Simplifying Motherhood

Richardson, Frank Howard

doi:10.1177/089033448900500416

Cited by 1 publication

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“…." 60 Other books of the period also recommended early, but nonpunitive, toilet training. In his 1921 book, The Care of the Baby, Dr. J. P. Crozer Griffith, professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, recommended beginning training at three months in, but also warned, "It need scarcely be remarked that punishment for delinquencies in this line is totally out of the question at any age.…”

Section: Beery Describedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dr. Richardson advised the mother to nurse the baby in a quiet place, with no one else in the room, and to prepare by washing her hands, cleaning her fingernails, and washing her nipples. 64 She should eat fruit, green vegetables, and milk, if the quality was good. "If she lives in the country and keeps her own cow .…”

Section: Beery Describedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to this new trend, it is now no uncommon thing to begin the feeding of green vegetables, usually spinach, as early as six months of age." 69 The "old fear of weaning in the summer" was no longer an issue because the milk supply was now safer and more reliable, 70 as the infant mortality rate had dropped overall and no longer spiked in the summer. 71 Bedtime for baby.…”

Section: Beery Describedmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Shifting Sands

Atkinson

2017

Journal of Family History

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This essay examines print literature targeting American mothers of infants from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1950s, analyzing text excerpts from "baby books" spanning six decades and providing background illuminating those texts and their authors. Books authored by Benjamin Spock, Arnold Gesell, and John B. Watson are reviewed, along with work of less wellknown but widely read authors Emmett Holt, Herman Bundesen, and others. Changes in recommended feeding and toilet-training practices, sleeping arrangements, and behavioral expectations of babies, as well as the variation in style and tone of the experts' advice are traced through the period studied. Parent advice publications grew in popularity as changing family structures removed traditional sources of information and support for mothers, and the public came to highly regard scientific information and seek expert guidance in aspects of their lives previously governed by traditional wisdom. Included are publications of the federal Children's Bureau and discussion of that agency's role in advising parents through printed literature. Findings from this review assert that despite the advice-givers' presentation of their recommendations as universal and scientific, their writings more accurately serve as a chronicle of changing patterns of beliefs and attitudes of middleclass society rather than an empirical body of knowledge about infant growth and development.

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Section: Beery Describedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Beery Describedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Beery Describedmentioning

confidence: 99%

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