Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America

Notes

199 n O t e s InTroduCTIon 1 Gesell and Ilg, in collaboration with Learned and Ames, Infant and Child in the Culture of Today, 65. 2 Nadel, Containment Culture; May, Homeward Bound; Stephens, “Nationalism, Nuclear Policy and Children in Cold War America”; and Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front. 3 Mintz, Huck’s Raft; Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America, 88–91; Gilbert, Another Chance, 54–75; and Strickland and Ambrose, “Baby Boom, Prosperity, and the Changing Worlds of Children, 1945–1963,” 533–38. 4 Coontz, Way We Never Were; May, Homeward Bound; Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver; Hayden, Building Suburbia; and Harris, Second Suburb. 5 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, rev. 1961, s.v. “creativity.” Psychologists have, however, tried to define this word empirically. Jonathan A. Plucker, for example, suggests a relatively open definition: “Creativity is the interplay between ability and process by which an individual or group produces an outcome or product that is both novel and useful as defined within some social context.” See Plucker and Beghetto, “Why Creativity Is Domain General, Why It Looks Domain Specific, and Why the Distinction Does Not Matter,” 156. 6 Frank, Conquest of Cool. 7 Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity. 8 See Ariès, Centuries of Childhood; and Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500. 9 Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, 79 (emphasis in original). 10 Rousseau, Émile, 79. 11 Milam, Fragonard’s Playful Paintings. 12 Sutton-Smith, Ambiguity of Play, 129–33. 13 Cooke, preface to Pestalozzi, How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, 2. 14 Silber, Pestalozzi; and Ashwin, “Pestalozzi and the Origins of Pedagogical Drawing .” 15 Fröbel, Friedrich Froebel’s Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, 9. 199 notES to IntroductIon 200 16 As Anne Higonnet has shown, pictorial representations of the innocent child are the deliberate work of adults. See Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 27–28. 17 Rosenblum, Romantic Child; and Higonnet, ibid., 15. 18 See Connelly, Sleep of Reason; Evett, Critical Reception of Japanese Art in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe; and Ogata, Art Nouveau and the Social Vision of Modern Living. 19 Fineberg, Innocent Eye. 20 Goode, Museums of the Future, 427. 21 Lienhard, Inventing Modern, 190–203. 22 See Latour, Reassembling the Social, 88–93. See also Turmel, Historical Sociology of Childhood. 23 Rose, Governing the Soul, 123. . 24 See the work of Ariès and Cunningham, as well as Brewer, “Childhood Revisited”; Mintz, Huck’s Raft; Cross, Kids’ Stuff; and Cross, Cute and the Cool. 25 Important exceptions are Schlereth, “Material Culture of Childhood”; and Calvert , Children in the House. 26 Highmore, “Sideboard Manifesto.” 27 Attfield, Wild Things. 28 Solomon, American Playgrounds; Gutman and de Coninck-Smith, Designing Modern Childhoods; Van Slyck, Manufactured Wilderness; and Colomina, Brennen, and Kim, Cold War Hothouses. 29 Cross, Kids’ Stuff; Jacobson, Raising Consumers; Cook, Commodification of Childhood; Mickenberg, Learning from the Left; Nel, Dr. Seuss; and op de Beeck, Suspended Animation. 30 Kline, Out of the Garden; Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland; Seiter, Sold Separately ; and Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse. 31 Pugh, Longing and Belonging; and Buckingham, Material Child, 32–42. 32 Cohen, Consumer’s Republic. 1. ConsTruCTIng CreaTIvIT y In PosT war aMerICa 1 Elaine Tyler May argues that the reasons for the baby boom have to do with an ideology that pervaded many aspects of American culture. See May, Homeward Bound, 142. 2 Harvey, Fifties, 105. Scholars have shown that concern for children’s cognitive abilities grew at the end of the nineteenth century to become a veritable obsession by the postwar era. See, for example, Wrigley, “Do Young Children Need Intellectual Stimulation?”; and Stearns, Anxious Parents, 100–101. Wini Breines, however, argues that mothers had relatively little academic ambition for their children, preferring them to be “normal” and “well adjusted.” See Breines, Young, White, and Miserable, 68–69. 3 Church, “Parents,” 18–19. See also Harvey, Fifties, 91–92. 4 Grant, Raising Baby by the Book. Peter Stearns argues this attitude toward parenting advice “spilled over” to other parts of the world; see Stearns, Childhood in World History, 104. 5 See Patterson, Grand Expectations, 362. notES to chAP tEr 1 201 6 See Grant, Raising Baby by the Book, 215–18. 7 Smith, “Where Did You Go?” “Out” “What Did You Do?” “Nothing,” 8. 8 Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, Personality in the Making, 7. 9 Ibid., 16. The report also suggested that if enterprise and imagination were restricted too greatly, the personality...