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181 8 Coming of Wage at the End of the Century Sure, baby-sitting is great. The sense of accomplishment. The money. The fun of being with young children and helping to mold and shape them. The money. The independence, the responsibility—and, of course, the money. But tell the truth. . . . Don’t you get just a little bit tired, a little bit bored, a little bit annoyed about some of the not-sogreat parts about being a baby-sitter? Well, join the club! The Bad Baby-Sitters Club! So began The Bad Baby-Sitters Handbook (1991), a slim and sardonic volume aimed at girls who had had enough of the Baby-sitter’s Club book series—and of babysitting. It was sentiments like these that led one girl to write author Ann M. Martin to suggest “[k]illing off all the [BSC] girls.”1 Both factual and fictional materials had been disseminating the notion that babysitting promoted girls’ self-esteem, autonomy, and empowerment . “Taking care of other people’s children, planning your own schedule and making money helps you gain responsibility, self-confidence and a sense of accomplishment,” Teen magazine had explained in 1980.2 While babysitting continued to be popularly presented as an identity-forming opportunity for girls in end-of-the-century advice literature and fiction, it was hard for real babysitters, who are the focus of this chapter, to feel as enthusiastic about babysitting as the experts did. Ironically, the “Super Sitter” ideal, which had combined Second Wave feminist criticism with Girl Power optimism, had contributed to rising numbers of girls who felt discontented with the job exalted by experts. Caught between conflicting gender expectations and employment realities, babysitters reacted negatively to the last-minute calls and cancellations, low wages, bounced checks, and late returns. Yet what left sitters feeling especially uneasy was working in the intimate, unchecked domain of neighbors’ homes, where employers sometimes drank and occasionally engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior. Working all alone in unfamiliar houses, girls often felt 182 Coming of Wage at the End of the Century frightened that “creeps” would victimize them, as they did other babysitters in horror movies and horror fiction series aimed at girl readers (see chapter 9). The children of their employers sometimes stirred fears and stimulated frustrations as well. Though generations of sitters had been following the advice published in “survival guides” that suggested ways to cope with the “brat,” many girls found that it was sometimes nearly impossible to turn a “devilish little demon into a perfect angel.”3 Sitters continued to be fair game for mischief makers (especially boys), who “acted out” troublesome feelings they had difficulty articulating. The way the sitter interpreted kids’ play and pranks—especially as things got out of hand—was critical to the ways in which she negotiated their needs, her employers’, and her own. Expectations, Identity, and the Employer: “More often than not, I should have been paid more.”4 The Washington Post headline “Sit Snit” was meant to describe employers ’ exasperation with babysitters. Yet the caption could just as easily have characterized the grievances of underpaid babysitters.5 What had motivated girls to babysit throughout the twentieth century had been the desire to earn money in return for taking care of agreeable children.6 All too often, the reality did not meet their expectations. “[For] this one job I had to babysit 3 kids for 5 hours and I only got $20.00,” complained sixteen-year-old Ginger .7 “My beef is that when I baby sit I never get paid enough money. I think I should get paid more for looking after kids,” explained Julie.8 While most employers who paid sitters the “going rate” understood it to be a neutral index of economic value, it was typically more fluid than “fair.” Before moving to New York City, where she earned a very comfortable ten dollars per hour, Katie made between two and three dollars babysitting in a small Pennsylvania town. “No one should make that little for any sort of work,” she argued.9 Like others before them, girls continued to feel that they deserved more money for babysitting “brats.” “I mean, $1.50 is pretty low.”10 The feminist notion of comparable worth—paying the same wage for similarly valued jobs—informed girls’ perceptions of the field of babysitting. Cindy was not alone in her observation that “I have always thought that it is odd to pay a boy $10.00 to shovel...

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