Babysitter: An American History

Acknowledgments

vii Acknowledgments I was a teenage babysitter. Yet my scholarly interest in babysitting stemmed from a previous book on the history of dolls in the lives of American girls. I had been intrigued by anecdotal evidence of girls who had purchased dolls with money they had earned pushing carriages as “baby-walkers” or “baby tenders.” These early twentieth-century babysitters proved to be just as business-minded as a group of plucky preadolescents I happened to encounter at the end of the century who confidently charged parent-employers by the number of children they cared for. I first began investigating the history of babysitters under a grant from the Princeton University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. I continued this project with support from the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College and a Faculty Research Grant from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The University of Missouri Research Board’s generous grant enabled me to spend an entire year researching and writing. Piecing together the history of those who “minded the baby” earlier in the twentieth century with those by its end was made possible with additional assistance. Colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, especially Dennis Merrill and Louis Potts, as well as Jim Durig, a former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, saw in this project something worth supporting. Andrew Bergerson, Gary Ebersole, Jane Greer, and Lynda Payne read chapters and offered cogent critiques. My thanks to my colleague Kristi Holsinger, in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, for helping me to better understand the emergence of the delinquent babysitter. Numerous librarians, archivists, and other experts located all kinds of wonderful sources. Cynthia Churchwell, the former social sciences reference librarian at Miller Nichols Library, who conducted an expert library search, uncovered newspaper articles and other sources. Chuck Haddix, director of the Marr Sound Archives at the University of Missouri–Kansas City provided helpful audio-technical assistance (for which I gave him a 45 rpm of the early 1960s hit “Baby Sittin’ Boogie”). Marilyn Carbonell, viii Acknowledgments then assistant director for collection development at the Miller Nichols Library at UMKC, permitted me to borrow back issues of popular periodicals . Music/media librarian Laura Gayle Green sent babysitting lyrics my way. Images from magazines were expertly photographed by Sherry Best, assistant professor and curator of Visual Resources. Sherry worked closely with Kelly Pangrac, document delivery librarian of the Kansas City Missouri Public Library, who generously loaned volumes of bound periodicals . Librarians at this library saved me countless hours collecting books about babysitting from branch libraries. I am especially grateful to Elizabeth Forbes and Marie McDermed at the Plaza branch library for locating a number of hard-to-find titles. I appreciate the help provided by Jeremy Drouin, the special collections librarian at the Kansas City Public Library, who provided a reproduction of the cover illustration of Henry Reed’s Baby-Sitting Service included in this book. The Norman Rockwell Family Agency generously provided permission to reprint Norman Rockwell’s Babysitter illustration, which graces the book’s cover. The image, which first appeared on a 1947 Saturday Evening Post cover, poignantly captures the perspectives of babysitters and their bosses privileged in this study. Liz Bezera, associate director for Information Services at the Emerson College Library, provided me with a photocopy of the only master’s thesis on babysitting, as well as permission to cite it. Sherl Casper, a reporter and one of my graduate students, found many useful newspaper articles published in the Kansas City Star. Tok Thompson, archivist at the University of California at Berkeley Folklore Archives, facilitated the retrieval of over two hundred babysitter urban legends. My thanks to Simon Bronner for putting me in touch with Rachel Wolgemuth, archival assistant at the Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies, who sent me another dozen babysitter legends. Jan Harold Brunvand aided my understanding of the fascinating world of urban legends. My thanks to Linnea M. Anderson at the Columbia University Archives and Mary Degenhardt at the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., who gave me many handbooks and other materials related to babysitting. The Internet provided me with access to a treasure trove of materials that regularly and repeatedly turned up on eBay. I quickly learned how to “snipe” after being painfully outbid in an early attempt to acquire Barbie’s babysitting accessories. Extant magazines, manuals, movies, and many other sources of evidence that appeared on...