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159 7 Sisterhoods of Sitters In 1979 the Kansas City Times reported that “[o]ne of the most indispensable persons in the world—and one around whom your social life revolves to some extent—is the sitter.”1 Just a few years later, the newspaper would cover the case of a babysitter serial killer. During the 1980s, many teenage girls in movies turned into monsters as dangerous as the maniacs who had been stalking babysitters for decades. The transformation of sitters from victim to victimizer—from powerless to powerful—led deranged teens to turn the tables on their attackers and direct their fury against parent-employers . In popular movies examined in this chapter, a revised version of the teenage babysitter who was hired to keep the place clean made a mess in living rooms and lives. Hired to be the cop, she became the criminal. Hired to ensure safety, she threatened security. Hired to mother, she murdered children. I argue that this raw depiction of sitters as killers was due to the ever increasing self-sufficiency of teenage girls: Imagining the sitter as a feminist Frankenstein enabled adults to express their displeasure with girls who now preferred a job at a mall to caring for kids.2 Yet, the vilification of teenagers occurred in tandem with the valorization of preadolescents. This chapter demonstrates that the goodnatured preadolescent girl—as opposed to her bad-tempered older sister—served adults as the most promising candidate for the feminization of girlhood. After a forty-year hiatus, the preadolescent girl was reconceptualized as less vulnerable and more valuable in self-help literature and girls’ fiction, sources on which this chapter also draws. Manuals and magazines from Women’s World to Weekly Reader promoted the “Super Sitter,” the miniature version of the “Superwoman.” Updated handbooks and training courses emerged to develop girls’ skills, buttress their confidence, stimulate their interest, and empower them as babysitters. In order to make babysitting appeal to young girls whose aspirations had been fueled by feminism, children’s fiction reframed babysitting as a “business.” The best-selling Baby-sitter’s Club book series promoted the notion that “determination, ambition, 160 Sisterhoods of Sitters individual achievement, competence, and hard work [like babysitting] would enable girls to realize their dreams.”3 At the same time that babysitting literature promoted empowerment, it also aimed to attenuate young girls’ autonomy, as horror movies, handbooks, course curricula , and babysitter fiction had for decades. The Super Sitter who appeared during the last two decades of the twentieth century served to neutralize feminist notions by glorifying babysitting. Walking a tightrope between female empowerment and accommodation, the preadolescent , presexual Super Sitter made American girlhood more endearing than dangerous. A Serial Sitter In 1982, the Kansas City Star was one of a number of newspapers that covered the case of the notorious babysitter serial killer, Christine Falling .4 It all began when a two-year-old girl died while in the care of the eighteen-year-old junior-high-school dropout. No one in the poor Florida community where she resided blamed the babysitter.5 Although no autopsy was performed, the cause of death was declared to have been encephalitis. When a four-year-old boy died next while also in the care of Christine Falling, local authorities believed that he had died of myocarditis . Several days later, the dead boy’s cousin died suddenly while his parents attended their nephew’s funeral. Guess who was babysitting at the time? Baby number four who also died suddenly was Christine Falling’s eight-month-old step-niece. Authorities suggested the baby had a fatal reaction to vaccinations she had just received the day before at a local clinic. Again, no autopsies were performed because the local officials who had investigated the deaths believed that all the children had suffered from health problems caused by poverty.6 While investigators declared Christine to be a “victim of circumstance,” how about the three other children who became seriously ill while under her care? “I tell you,” Christine pondered, “sometimes I wonder if I don’t have some kind of spell over me when I get around young ‘uns.”7 After a fifth child was found dead in the ramshackle trailer the babysitter shared with her boyfriend, even Christine had to admit that it was an “awful weird coincidence .”8 Then, in her confession to a forensic psychiatrist, Christine was purported to have explained that “[t]he way I done it, I seen it done...

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