history of baby care
In this chapter we examine childcare literature as one source of information on how specialized knowledge was imparted to parents in the first decades of the twentieth century. We have concentrated on advice available in Britain between the two World Wars and have deliberately selected literature which was sufficiently popular to justify several reprintings. 'The child' in this literature is generally, but not... more
Cathy Urwin was at the Cambridge University Child Care and Devlopment Group when she wrote and presented this
War in the Nursery Denise Riley. Virago 1983 ISBN 0-86068-273-0
£5.50. 250 pages.
This chapter draws on research interviews with forty mothers of infants to illustrate the influence of certain ideas from the psychology of child development (located historically), not only on current orthodoxies on what women ‘should’ do (the discursive aspect) but on women’s own aspirations and desires (the subjectivity aspect). [In this respect it is psychosocial ‘avant la lettre’.] Urwin draws critically on the post-structuralist... more
