November 20, 2020
12:00 - 1:30 pm
Problematizing the Moralization and Idealization of Childhood: America's Historical Obession with Child Development
Heather Reel is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. Her scholarship bridges U.S. social and cultural history, history of medicine, and American Studies. Her research interests include histories of child health and the body in the 20th century U.S.; histories of health-related advertising and health consumerism; the role of children in the American eugenics movement; and the cultural politics of emotion and affective economies of childhood. Heather’s dissertation work examines the spectacle of child multiple “sensations” in mid-20th century America within discourses of child health, race and eugenics.
Heather Reel
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Raising the Dionnes, Raising Ourselves: Imagining America's "Every Child," 1934 - 1946
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On May 28, 1934, the first quintuplets to survive beyond birth were born in Corbeil, a small village in Ontario, Canada. News of their birth was front-page fodder around the world and the sisters eventually became the central force of a marketing juggernaut. The Dionne Quints, as they were popularly known, produced a generation of well-wishers who celebrated their every milestone. Every mood, outburst, growth spurt and achievement was meticulously recorded and reported in the press. The public responded with unprecedented enthusiasm and marketers found an insatiable audience for any mention of multiples. In American homes, the Dionnes decorated the walls of living rooms and graced the pages of scrapbooks, family photo albums and baby books throughout the country.
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While companies like Lysol and Palmolive soap used multiples to make statements about personal and domestic hygiene, food brands such as Quaker Oats sought to teach about child nutrition, and the press invited millions to track multiples’ progress and growth throughout the years. This provided a communal barometer of child growth - a yardstick against which one’s own child’s progress could be measured.
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In this paper, I examine the ways in which the Dionnes were vital to the process of how Americans came to “know” the child in mid-century America. Through the Dionnes, American parents were taught to read their child's bodily measurements, behavior, expressions, personality and intelligence and how to “grow” ideal children. As a scholar of childhood studies, I seek to examine how the Dionnes’ promise of a seemingly objective and “knowable” truth of child development compounded the artifice of what constituted a child. I also consider how widely disseminated images of young white girls as embodiments of “the every child” served as a central site of the production and dissemination of normality writ large. The racialized and classed implications of commercial representations of multiples will thus be considered, as will the role of eugenics and racial health imperatives in mid-century America.
Elisabeth Yang
Elisabeth M. Yang is a PhD Candidate and a Research Fellow at the Winterthur Museum and Library in Delaware. She has been awarded fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia, UCLA, Winterthur Museum and Library, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, Rutgers University, and a research grant from Princeton University’s Library. She received her BA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Barnard College, Columbia University, an MA in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics from Biola University, and an MA in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from Durham University. Her research examines the cultural and social construction of “moral” infants in American medical and scientific discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Elisabeth’s work draws largely from the history of science and medicine, history of developmental psychology, childhood studies, religious studies, philosophy, and material culture. Areas of interest concern notions of agency, personhood, science and religion, critical realism, mind-body relations, and social epistemology.
*This phenomenal panelist is open to discussing placement opportunities within organizations seeking talented individuals. Please contact Elisabeth at: elisabethy@gmail.com
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Automatons and “Bundles of Reflexes”: “Moral” Infants in 19th and
early 20th century Medical and Scientific Discourse
In this paper, I explore the philosophical and social constructions of the moral infant in American medical and scientific discourse from the 1850s to the 1920s. While historians, sociologists, and literary scholars have written extensively on the history of child-rearing and child health, very little has been done that focuses on the history of infants as moral agents and persons. I investigate conceptualizations of the moral agency and personhood of infants in nineteenth-century American medical texts and child-rearing manuals to disentangle the interweaving of hegemonic religious, scientific, and philosophical conceptions of the infant and infancy during the popularization of an evolutionary approach to child development in the 1860s and the growing mechanization of the child’s body in the early twentieth-century. My research aims to historicize and problematize the moral infant whose being and development had increasingly captured the attention of psychologists, physicians, politicians, and parents during a period in which child health and welfare burgeoned as a moral, scientific, and political enterprise in America. In this brief presentation, I discuss just two vignettes of American infant that were iterated in medical and scientific literature and circulated among physicians, scientists, and child-rearing experts, and written advice literature for mothers: the infant as a (1) “biological memory” and “bundle of reflexes,” and (2) a pre-moral, conscious automaton. My analysis concerns the confluence of science, religion, class, race, and politics in the fabrication of the idealized “moral” American infant during its emergence as a spectacle and object of medical and scientific inquiry during the second half of the nineteenth century.