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  • Babysitter: An American History
  • Susan A. Miller
Miriam Forman-Brunell . Babysitter: An American History. New York: New York University Press, 2009. xi + 313 pp. ISBN 978-0-8147-2759-1, $29.95 (cloth).

In this first-ever history of babysitting, Miriam Forman-Brunell has written an enjoyable account of a class of employees who, she argues, does an extraordinary amount of cultural work in addition to its assigned childcare chores. Far from being merely the girls next door, babysitters stand in for a swirling mass of inchoate fears that Americans had (and continue to have) about teenage girls. "Represented as villains who have caused danger, and as victims who have courted it," Forman-Brunell's babysitters find themselves at the center of domestic plots that would not be out of place in even the most overwrought gothic novels because they are harbingers of vast "gender and generational changes" (p. 2). Babysitters attract this enmity due to their employers' discomfort with their own evolving domestic roles: fathers worry about the decline of paternal authority, while mothers are guilt-ridden over their increasing disinterest in domestic responsibilities, and neither parent can resist the allure of commercial entertainments that make babysitters integral to private life. This adult angst, Forman-Brunell claims, gets foisted onto the young girls hired to look after the kids. When babysitters are not themselves charged with misbehavior, they are depicted as the never-quite-innocent victims of lecherous dads and murderous stalkers. All these arguments might strike the reader as a tad preposterous if it were not for the overwhelming evidence Forman-Brunell has amassed to support her case.

After an excellent introductory chapter that explains the origins of both child-minding and girls' culture in the 1920s and 1930s, Babysitter [End Page 696] really hits its stride when bobby-soxers and postwar families meet in the new suburban housing developments of the 1940s. Subsequent chapters, each covering roughly a decade, move the story up to the present day. Although Forman-Brunell clearly enjoyed working with some of her more salacious material, such as slasher movies, urban legends, and soft porn, every chapter is grounded in an impressive amalgam of diverse sources. Indeed, Forman-Brunell's deft handling of everything from comics and teen fiction to union records and government documents—the National Safety Council released "You're in Charge," the first postwar manual for (undoubtedly dubious) babysitters in 1946—is one of the great joys of the book (p. 85). These sources are deployed not only to build her argument for the babysitter as icon of American girlhood but also to give contour and texture to the working conditions and employment practices girls encountered while on the job.

Of all the great graphics in the book, none can top the image of a 1947 "weekly business meeting of the West Branch, Michigan, babysitter union" that illustrated an article in Women's Home Companion entitled "Baby Sitters United" (p. 57). Were adult readers supposed to admire these plucky gals in plaid skirts and sweater sets, or was this, in essence, a sneak peek into the enemies' camp? Although Forman-Brunell characterizes this and other babysitter union activity in the 1940s as representative of a "militant minority," by the 1990s babysitters wore their activism on their sleeves and their compensation demands on their T-shirts. A manual from that decade showed a member of "Sitters, Inc." proudly displaying her going rates: "$2 an hour for a sleeping baby, $3 for a normal child and $5 for a brat" (p. 183). Sitters not only complained about troublesome kids but also outlined ideal working conditions for the benefit of clueless employers and yearned for objective rubrics with which to measure their work. If the kids were safely asleep when parents returned home had not the employment contract been fulfilled, evidence of a boyfriend's visit and scavenged fridge notwithstanding? While some girls and their advocates were tenacious, babysitters' requests for licensing regulations or workmen's compensation rarely reached a wider audience. Sometimes, however, the girls' arguments had resonance. In the 1980s, for example, daughters of Second Wave feminists took up their mothers' complaints about gender discrimination and comparable worth. Why...

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