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Richard Glover's new book on Australian parenting history is out this week, exploring how past experts clung to the certainties of their age, from euphemisms about sex to assumptions of middle-class households.
Richard Glover's new book on the history of Australian parenting is out this week, following a year or two of research into how past experts marched to the same drum.
Conventional Attitudes and Repeated Certainties
In every period, nearly every expert copied each other's ideas and used the same phrases, making beliefs into certainties by endless repetition, usually on the basis of nothing at all. Glover came across a letter written by Charles Darwin during his trip to Australia, found halfway through the Oxford Book of Australian Letters. Darwin described how he and a friend went with a gun in search of the Platypi and actually killed one.
He called it a great feat to be at the death of so wonderful an animal. Darwin, famous for upending humanity's certainties, was still imprisoned by the conventional attitudes of his time, when killing animals was fun. In every period, most people cling to the common attitudes of the age. When writing about sex, the guidebooks of the past always used euphemisms.
Euphemisms in Early Parenting Guides
The womb was a wonderful room, according to a Sydney parenting guide from 1913. The vagina, in 1941, was the hallway of life. Sex, according to a 1968 pamphlet from Australia's Father and Son Welfare Movement, was the means whereby a man and a woman can get together with God in His ongoing work of creation. In the State Library of NSW, Glover stumbled into the company of a Sydney doctor with a wonderful name: Gertrude Buzzard Dunlop.
Her 1928 guidebook lists correct names for anatomical features, including the clitoris, which she describes as the seat of erotic sensation. In a book mainly about breastfeeding, weaning and childhood ailments, she says women should be more active participants in sex, with the aim of always achieving orgasm. The early parenting experts also assumed every child lived in a middle-class home.
Middle-Class Assumptions in Child Rearing
If an example is given of a father's workplace, it is in the city or at the office, never in the factory or even on the farm. In the Catholic guidebook The Choice of a Husband, published in 1964, the father returns home each evening exhausted from a day spent with professional contacts in a harsh and austere business world. That is why he needs his wife to be soft and loving as he walks in the door.
Mother and Child assumes the household has a cook and a maid, and at one point even mentions the servant's bell and the need to hang onto staff. She also sounds a warning about the evil habit of the solitary vice, speculating that it often takes hold after the child has enjoyed the sensation caused by sliding down bannisters in one's two-storey house, perhaps not a hobby available in every home.
Most writers assume there will be a separate bedroom for each child, and some insist on a playroom as well. A playroom can be regarded as a necessity, according to a 1932 booklet by Victoria's Miss Mary Lush, proving yet again you cannot be an Australian parenting expert if you do not have an eye-catching name. It is also anticipated that every house will have running water, electricity and refrigeration, in an era before such things were commonplace.
Meanwhile, others blamed the decline in table manners on the practice of allowing one's maid to supervise the children's mealtimes. Again, not a problem faced in every home.
Vera Scantlebury Brown's Practical Empathy
Then, just as with Gertrude Buzzard Dunlop, there is a thrill when you encounter someone willing to break ranks. Melbourne's Vera Scantlebury Brown had a nice house in Hawthorn with a maid and a nanny but also understood not everyone lived that way. In her 1947 guidebook for nurses, she gave various formulas for modifying cow's milk when breastfeeding had proved impossible.
She recommended adding lactose, derived from milk, but noted that cane sugar is not so bad and has the advantage of cheapness where this factor must be considered. She also gave details of how to construct a Coolgardie safe, a low-tech way of keeping milk cold in households that lacked electricity. She could imagine the life led by others, a feat of empathy managed by so few of her fellow writers and officials.
Whether you are reading a letter from Charles Darwin or a parenting guide from a century ago, you are often left to wonder about the certainties of our own time and whether you are one of those rare people who find a way to march to a different drum.
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brisbanetimes:This story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
Charles Darwin Letter Parenting Guidebooks Gertrude Buzzard Dunlop Vera Scantlebury Brown
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