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  • “Our Community Helpers” and the American Feminist Struggle against Stereotypes
  • Laura L. Lovett (bio)

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“Our Community Helpers” created by the Non-Sexist Child Development Project, ca. 1975. WAA Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.

[End Page 354]

The international women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s confronted manifestations of sexism as varied as the social and political contexts that fostered them. In the United States, founders of the Women’s Action Alliance, including Brenda Feigen and Gloria Steinem, polled the country to articulate a women’s agenda. The result made children’s toys a national priority, along with ten other issues, such as “physical safety” and “equal access to economic power.”1 WAA organizers, feminist parents, and a growing number of child studies experts realized that children learn sexist and racist stereotypes at a very young age and that toys mattered both as a means of teaching stereotypes and of countering them.2

In 1972, the WAA created the Non-Sexist Child Development Project (NSCD) and hired Barbara Sprung, a New York teacher, to direct its growing grassroots efforts at non-sexist parenting. For Sprung, the traditional American sex role stereotypes that enshrined mothers as domestic icons and fathers as breadwinners were rooted in “sex role socialization patterns developed for an agricultural, under populated, frontier society.” Echoing Betty Friedan’s rejection of domesticity in The Feminine Mystique, Sprung declared that these sex roles will “no longer work for urban, industrial modern America.”3 Her reasons were not grounded solely in feminist ire. “Economic necessity,” in Sprung’s words, demanded that “both parents work.” With the cost of living escalating by over thirty percent in Sprung’s estimation and the divorce rate rising quickly as well, women had no choice but to enter the workforce as never before. Fighting sex role stereotypes then was a matter of making sex roles match social and economic realities for American women in the 1970s.

Charged with creating a new non-sexist preschool curriculum, the NSCD staff developed a set of non-sexist and multiracial “occupational” puzzles. [End Page 355] These toys were intended to “show both men and women in counterpart roles in community work and in the nurturing role; to show both boys and girls in active and quiet play (instead of showing boys always in action and girls always passive); to show the cultural diversity of our society; and to show a more open view of the family.”4

The “Play People” of this set were ten-inch-tall color cardboard figures with plastic stands. Manufactured by Milton Bradley, they are described in promotional material as “multi-racial stand-up pairs of female and male workers (twelve figures in all): doctors, nurses, police officers, letter carriers, construction workers, business executives.” Milton Bradley included them in its Social Studies collection, which was intended to allow children to “develop an understanding of themselves in relation to the family, community, society, and the global environment.”5 Contemporary versions of “Our Community Helpers” remain a standard component of the early childhood Social Studies curriculum internationally.6

As a series of identifiable people a child may encounter, “Our Community Helpers” represented a chance to teach children about those people who made their community a better place. Even though reorganization of the Postal Service in 1970 pulled letter carriers into a national labor dispute that included a six-day national work stoppage, they remained highly visible representatives of civil service in every neighborhood of the country. Recognition of distinctive costumes and uniforms became an important part of how children learned about their community and the roles that were valued within it. This project of getting children to think about occupations was a relatively new vision for early childhood education; indeed, the New York Times reported that “career education” was becoming a buzzword among educators in the 1970s.7 Teaching children that they could hold any of these positions regardless of their sex was not only original, it was radical.

The WAA’s investment in a pre-school curriculum represented an investment in future change both in terms of changing future career expectations for women and in terms of countering the...

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