogers Neighborhood show. And 2. Rothenberg wanted more money when it came time to update the book for the 7th edition. And the Spocks found someone else who would co-author for less money!

That goes against my kindly, avuncular vision of Spock. These were before the hayday of brand synergy, but it seems like if Spock had been thinking clearly, he may have embraced the connection to Mr. Rogers. Sure, Spock wrote the book on childcare, but was there anyone else more trusted by parents when it came to raising children in the late 80s than Mr. Rogers? Rogers plus Spock would’ve been a goldmine! Although please don’t disabuse me of my notion that Fred Rogers would’ve been above such a crass cash grab.

Dr. Steven Parker co-authored the 7th edition, which was published in 1998. He was a pediatrician, at the Boston Medical Center. He died in 2009, relatively young, when he was 62. 

Robert Needlman revised the 8th, 9th, and 10th editions, all published between 2004 to 2018. These are all after Spock’s death. He included updates on things like divorce, or just conflict between parents, and manmade and natural disasters, like 9/11, Iraq war. (Associated Press). He seems to still be practicing medicine. And teaching at Case Western Reserve in Ohio.

A quick library database search on Needlman turned up an article about how, in the 1990s, he founded an initiative called Reach Out and Read, acronym ROAR, that promoted reading in health clinics and doctor’s offices nationwide by giving away books in waiting rooms.

 Bup bup, Robert Needlman. Needlman is the voice I feel most familiar with since I’ve been exploring the 10th edition, and I found his voice in the preface to be quite charming. He was upfront in the ways parenting and childrearing have changed and continue to change and frank that he still struggled to use the most inclusive language in his writing but was trying. It went a long way to putting my mind at ease about consulting such a…shall we say vintage?...resource.

There was nothing super revealing, or groundbreaking, or controversial about these guys.They seem just like good, male pediatricians who got asked to help author the Spockian oeuvre.

There are multiple ways we can look at this phenomenon, the male expert:

1. Just, like, at face value and superficially. There was a market-based need for childcare advice because of the trajectory of capitalism. Young parents, especially mothers, were without their traditional support systems, and parenting guides like Spock’s were very helpful for some of those parents.
2. We can also look at this in a more, like, discursive way. Sometimes a baby care book presents itself to be full of universal and scientific recommendations. When, actually, the recommendations are more about changing middle-class norms than being evidence-based, good science.  (Atkinson, p. 131). As one academic writer, Jane Levey, puts it: [Baby and Child Care was] “A cultural text functioning as a social actor” (Levey, p. 22).

Very broadly, to have one main baby and childcare expert telling mothers what to do, who, admittedly, based his information on anecdotal data from his pediatric practice in New York City, is maybe working more to, in a top-down way, influence people’s behavior.

In some instances a singular expert works to undermine  mothers’ agency. And it de-legitimizes folk wisdom, the way parenting information used to be passed on from grandparent to parent. Because what people need, for advice and information, or advocacy, is soooo dependent on circumstances.

Yes, it’s the question not of what is right for baby but what is best for baby. Yes, your mother and grandmother may have been doing things one way for generations, but it’s really “best” to do it like so. And just like that, it’s not about keeping your kids fed and healthy and reasonably happy, it’s about making sure they get into ivy league colleges and land well paying corporate jobs. On the surface level, it’s removing women’s worries about caring for their children by replacing them with a whole other set of worries that are about conformity rather than survival.

You made a comparison offline that seemed apt, but it may be because we’ve been aggressively scoping out zillow listings lately. It’s the Chip and Joanna Gaines (and HGTV in general) effect. A kitchen and a living room were good enough for our mothers. Having multiple rooms was not only good enough; it was a success! But suddenly the “best” thing is to have a huge open concept multi-purpose space? Why? Because generations of families have found it to be the most efficient and effective way to organize a home? No! Because some so-called experts decreed it should be so. And don’t get me started on shiplap…

But back to the topic at hand. Was EVERYONE reading Spock?

Good question. I, for one, have many parenting books I’ve purchased and never read all the way through. Or at all.

 Yes! Well, some are reference works, and you only consult sections on specific issues. I might even put Spock in this category. And then there are those you read (or don’t read) for a wider philosophical approach to parenting. Your attachment parenting guides. Your Magda Gerbers. Your Montessori explainers. Or the aspirational ones - or are they more the pop cultural ones? Like your Tiger Moms and Bringing Up Bebes. Then later you have your problem-specific ones: dealing with behavioral or developmental  issues. I still have a whole shelf of these I’ve only read one or two chapters of.

Spock’s readership was pretty much white ladies, white moms. There is an interesting section in the book Raising America about Spock’s work in the family clinic associated with Western Reserve medical school. Black mothers did not always follow the clinician’s advice. In a letter to a contemporary who taught at Cornell, Spock wrote about how the predominantly African-American patients at the family clinic, “silently but firmly refuse to take advice …. Mothers fed their children as they always had, shared rooms and beds with them, toilet trained them early, and went back to work in a few months” (Hulbert, p. 265).

He basically described why these mothers don’t follow the clinicians’ advice: because of their economic circumstances! 

This is where having one main expert on a subject like child-rearing is a problem. And that is, it puts the onus on the parents. Parents who, for many reasons, may or may not be willing or able to follow the expert’s advice, and then they can be scapegoated for problems that are really systemic. It may appear that parents are being insubordinate, when really the system, the society, is the problem, with economic and social barriers to what is narrowly defined as success.

I read a New York Times piece from 1971, (Dann) in which the author tried to argue that Black parents (she actually wrote “Black mothers” so I’m editorializing) needed their own Dr. Spock. But the Black experience in the U.S. was so starkly different that mainstream advice, like Spock’s, really only applied to white parents.

There is a horrible section that said Black parents needed an expert who will teach “mothers about problems like croup so they can handle them at home and won’t head for the hospital every time a baby has an attack” in regards to an ER with a three hour wait time for kids with respiratory problems. When, probably, what Black families in this New York neighborhood NEEDED was for redlining to STOP and for the system to pay them reparations. OMG. 

It’s a tough read, 50 years later, because the article described problems that, to me, are so clearly the result of systemic racism, a racially biased carceral system, poverty, pollution, and to me, a reader in the future, I’m like, the problem IS NOT that there’s no Black Dr. Spock. The problem is that the system is rigged against anyone who is not white!

It’s just that, why couldn’t it have been more of a partnership between the science-y, medical professionals, AND the folksy matriarchs? It would be wonderful and lovely to have both a science-based perspective, plus generational wisdom. Both / and!

Right. But Spock’s career was long. He did change and develop along the way. In a future episode, we’ll talk about how Spock actually listened to mothers and took feedback and used it to revise his book’s later editions. 

So! Back to our original question - why was the Spock brand so enduring? Because the social, economic, and cultural trends made Americans absolutely hungry for an expert, and Spock fit that bill. He had the education, the look, the confidence, and the writing skills to pull it off. 

Before we wrap up, let’s go to a segment we call “New Spock, Old Spock. In this segment we’ll take a look at early Spock advice and see what has changed since the mid-1900s.

Here is Spock on bringing home baby, from a list of equipment in the 1957 edition of Baby and Child Care:

“Mattresses made of foam rubber or hair keep their shape best, but they are more expensive. (Occasionally hair, principally PIG’S HAIR causes allergy in a susceptible child in an allergic family. This risk can be avoided by enclosing the mattress in an airtight casing made for this purpose.)” (p. 27).

What do later editions say about pig’s hair mattresses?

10th edition Shockingly, no mention of pig’s hair! On the subject of appropriate sleep surfaces, the 10th edition simply says “You may long for a beautiful bassinet lined with silk, but your baby won’t care…Choose a crib, cradle, or bassinet with a firm, well-fitting mattress - one that doesn’t show a dent when the baby is picked up.” p. 43 

How much pig’s hair do you think is required to not show a dent?

Thanks for listening to this episode of Spock Talk! Please subscribe so you are sure to get our next episode, in which we’ll explore how Dr. Benjamin Spock incorporated Freudian and  Psychoanalytic concepts into his work!

See this episode’s show notes for our references.

If you like what you’re hearing, give us a like or a share on social media! Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts! Listen to our other podcast, It’s My Screen Time Too, where we review TV shows and movies made for kids.

Special thanks to the National Library of Medicine for the public domain Spock audio!

We’ll see you soon, the next time we Talk Spock!