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69 3 The Bobby-Soxer Babysitter In an article entitled “Know Where You Stand with Your Sitter,” Better Homes and Gardens magazine described young mothers out for the night, who often found themselves stealing “glances at the clock half-wishing they hadn’t left home.”1 While many adults today look back longingly to the 1950s as a time when babysitters were both abundant and affable, that golden age of babysitters—and of girlhood—never existed, not even in the mind’s eye of many postwar parent-employers. Rather than the militant, union-organizing babysitter, the figure that proved to be more noxiously persistent and pervasive was the more plentiful “bobby-soxer” babysitter who had first appeared as Ginger in the movie Sitting Pretty (1948).2 Following her attempted seduction of Mr. King, Ginger hosted a party for friends at his home. Returning unexpectedly early, Mr. and Mrs. King found the “careless and irresponsible” teen whirling past them in the arms of a young man while other “jitterbugs” danced to the radio on full blast.3 This chapter examines the ways in which the figure of the bobby-soxer babysitter—the embodiment of postwar parents’ expectations and anxieties about teenage girls—was shaped by constructions of gender and perceptions of girls’ teen culture. While upwardly mobile middle-class employers hoped that teenage girls would practice domestic skills and develop maternal sensibilities according to the conservative postwar gender ideology, they harbored fears about reckless delinquents who messed up the household instead of maintaining it. During the 1950s the “bobbysoxer babysitter,” who “raided the icebox and jitterbugged with the crowd, until Mommy and Daddy arrived after midnight to discover Junior sailing boats on the bathroom floor,” dwelled in the imagination of middle-class adults anxious about the potential of teenage girls to disorder their living rooms and disrupt their lives.4 The “bobby-soxer babysitter” concealed another troubling reality: while the vast majority of teenage girls worked as babysitters, many felt as ambivalent about babysitting as did those before them. What differed among this generation of girls was not the nature of their grievances, nor 70 The Bobby-Soxer Babysitter decidedly different conceptions of girlhood, but their new forms of resistance . Unlike the previous generation of teenage girls that had produced manifestos, those in the 1950s devised an informal work culture that expressed their dissatisfactions by drawing upon the practices and principles of girls’ culture. The second part of this chapter examines how teenage girls put to use the teen culture they shared with peers and not parents. Devising an innovative vocabulary, sitters expressed their dislike of the “supercharged” baby boomer “brats” they were hired to watch, the male “wadders” who ripped them off, and the stifling suburban “babyvilles” in which they lived.5 Gender and Generational Ideals: The Watchful Mother and Steady Sitter In postwar America, young parents who had left cities for suburbs hoped to improve their standard of living and raise their social status. For many, upward mobility was made possible by the federal GI Bill, which enabled largely white veterans to receive low-interest mortgages on houses they could not otherwise have afforded. In addition to home ownership, the bill also provided for a federally funded college education program that enabled millions of veterans to get white-collar jobs in the rapidly expanding postwar economy. Not only did suburbanites construct homes, but they also built a way of life characterized by distinctive middle-class rhythms, patterns, and ideals learned from their neighbors and from idealized suburban families in the popular culture.6 While fathers were expected to be hard-working “breadwinners,” mothers were prescribed to be “happy homemakers.” For women, motherhood was to be a primary identity and home was the place over which they were to preside.7 According to this newly constructed gender ideal, caring and cheerful mothers were to be emotionally responsive and psychologically engaged “seven days a week and 365 days in the year,” explained the influential psychological theorist John Bowlby.8 A staunch advocate of the mother/child bond, he maintained that the mothering of the nation’s fortysix million babies born between 1944 and 1957 required “constant attention day and night.”9 Popularized psychological theories informed by Cold War perspectives had given shape to an ideology of domestic containment that prescribed mothers’ crucial importance in child-centered child rearing. According to notions about good parenting during the Cold War, the “vigilant ” mother sheltered her children from foreign ideas and foreigners.10 [3...

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