Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (review)

With the rise of cultural studies, the approach known in literary criticism as “reader response theory” and in media criticism as “audience response theory” has served as an invaluable tool for investigating the active participation by a reader or viewer of a text in the making of the meanings of the text. As William James said of truth, meaning “happens” to a text only in the dialectic between the text’s characteristics and the audience’s intentions, beliefs, and so on. On this account, texts can be polysemic, relatively open or closed to various interpretations; the approach attributes to the audience a great deal of power (compared with the author) in creating the practical meanings of texts. The pleasant surprise in Grant’s enormously interesting and important book is that she has figured out a way to undertake historical reader response criticism around the sorts of texts that offer child-rearing advice to parents, especially to mothers.

Grant looks at the parenting education movement for mothers and finds evidence of the voices of mothers speaking back at the experts. As Grant writes, “like other marginalized groups, mothers have struggled to maintain a degree of individual choice where they were able to do so, and the choices they make can alter the larger social institutions that govern their lives” (5). Mothers are “discriminating consumers” capable of weighing expert advice along with other forces leading to their child-rearing decisions and practices. Women’s networks of family and friends constitute interpretive communities for more collective resistance to expertise, and the profiles of these communities introduce ethnicity, religion, and social class into the responses.

Grant provides some nineteenth century background to the history of child-reading advice literature, but she focuses primarily on the twentieth century and on the rearing of infants and preschoolers. She reconstructs two parallel organizational forces, one the professionalization of child-rearing advice and the other the creation by women of clubs and other organizations for sharing information and emotions about child-rearing. Some of these groups were local, but Grant also investigates the role of three national organizations—the National Congress of Mothers, the Child Study Association of America, and the American Association of University Women—in the delicate dance between valuing and resisting “scientific” child-rearing advice. The real bonanza of evidence for Grant is the body of records she found of several child-study groups (at Cornell, in Minnesota, and in meetings of the Child Study Association of America) beginning in the 1920s. These groups are the “interpretive communities” (141) Grant uses to sketch the detailed responses by mothers to the expert, scientific advice, especially around specific matters, such as toilet training, thumb-sucking, and discipline. The social and economic jolts of the Depression and then the war led to greater scrutiny of the role of the father in child-rearing and of the family as a model of democracy.

Grant uses mothers’ letters to the two great child-rearing gurus of the baby boom—Benjamin Spock and Arnold Gesell—to reconstruct the official and unofficial ideologies of motherhood in the postwar years. Mothers generally came to see their children in psychological terms, and their mothering continued moving toward greater attention to love and affection and efforts to reduce frustration; still, mothers experienced a great deal of worry over “spoiling” their children in the face of advice from Spock and others. Grant suggests that the mothers themselves may have helped Spock back away from an overly permissive approach when he came to revise Baby and Child Care in the late 1950s, more evidence of ways the resistance by an “interpretive community” can help change the experts. Overall, despite the reputation of the 1950s for conformity and unprecedented respect for scientific expertise, Grant finds a multivocal conversation about how best to rear a child.

Grant uses the brief conclusion of her book to connect her research with the late twentieth century “culture wars” over...