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?

But first, listeners, we want to hear from you again! What’s your favorite piece of parenting advice? It could be funny or serious! Leave it in a review and we’ll read it in a future episode!

Last episode we covered Spock’s sexism in his written works. In this episode, we are talking about Spock’s personal relationships with the women in his life.

First off, childhood. We’ve talked plenty about his mother, Mildred. Spock had one brother and four sisters. His sister Marjorie, nicknamed Hiddy, was a year younger than Spock and his “constant companion” in childhood. Hiddy was also a writer. In adulthood, Hiddy and Ben tried to interest one another in their professional interests, but Hiddy was not impressed by Freud and Ben was disinterested in her study of “anthroposophy.”

Anthroposophy? Is that a word?

A spiritual philosophy that the Waldorf schools are based on? That’s all I looked up. 

I did you one better and checked Wikipedia: “Anthroposophy is a spiritualist movement which was founded in the early 20th century by the esotericist Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world, accessible to human experience.” I then went on to read way more of the Wikipedia page than I needed to, and I’m happy to report that I’m still confused, but it seems like hogwash to me.

Hiddy helped out the Spocks on a few occasions. She didn’t have kids of her own. Hiddy took care of John Spock for a while, when Dr. Spock was in the Navy in California, so that Jane and Michael could go visit him because Jane was worried Spock would be unfaithful, “with too much free time on his hands.” (Maier p. 151).

John also spent time with Hiddy, when he was a young adult, on Hiddy’s farm in Maine where she lived with a “female companion” (Maier, p. 334). Which I believe is code for “lesbian”

When was this biography written? 

1998!

There’s not as much information about the other four younger siblings, Betty, Anne, Bobby, and Sally. But in the Maier biography, it’s noted that, when their mother died, they all got to air their grievances about being raised by an overbearing woman.

Okay, let’s talk about some weird stuff:

We’ve already established that Spock was a clotheshorse. But he also liked to shop for Jane’s clothes, which sounds moderately fun.

 I’m fairly sure Kevin would choose a root canal over a shopping trip with me. He answers the question “which dress, the red or the blue?” with his eyes closed.

But, this is weird and creepy: Spock would not let Jane pick out her own clothes (Significant Others podcast, min. 9-10).

No thank you. That is taking it from something you can kind of sort of argue is charming in an “I want to show the world how hot my wife is” way to “creepy and controlling.”

Also, Spock LOVED to shop for intimate apparel. Lingerie. For Jane and then, after his son Michael got married, Spock gave lingerie to his daughter-in-law Judy for Christmas! That weirded Judy out, but she said that he just liked buying clothes for women, and it wasn’t intended to change their relationship at all. (Maier)

This feels like a question on Reddit. “I’m weirded out that my father in law bought me lingerie and I asked my husband to tell him to stop, but my husband says it’s no big deal because his dad just likes buying clothes for women. AITAH?”

Later on, the entire family went to therapy together. Ben and Jane, their kids, and the kids’ spouses. Their therapist suggested that maybe Spock should stop buying lingerie for his daughter-in-law.

This had to have been a hard one for Spock to hear, given his respect for the psychoanalytic process.

Now let’s talk about some profesh stuff. I want to point out that Spock had some collegial, professional relationships with women. We’ve mentioned Caroline Zachry before, who served as a mentor to Spock. Spock’s co-author on his first academic paper was a woman, Dr. Mabel Huschka (Maier, p. 133). 

There was Margaret Mead, whom he knew from the New York psychoanalysis scene, and they both wrote for Redbook magazine. Another Redbook colleague of Spock’s was Judith Viorst.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day author Judith Viorst?

Yo, that one! They were friends and colleagues and collaborators and respected one another’s works. This was in the golden era of magazine publishing when the writers got to go on fancy junkets together.

Remember when magazines could afford to pay people to write articles? Remember when people paid for magazines?

He seemed like a fine person to work with. Spock had a secretary at Western Reserve who would hide his hate mail so his feelings wouldn’t be hurt. Which, if your boss was terrible, I think I would put the hate mail ON TOP of all his other mail.

I don’t know - what if you had a particularly volatile boss? Wouldn’t you hide the hate mail because he’d bite your head off after reading it? Not saying that was the case with Spock, but as someone who has been known to go to great lengths to avoid confrontation, I might take this tack.

Okay. Before all of that. Spock married Jane early in life, when he was 23 and she was just 20. They stayed married past the time he retired.

When they wrote Baby and Child Care, Jane did the typing because, ““Like a traditional doctor’s wife” She was the one who knew how to type! (Ryan) (Maier) In a 1976 interview with Jane, she talked about her contributions to the book. She took his dictation from 9pm to 1am every night for a year. She said, “I did quite a lot of changing of expressions and other things that weren’t clear.” She also did the medical research by consulting with doctors and nurses, she tested eight different formulas, and she said she wrote “‘the section on layettes, how to make a formula, all of the research from the Academy of Medicine” (Klemesrud)

Jane was pretty troubled! She abused alcohol. She took a prescription drug called Miltown, which was an early antidepressant, and mixed it with alcohol, which was not how the drug was supposed to be taken. (Maier, p. 177).

I have to say, I got to this information by way of a very excellent episode of the Significant Other podcast titled “Jane Cheney Spock” and, had I not listened to that, I might not have bothered to read the Thomas Maier biography. I probably would have stopped at the memoir and the Lynn Bloom biography. But I’m so glad I did because there are so many stories about the Spock family!

The source of some of the more scandalous stories was the Spocks’ daughter-in-law, Judy! Who married the oldest Spock son, Michael. 

The daughter-in-law for whom Spock bought lingerie?

After working in New York, right when Baby and Child Care was published, Spock got a job offer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. Jane HATED Minnesota. She became paranoid and was suspicious of Spock’s colleagues who she thought were conspiring against them.

Spock ignored her erratic behavior and delusions. 

In 1954, at age 48, when the Spocks lived in Pittsburgh, Jane had a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia (Maier, p. 194). She spent 6 months in a mental hospital in White Plains New York, named New York Hospital Westchester Division.

But everyone called it BLOOMINGDALE’S because the retail family used to own the acreage. (Maier, p. 184).

 I want to make a joke about retail therapy, but I’m really just so sad for Jane right now.

I have a lot of empathy for both of the Spocks,  because, in the 1950s mental illness was stigmatized. And so Dr. Spock tried to cover it up - he wasn’t forthright about what was happening to Jane, or where she even was. And, for her, it was a tough time to be a woman! She had been raised in an affluent environment, she was frustrated that she had to follow Spock, she hated living in Minnesota, she didn’t have any agency at all because, although she helped write the book she didn’t earn anything or get any credit. She had to deal with Spock being a public figure and being a public pediatrician psychiatrist, on top of everything else, he placed an enormous emphasis on keeping up appearances.

Plus, Spock “enjoyed the company of women and loved flattering them with decorum and witty repartee,” (Maier). He was very charming at parties, social events, with his patients. When he and Jane went out dancing in their youth, sometimes she’d want to go home, but he would insist on staying and dancing with other women, “whom he whirled around, dancing cheek to cheek…changing partners constantly, each one a beautiful woman who seemed enthralled in his presence” (Maier p. 108)

 I know people are complicated, and Spock’s work did a lot of good for a lot of people, but this is just straight up awful. He was a psychiatrist and he doesn’t seem to give one moment of thought to his wife’s mental wellbeing. Or to consider his own role in it. I’m not saying Spock drove Jane to alcoholism, because that’s not how it works. But he seems to have hidden behind this paper thin veneer of helpfulness - I got her the right doctors, what else can I do?

I think she’s an incredibly sympathetic figure in this real-life story.

Spock offloaded her problems on doctors and analysts, and ignored her addiction. 

Spock did get her treatment and he paid for therapy or analysis for basically their whole marriage. To the point that the cost of her medical bills really ate into the family’s income. (“Jane Cheney Spock” Significant Other podcast). But I wonder if he had, like, personally acknowledged the problem instead of hiding it away, how things would have been different. 

It’s no wonder that she was unhappy. She had to be married to this guy who was just so dismissive of her. Listen to this Saturday Evening Post article excerpt, in which Spock demonstrates a pretty old school, insufferable Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus type of BS:

“...a few years ago he and his son John almost drowned in Copenhagen harbor when their small sailboat capsized at dusk a mile from shore. Realizing that they were drifting out to sea, they decided to swim for shore, but luckily an old fisherman happened along in a skiff and picked them up. Dr. Spock gently shrugs off his wife’s distress about these incidents, [saying] ‘Part of the difference between men and women is their reaction to danger. Men need a bit of danger now and then as a challenge, a spur. Women are more realistic, more sensible. They think in terms of security.’” (Massie, 86).

 We carry this BS attitude with us even today. It’s not an actual difference, it’s a societal pass to avoid taking responsibility for your actions! Women are only the realistic, sensible ones in a relationship because men have absorbed the idea that they don’t have to be

1974, the Spock children wanted Ben and Jane to divorce. And in 1975 they had a trial separation. Jane’s alcoholism got worse. Within a year the marriage was over. Jane resented Spock’s success, and had always felt that he refused to share the spotlight.

It was also, right around this time, that Spock was confronting his kind of baked in sexism, as he was criticized by the women’s liberation movement.

Let’s listen to an audio clip of Dr. Benjamin Spock speaking about reconsidering some of his thinking about women:

Audio: WNYC clip on women’s lib criticism [I admit that I was a sexist, in the sense that I took it for granted that men had a lot of advantages that women didn’t have. I was not an advanced person in realizing that this was unjust. In fact, women’s liberation figures had to attack me. Skin me alive in public, I would be speaking to an audience of a thousand or two thousand people at a university and I’ve had women’s lib groups come and demonstrate in front of me, singing derisive songs, chanting insults at me, sneering at me. Well, this forces you to consider your position, to be criticized this openly in public.]

Thank you to the WNYC Archives collection for that clip!

I find this to be a sort of tragic and ironic, just as his marriage to Jane ends, he has this change of heart and attitude.

In 1975, he had been retired from teaching for 8 years when he and Jane separated. He lived in a studio apartment over a deli on the third floor of a Madison Avenue brownstone in the eighties, for everyone who knows New York City real estate (Spock on Spock, p. 221).

 I wish I knew more about New York real estate. Did Jane just get a really good divorce settlement? Because he was pretty famous by the 70s, and it seems like back then he maybe could’ve done better than a studio. Unless he really just needed the proximity to deli sandwiches because he didn’t have anyone to cook for him anymore.

So, after the divorce, when Spock really enjoyed his third-floor walk-up efficiency apartment, That’s when he met Mary Morgan, who became his second wife. After a talk he gave about health insurance. This just makes me think of Donald Trump, unfortunately: “She was impressed by how well I’d handled the questions--and also by how large my hands were. This was the only time I ever made an impression based on the size of my hands” (Spock on Spock, p. 222).

Spock’s family, his kids, his siblings, pretty much everyone disapproved of the relationship. (Maier, p. 386)

I don’t know why it was hard to pin down her age, but it kind of was?

Ann Hulbert writes in Raising America, in 1975 Spock filed for divorce from Jane and “‘[takes] up with a 38-year-old girlfriend’...the spirited Mary Morgan--a divorcee with a daughter” (p. 273)

I think this age was a mix-up. Just a reminder: Spock’s son Michael was born in 1933, his son John in 1944, and I think Mary Morgan was born in 1941? Their wedding announcement, published in the New York Times on October 25, 1976, has an interesting headline: “Dr. Spock, 73, Weds Arkansas Woman, 35.”

I thought this was my best, definitive source on her age. But in a March 1976 interview in The New York Times with Jane Spock, Jane mentioned that Dr. Spock had “a 38-year-old girlfriend.” And that she does not approve of that relationship. And then in a San Francisco Gate interview in 2004, Mary Morgan says she was 30 and he was 70 when they met. And then a LA Times article from 1989 says she is 46 when he is 86, so that 40 year difference is consistent? 

I don’t know. It doesn’t matter; it was a big age difference.

 Do you think it’s just easier for both parties to be themselves in relationships that seem so transactional from the start? If the public assumption is that a younger woman marries an older man for his fame and/or money and an older man marries a younger woman for her looks and to avoid confronting his own mortality, does that make for less pressure on either party to conform to the other’s ideal? Maybe not. It’s got to be a lot of work for a 70 year old to keep up with a 30 year old. And a lot of work for the 30 year old to maintain her looks until her husband’s eyesight finally fails.

Mary Morgan grew up in rural Arkansas, she married her college sweetheart, she worked as a schoolteacher to put her husband through medical school. This is such a common trope! And she did the typing for him because he didn’t know how to type! Then, domestic abuse is like alluded to but not spelled out, she ended up leaving the husband. After they have a daughter named Ginger. Mary move, with Ginger, to Berkeley California and became a hippie. She’s not a into-drugs kind of hippie, she’s into other counter-culture stuff like Marxism, radical psychiatry, and consciousness raising (Maier, p. 382).

In Little Rock, AK, a friend took her to see the big hands lecture given by Dr. Spock. When she lived in Berkeley, Mary pursued Spock by inviting him to speak, in California, at Glide Memorial Church. (Whiting) (Maier, p. 382).

Meanwhile, Jane Spock got a too-little-too-late acknowledgement of her contribution to Baby and Child Care in the 1976 3rd revision, with a full page dedication called “To Jane with Gratitude and Love” where in the earlier editions, she only got a one-paragraph mention (Klemesrud).

In that 1976 interview from the New York Times, the article author, Judy Klemesrud, writes “Mrs. Spock grew visibly angry with veins standing out on her neck and temples as though the years of silence were about to come bursting through some self-imposed dam”

Yes Jane! You get it all out! You deserve it!

After the divorce, she “floundered in her addiction” for another 13 years. Spock 

Judy, my favorite family gossip, told a story about how Jane was down in the Virgin Islands, trying to keep some of the traditions she had when married, of socializing on this sailboat that they owned, so Jane invited Judy’s brother Irving and his wife, Ruth. Irving and Ruth go to the Virgin Islands to sail with Jane but they find her just WASTED and basically unable to sail, for sure, and maybe unable to function (Maier, p. 362-371).

Let’s fast forward to 1984. Okay, I am like, too Midwestern to even read about this, practically. But. I think it’s important. All of the Spock women: Jane, Judy and her daughter Susanna, John’s wife Cindy, grandson Dan’s wife Lisa , PLUS MARY MORGAN and her daughter Ginger. They all spend a weekend together at an oceanfront house. They call themselve “Spock Women’s Group” and they take the weekend to do yoga and talk. (Maier, p. 424-425).

 I suppose since they’d all been airing their grievances together in giant group therapy for who knows how long, this felt less weird?

Judy got stuck being Jane’s caretaker. Jane went to rehab, again, for a year and got sober, but when she moved back to New York and lived alone again, she relapsed. Judy blamed Jane’s therapists for the ongoing addiction issues because the therapists KNEW Jane had a problem, and yet they kept prescribing her mood-altering medications, which they knew she was going to mix with alcohol. To bad cognitive effect. Jane had therapy almost her whole adult life and it’s super sad that the alcoholism was never really dealt with! (Maier, p. 428).

In 1989, at age 82, Jane fell and broke her hip. She had a stroke, then another stroke. She’s really banged up, looks terrible, feels terrible, she’s alone in the hospital. Spock tries to see her on her deathbed and she refused. Get this: biographer Thomas Maier writes, “BEN FELT DEEPLY HURT” (p. 430).

 Yes Ben, by all means make this all about you.

Back to our original question, what does this have to do with Spock’s work enduring? 

At first, I was going to say this is just sensational and gossipy. But then I thought, this really had a tremendous effect on Spock’s career after retiring from medicine. He was a very influential political activist and we can attribute this to Mary Morgan and her youth and verve and their partnership. Which, if Spock had been nice to Jane, more supportive, more willing to recognize that alcohol was a big problem for her, then things would have probably turned out differently for their marriage and his retirement.

So, definitely, Spock’s personal relationships with women kept his name in the news, he had the younger wife, an active lifestyle, alternative interests, and some business stuff that we’ll get to in one of our upcoming episodes.

New Spock / Old Spock segment

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.

I remembered a blog post about it from forever ago, and when I went to find it, I realized this is a trend that regularly surprises Americans. Most recently in TikTok form a video of babies left outside to nap was making the internet rounds. 

Did you ever read about northern European babies sleeping outside coffee shops? 

No! But I remember watching an episode of Call the Midwife (set in London in the 50s and 60s) where a mother doing laundry in the kitchen just casually mentioned that the baby was outside on the sidewalk sleeping in its pram to get some fresh air. At the time, my babies were tiny, so my reaction was a bit of a double take. Is this just of a piece with the whole “no one locked their doors at night” neighbors knew neighbors philosophy that has been used to shame millennials since we started having kids?

Well, this used to be a thing in the United States, too, or at least it was Spock’s advice in 1957.

And in earlier parenting manuals, which promoted napping outdoors in all seasons, on porches, in balcony cots, or even “a bassinet that hung from an apartment window” (Atkinson p. 135).

In Spock’s 1957 edition, there’s a section on “Getting the baby out of doors” which recommends getting a baby outside “when it isn’t raining, for 2 or 3 hours a day, as long as the temperature is above freezing and the wind isn’t bitterly cold”...

Which, that sounds supervised. But the advice continues: “As he grows older, is awake for longer periods, and appreciates company more, I wouldn’t keep him out all by himself [emphasis Spock’s] for more than an hour when he is awake. (p. 160)

Katie. What does the 10th edition say about leaving babies outside by themselves? 

10th edish stuff The 10th edition is concerned with the dangers of too much outside time in a way earlier editions were not. I’m not sure if you’ve heard, Deborah, but “while it’s good for babies to spend time outdoors, sunlight contains ultraviolet rays, which can lead to skin cancer years later. Infants are especially vulnerable.” (79) That said, there are sections later in the book about allowing children to explore their “powerful connection with nature” and about the importance of “letting children do things that might be a tiny bit dangerous, like sleeping outside in a tent…” (419) The book doesn’t explicitly say they’re talking about older kids, but that was the implication I got. They also recommend the book Free Range Kids, which I’m kind of surprised didn’t come up in our earlier discussion of popular parenting books. That one was very buzzy when my kids were born.

Outro

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 Dr. Benjamin Spock’s political activism.

See this episode’s show notes for our references.

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Remember, listeners, we want to hear from you! !hat’s your favorite piece of parenting advice? It could be funny or serious! Leave it in a review and we’ll read it in a future episode

Special thanks to the WNYC Archive Collections!

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