for the student riots of that decade, which his critics maintained were provoked by youngsters raised according to his permissive ideas. Right or wrong, the accusation nevertheless shows the extent of his influence.
Spock was himself raised on the standards of Emmett Holt (the American Truby King) but his own approach to childcare was just the opposite: sleep when the baby felt like it; potty training in her own time; feeding on demand and then as much or as little as the baby wanted; he didn’t even insist on breastfeeding. While earlier approaches to childcare insisted babies fit in with adult schedules, Spock had it the other way around, but his relaxed approach meant that mothers had to be on hand twenty-four hours a day while baby did things in his own time.
The quantities of information from every quarter, the sea-changes in expert-led opinion, and most of all the apparently dire consequences of getting it wrong have placed mothers in a state of utter dependency on outside sources of information. Although Spock often urged women to trust their own instincts, as social historian Shari Thurer remarked in her historical account of motherhood: ‘If a mother knew which of her impulses to trust, why would she have cracked the cover of these books in the first place?’17
Spock’s era was a time of changing ideas and Spock, perhaps a little unfairly since he was scarcely the worst offender, took the brunt of feminist ire. Spock’s assumption that parenting was women’s work, backed up with remarks such as, ‘Of course, I don’t mean that the father has to give just as many bottles or change just as many diapers as the mother. But it’s fine for him to do so occasionally’,18 inflamed the emerging ranks of sisterhood.
Like all good Freudian-influence theorists, he was also unhappy about the idea of women leaving their children to work and countered his recognition that some women may need or want to work with the guilt-inducing words: ‘If a mother realizes clearly how vital this kind of care is to a small child, it may make it easier for her to decide that the extra money she might earn, or the satisfaction she might receive from an outside job, is not so important, after all.’19 That was in 1958, five years before Betty Friedan awakened the consciousness of millions of women with The Feminine Mystique in which she challenged Freudian ideas of gender. Her ‘problem with no name’ was the mind-numbing routine of home and family life in which women were expected to find contentment, but which buried women alive. This state of affairs, she argued, was good for neither women or children: ‘Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping with their homework – an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.’20
Adrienne Rich’s problem had a name and its name was motherhood. She wrote with extraordinary candour about her experience of motherhood and her feelings for her children whom she confessed, from time to time, she had the urge to kill. She made it clear that the problem for her was the ‘institution’ of motherhood, ‘the chaining of women in links of love and guilt’.21
A poet and academic. Rich, for a while, tried to become the archetypal perfect wife and mother. When she wrote of the experience she lit a charge:
I only knew that I had lived through something which was considered central to the lives of women, fulfilling even in its sorrows, a key to the meaning of life; and that I could remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and division within myself; a division made more acute by the moments of passionate love, delight in my children’s spirited bodies and minds, amazement at how they went on loving me in spite of my failures to love them wholly and selflessly.22
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