Some people think that the study of girls' literature and culture is somewhat
frivolous or pointless. Others, including one grant assessor I recall, feel that researching girls reveals nothing that we don't already know from studies of women. Babysitter:
An American History by Miriam Forman-Brunell (New York University Press, 2009) is a
compelling counter to such ideas. It takes the topic of the teen girl as child
minder and, in turn, unravels the history of girls' employment (including their
formation of babysitter unions), the development of youth consumer and print culture,
theories of child development, and the tension between competing discourses of
sexual "threat" in the home and girls as victims of sexual harassment.
The book explores both the lives of
actual girl babysitters, who contribute their own little-heard voices —often
with indignation about their working conditions—cultural imaginings of the
babysitter in film, television and literature.
Forman-Brunell approaches babysitting as "a cultural battleground where conflicts over girlhood—especially regarding sexual, social,
cultural, and economic autonomy and empowerment—are regularly played out"
(4). She shows that adults were uncomfortable with "modern" girls
from as early as the 1920s, when babysitting was a only new concept. In this
period, girls were redefining female adolescence, especially through their part
in the burgeoning youth commodity culture by wearing make-up, reading
magazines, and going to the movies, amusement parks and ice-cream parlours
(often on a "double-date"). Girls' new-found independence and interest
in socialising at night made the task of caring for other people's children
less desirable. Babysitting therefore held little appeal to many American
teens at this time. Child development experts also advised parents to be
cautious about babysitters, describing these "flirtatious
girls" as posing a threat to helpless children.
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Barbie embodying the myth of babysitting as
"easy" labour |
The Great Depression, as Forman-Brunell argues, provided financial incentive for
girls to become more enthusiastic about sitting, as their own families were no
longer able to provide generous allowances and constraints on employment
meant that other jobs were not available. More than 750,000 high-school aged girls
became "mother's helpers" or babysitters, in part, Forman-Brunell
explains, because of significant
cultural shifts such as the number of teenagers becoming a larger part of the
overall population, the growth in high school attendance (which enabled fads to
spread rapidly) and the growth of commodity youth culture.
Adults nevertheless remained suspicious of girl babysitters, at first over
their contested use of the home telephone, and later over crimes such as
raiding food from the refrigerator. There were also numerous urban myths of wild parties, drug use and child neglect.
Forman-Brunell punctuates her history with the various ways in which this suspicion
has been made manifest through fears about "bobby-soxers" in the '40s, who were scandalised for "pursuing
their social and sexual pleasures" (42) and sexually unstable girls who might
spread communicable diseases, as well as fictional representations of crazy,
murderous vixens out to destroy happy marriages. The "disorderly
babysitter" becomes a prominent figure in the 1960s when American culture
"simultaneously stimulated girlhood rebellion but also stifled it"
(121). While from the 1970s, the babysitter is heavily eroticised in slasher movies,
including Halloween, and pornographic novels.
Throughout their history, babysitters have consistently complained about poor and unfair working conditions:
adults regularly failed to provide sufficient emergency information, girls were
left stranded for hours when parents did not return home at the agreed-upon
time, sitters were commonly underpaid (or received no payment at all), and, in the Depression-era, girls were required to complete extensive housekeeping tasks in addition to
childcare. Sylvia Plath is perhaps the most famous babysitter of the 1940s who
recorded her cynicism about child minding. As a fourteen-year-old she declared that "little children are bothersome beings that have to be waited on hand
and food" (56). The discontent among sitters, primarily about overwork in
comparison with meagre remuneration, grew to the point where girls began to
form their own babysitter unions in the Midwest and Northeast to demand fair
working conditions and payment.
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| Iowa State College "Y" members, 1955 |
World War II opened up many employment opportunities for girls, not
only in after-school positions, but in jobs that lured them away from school
altogether. The growth in new occupations for girls, an increasing birth rate,
and the movement of many families away from cities (and grandparents) to the
suburbs created a chronic sitter shortage. Forman-Brunell shows
how many magazines therefore presented babysitting as a patriotic duty for
girls, in which a girl might "guard the home front" in a mother's
absence. Parents attempted to find their own
solutions, such as sitter exchanges or co-ops where groups of parents would take
it in turns to mind each other's children. Inevitably, some parents did not
pull their own weight and these co-ops failed to provide the answer to the
sitter shortage.
An unexpected aspect of the history of babysitting in America is the cultural support for
boy sitters, who were viewed as more reliable and authoritative than their female
counterparts. During the Depression, the scepticism about girl babysitters
contributed to the popularity of hiring boys to mind children and, similarly,
during World War II, the sitter shortage meant that boys actively pursued jobs
as child minders. Male college students even formed their own babysitting
services, such as Princeton's "Tiger Tot Tending Agency". Male
sitters also answered fears about the feminisation of boys while their fathers
were busy working 50-hour-weeks: "boy sitters could pry loose the 'skirt-clinger,' and
by playing 'rough-and-tumble' games outdoors, instill the manly hardiness
experts anxiously promoted" (107).
 |
Ann M. Martin's
The Baby-Sitters Club series |
The latter part of the book concentrates on the increasing popular cultural
representation of the babysitter from the 1970s and offers some intriguing
insights into how this figure comes to be blamed for the destruction of the
domestic ideal (especially by maniac male stalkers). For girls themselves,
however, series such as the Baby-sitter's Club, which began in 1986 with Kristy's Great Idea, promoted sitting as
a means to a career and a demonstration girls' competency. The books also
presented sitting as an enterprise among a confident sisterhood of friends, well in advance of the concept of "Girl Power". Forman-Brunell argues that the cultural construction of the "Super
Sitter", which the Baby-sitter's club espoused, "appropriated feminist
ideologies but neutralized empowerment so that girls would not become too
powerful" (177).
 |
The Babysitters (2007), a babysitter transforms her child-
minding business into a call-girl service |
Babysitter: An American History necessarily charts the "fall" of babysitting, as girls became more preoccupied with after-school activities and part-time work in malls than minding children in private homes. While girls have always shown some reticence about sacrificing their social life during their teens, Forman-Brunell includes the perspectives of girl sitters that show that discontent with parents sometimes turns girls away from sitting. This history uses the practice of babysitting as a focal point for mapping changes in girls' education, employment and popular culture across the past 90 years. While babysitting may be a less popular form of employment among American teen girls today, the cultural resonance of the babysitter, however, lingers on, as both a trope of forbidden teen sexuality in pornography and a potential threat to children themselves in the horror genre.
