• Sue Miller's best-selling novel, The Good Mother centers around the problem of reconciling adult sexuality with the demands of motherhood. The book's protagonist, Anna, a recently divorced mother, experiences an intense sexual awakening with her new lover, Leo, an erotic experience which inevitably effects her relations to her daughter, Molly. 
  • The girl's "seemingly complete comfort with Leo was like a benediction on all aspects of the relationship, even the sexual." 

  The two adults are comfortable with both their erotic and parental roles, displaying casual domestic nudity, allowing the young girl to enter the bathroom when they are bathing, even dealing nonchalantly when the girl accidentally stumbles onto them making love. 

  Their relationship sours, however, when her vindictive ex-husband accuses them of "sexual irregularities" and seeks to regain custody of his daughter. The two lovers are crushed by the social work and legal establishments which question them about every aspect of their relationship and pathologizes what they had experienced as a natural and uninhibited sensuality. Repeatedly, they explain and justify their choices as parents, their desire not to inhibit the child's own sexual development, their hopes to have their erotic relations become a natural part of family life. However, they encounter few people, not even their own lawyer, who can see such sexual openness as part of being a "good mother."

  They should have consulted Doctor Spock!

  What gives this contemporary maternal melodrama its power is the degree to which The Good Mother reflects America's shifting understandings of the erotic relations within the family. 

  • On one level, there is something absolutely normal about the sexual experiences Sue Miller describes, many of which could have come directly from the pages of child-rearing guides from the immediate post-war period. 
  • On another level, such frankness and openness ran directly counter to growing public hysteria about sexual molestation and incest, which had, by the early 1980s, charged all forms of sexual exchange between children and adults. 

  Confronted with the fact that Leo has allowed Molly to touch his penis, their lawyer asks, "So you might say you misunderstood the rules." Leo responds angrily, "I thought I understood them." What Leo didn't understand was that the rules were changing. 

  In this essay, I want to look more closely at the social context which led, for a short while, towards a loosening of the "rules" governing sexual contact between children and adults, a changing understanding of children's erotic life and its place within the home.
  

  In the 1960s, a spate of books appeared with titles like The Sensuous Man and The Sensuous Woman. Nobody ever published a book called The Sensuous Child. Yet, the title seems an appropriate description of the utopian erotic fantasies which underlay permissive child-rearing books. The recognition of children's sexuality as a positive, rather than as a negative, force led to a close examination of how parents should respond to and facilitate children's erotic awakenings. Children, so often, in our culture become the bearers of our own utopian fantasies for a better world. In this case, the world which was being envisioned was a world without erotic inhibitions, a world which was open to sexual pleasure and free from guilt and negative self-images.

  By looking closely at children, their bodies and their desires, permissiveness developed an ideology about sexuality which helped to prepare the way for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. 

  • First, sex was rendered "wholesome," natural, biologically necessary, and in the process, old superstitions and moral prohibitions were pushed aside. 
  • Second, sex was stripped of its ties to procreation, with the child's masturbatory exploration of its own body and its pursuit of pleasure assuming positive values in and of themselves. 
  • Third, healthy sensuality extended to the entire body and not simply the genitals. The child's polymorphous eroticism was to be retained in adult life as a new and more vivid form of sexual experience. 
  • Fourth, pleasure was seen as beneficial, necessary, and the body was depicted as knowing its own needs. The body doesn't lie; if it feels good, it can't be bad. 
  • Fifth, all aspects of life, especially learning and creativity, assumed an erotic dimension, as practices of re-direction and sublimation transformed sexual energies into other kinds of activities, and the desire to explore the world was understood as primarily sensual in origins. 
  • Sixth, sexual openness within the domestic sphere was viewed as positive, including some "healthy" interplay between parents and children, yet sex was, by its design, a private act, which should be performed behind closed doors and held in check by public expectations. 

  Morally charged concepts, such as "sin" or "guilt," were gradually displaced by socially-directed concepts, such as "privacy" and "propriety." Most of these conceptions of eroticism would become core tenants of the self-help books or liberation literature of the sexual revolution; they would become the common wisdom of a generation which sought to expand the place of recreational sex within American life and to prolong the period of childhood sexual experimentation into a richer, fuller erotic life as adults. 

  Historians of adult sexuality characterize the immediate post-WWII period in terms of erotic containment, contrasting it with post-WWI moral shifts or the 1960s "Sexual revolution." While researchers are starting to explore the ways that WWII created a new "urgency" in the erotic relations between men and women, paving the way for extra-marital and pre-marital relations , they have tended to depict the late 1940s and 1950s as frigid and frustrated. One recent history of American sexuality explains:

  "Sexual experimentation appeared lost in a maze of suburban housing developments as a new generation took on family responsibilities and raised more children than their parents had. The erotic seemed to disappear under a wave of innocent domesticity."

  Within such an account, parenting is perceived as oppositional to eroticism, as a sublimation or repression of sexual desire. The presupposition is that sexual experimentation occurs primarily outside of marriage, rather than recognizing that shifts in sexual desire and expression might originate within the family. Of course, such accounts leave us with that awkward question: If adult erotic life was so dull, where did all the babies come from?

  Such writers have even less to say about the sexuality of children. Our prevailing conception of childhood innocence excludes children from the realm of adult sexuality. As James R. Kincaid has noted, the modern division between adult and child is defined along such lines: 

  • "The child is that species which is free of sexual feeling or response; the adult is that species which has crossed over into sexuality." 

  Yet, as Kincaid suggests, such distinctions are hard to maintain. 

  • Children remain both subjects and objects of desire. 
  • Children display an inconvenient degree of sexual curiosity and sensual pleasure. 
  • Children are central to the erotic dynamics of families, 
  • and often, become the vehicles for parent's erotic fantasies and desires. 

  Just as Kincaid argues that the Victorian's sentimentalized conception of the innocent child was vitally linked with pedophilic impulses, permissive discourse offered a new conception of the sensuous child, which posed awkward questions about adult sexuality. In constructing a new model of children's sexuality, post-war parents opened new erotic prospects for adults.

  This essay will trace this shifting conception of children's minds and bodies through a close examination of pre- and post-war child rearing guides. 
  - Specifically, I want to explore how conceptions of childhood sensuality and bodily pleasure emerge as positive forces in the post-war literature. 
  - I will be especially interested in the ways that the desire to "liberate" children from inhibitions was seen as forcing adults to be more open about their sexuality and more accepting of their own bodies. 
  - At the same time, in stressing how child-rearing guides spoke to and justified adult erotic interests, we need to also recognize the tremendous anxieties and uncertainties which surrounded this transformation in our social construction of childhood. 

  Parents were being asked to raise their children according to principles dramatically different from those of their own parents. As child study expert Eda J. LeShan wrote, 

  • "Sometimes, because what we have tried to do is strange and new, we take ourselves too seriously and try much too hard. In trying to help their children to be less frightened of their feelings, parents often become more afraid of their own feelings!" 

  Imagining change was one thing; living with that change was something else.

  Regulating the body: the pre-war paradigm

  Writing in 1951, Martha Wolfenstein identified what she saw as a "changing conception of human impulses" within dominant childrearing practices. Newer conceptions of childhood embraced "fun morality," an acceptance of sensation, pleasure, spontaneity as an important part of how humans grow and learn. She saw these new child-rearing practices as standing in stark contrast with the more discipline-centered approach of pre-war authorities. 
  
  Erotic impulses, seen as dangerous and overpowering in pre-war discourse, were reconceptualized as benign, natural and even necessary for children's intellectual growth.
  
  
  • The pre-war paradigm saw the relations between parents and children primarily in terms of discipline and authority; 
  • the post-war model saw parent-child relations increasingly in terms of pleasure and play. 
  • The pre-war paradigm, grounded in behaviorism, stressed the importance of forming habits of behavior necessary for productive life, while 
  • the post-war paradigm, grounded in Freudianism and most often labeled "permissiveness," sought to limit inhibitions upon basic impulses and desires. 
    
    Wolfenstein saw these shifts as linked both to changing understandings of child psychology and to larger social shifts from a culture of production towards a culture of consumption. 
     
  • The pre-war model prepared children for the workplace within a society of scarcity, 
  • the postwar model prepared them to become pleasure-seeking consumers within a prosperous new economy. 

  The dominant pre-war experts owed strong allegiances to behaviorist psychology and to progressive era ideologies. Behaviorism bracketed off questions of interior mental life as ultimately not open to scientific examination, focusing instead on understanding external behaviors. 
  
  According to John Watson, who was both a leader in behaviorism and the best-selling child care expert of the period, humans possessed no instincts, except from a fear of loud noises and a fear of being dropped. Claiming that children are "made, not born," Watson saw parents as like blacksmiths shaping children's malleable minds into "instruments" appropriate for the modern world:

  The fabricator of metal takes his heated mass, places it upon the anvil and begins to shape it according to patterns of his own ... So inevitably do we begin at birth to shape the emotional life of our children ... How few human instruments have ever been perfectly shaped to fit the environments in which they must function!

  Watson's primary metaphors are those of the industrial (or in this case, the pre-industrial) age, centering around the construction and processing of "raw materials" (i.e. children's minds and bodies) into finished products. His book's goal was to make this process more "scientific" by bringing emotional life under "control."

  As practiced by Watson, behaviorism had strong anti-sensual and anti-sentimental underpinnings, involving a distrust of the body as requiring constant discipline. Watson hoped to develop "impartial" children with few emotional attachments and limited erotic interests. Following his advice, middle class mothers moved from breast-feeding and towards bottle-feeding, seeing a carefully calculated formula as offering better nutrition, while showing little interest in the potential loss of the affective bond between mother and child. Parents were urged not to play with their children, since even a few minute's play could cause "nervous disturbances" or "disruptions of regular habits." To avoid such over-excitement and disruption, the outward display of affection was to be minimized:

  Treat them as though they were young adults. Dress them, bathe them with care and circumspection. Let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap .... Shake hands with them in the morning.

  Discipline, control, regularity were essential. By feeding the child on a regular schedule, putting it to bed and picking it up according to the clock, toilet training it at the appropriate age, the parent would instill in their infant good "habits" which would carry into the workworld. As Ellen Richards urges, "Let the furrows be plowed deeply enough while the brain cells are plastic, then human energies will be the right result."

  Watson and his disciples saw child-rearing primarily in terms of preparation for the demands of an increasingly regimented adult world. For Watson, the ideal child is silent and obedient, one 

  Developing good habits required that parental authority be absolute and unwavering, that discipline be systematic and strict. Ada Hart Arlitt's The Child From One to Six (1930) warned that the child "will not know that there are laws that govern the universe unless he knows that there are laws that govern the home." 

  The home was to be regulated not by "mother love" but by the "kitchen timepiece." Parents, Arlitt insisted, should "cut down the number of times that one speaks to the child. Speak only when necessary then expect to be obeyed." The signs of adult authority were to be overt and unmistakable; the separation between the child's sphere and the parents' sphere were rigidly enforced. 

  Children were to be taught a proper relation to hierarchy and authority so they could become workers on the assembly line or employees in the emerging American corporations.

  The danger of "spoiling the child" was ever present and often irreversible. Watson argued that "invalidism" was a direct product of too much nurturing and fondling of children. The ideal of a tightly regulated mind and body could only be maintained if more unruly impulses were checked. Mother's love was 

  • "an instrument which may inflict a never healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter's vocational future and their chances for marital happiness."
    Almost all aspects of daily life posed dangers of sexual excitement or sensual stimulation. Watson insisted, for example, that the bath "should be a serious but not gloomy occasion," objecting to the "useless and foolish" practice of putting toys in the tub: "The object of the bath is to get the child clean and not to entertain it." 

He warned against too much time spent cleaning the "sex organs" since "any continued handling of them may start masturbation on the child's part." Watson advocated allowing a child to take a stuffed toy to bed since it will be "less tempted to explore its own body" but urges this practice be abandoned at an early age, since it also posed dangers. As the child is put to sleep, the parents should check to see "that his hands are placed outside the cover (if he is not a thumb sucker, inside if he is.)" His uncertainty reflects the fact that thumb-sucking posed almost the same dangers as masturbation. For one thing, "the child with its mobile hands gathers germs everywhere" and thus falls victim to disease. The persistent thumbsucker, Watson felt, "doesn't conquer his world. He becomes an 'exclusive,' an auto-erotic." Hands should be bound and constrained at night, if necessary, to stop negative habits from forming.

Watson advocated an even more aggressive campaign against masturbation: Almost from birth watchfulness begins .... Clothing should not be tight or too warm. Covers should not be too heavy or too numerous. Their hands should be watched. Persistent tree climbing, the popular sport of sliding down the banister -- the earlier dangling astride the father's leg -- are all forms of activity that must be scrutinized somewhat.

Subsequently, the campaign extends to verbal instruction specifying the harmful nature of masturbation. Watson reports his horror about a youngster who told him, "Why can't I play with it -- it is mine." Such personal pleasures were antithetical to Watson's desire to accommodate the child to larger social responsibilities. 

Assuming that marital life precluded autoeroticism, parents were to emphatically inform their children that "father or mother does not do this." As with thumbsucking, such sexual interests were seen as demanding "time and energy for doing and learning other things which will help you get along in life." However, the most serious harm of masturbation, in Watson's view, was that "if it is persisted in too long and practiced too often it may make heterosexual adjustment difficult or impossible." (Emphasis in original). Ever vigilant against environmental factors which might lead to homosexuality, Watson argued that participation in the Boy Scouts or the YMCA was "unwise and dangerous" since such exclusive and unhealthy involvement in homosocial relations might also contribute to homosexuality.

Exploring the body: The post-war paradigm

Noises fascinate a child. He can't understand why yells, crashes and thumps disturb grownups. He loves to explore but there are a disheartening number of things he may not touch .... Dirt is pleasant and mud feels good when it is squished between the fingers or toes. Parents don't always see it that way, especially when the stuff gets tracked into the kitchen.

Parents were urged to accommodate these impulses as much as possible, since it was through such activities that children learn about the world around them. Learning was motivated by sensual pleasure and experimentation: 

* "The tiny child wants to touch, feel, and taste everything which he can reach. This is his way of learning. Yet, so often mother follows him around turning aside his interest and his curiosity with 'Don't touch that,' 'Don't put that in your mouth.'" 

Here, two classic permissive themes come together: 

first, a core faith in the body as driven towards pleasure and knowledge (with little distinction drawn between the two) and 
second, the fear of cutting off that natural growth and exploration through adult restrictions. 

While the pre-war model sought to master children's nature, children's bodies were now viewed as largely self-regulating. The child's mind was to be free to develop without adult inhibitions, fears or anxieties. In one Parents magazine article, mothers were urged to allow their children to splash in the bathtub or even paint the bathroom floors and walls with water: "As for the floor, let the youngster help mop it up. It's less important than his healthy emotional development." Spock adopts a similar stance towards playing in the dirt:

"A small child wants to do a lot of things that get him dirty, and they are good for him, too. He loves to dig in earth and sand and wade in mud puddles, splash in water in the washstand. He wants to roll in the grass, squeeze mud in his hands. When he has chances to do these delightful things, it enriches his spirit, makes him a warmer person, just the way beautiful music or falling in love improves an adult. The small child who is always sternly warned against getting his clothes dirty or making a mess, and who takes it to heart, will be cramped. If he becomes really timid about dirt, it will make him too cautious in other ways, also, and keep him from developing into the free, warm, life-loving person he was meant to be"

If the pre-war writers had treated children's minds as clay, which could be shaped and modeled by a strong hand, the post-war model saw children's minds as ripe fruit, which could be bruised and mangled by too much manipulation. Guilt, once introduced, could be a powerfully destructive force. The idea of spoiling a child through too much physical attention, on the other hand, was seen as the baggage of pre-war puritanism.

The threat of childhood diseases and the problems of hygiene which dominated pre-war accounts gave way to a new focus on psychological health and social development. The parent's attention to mental health was as important as its focus on the infant's bodily development. Spock explains:

"Every baby needs to be smiled at, talked to, played with, fondled -- gently and lovingly -- just as much as he needs vitamins and calories, and the baby who doesn't get any loving will grow up cold and unresponsive."

Moralistic concerns about "overstimulation" were displaced by advice which stressed the importance of early and frequent physical contact and stimulation for mental health and social development.

New research pointed to psychological harms resulting from sensory depravation. Children denied physical contact could suffer from marasmus, literally "wasting away," an ailment which some doctors claimed resulted in "more than half of the deaths of babies" in the first year of life. Drawing on such research, Margaret A. Ribble's The Rights of Infants (1943) stressed the "vital importance" of parents respecting and even encouraging children's "sensuousness" with bodily pleasure seen as evidence of a healthy and well-cared-for child. Ribble writes:

"Nature seems to have a purpose in this earliest biological endowment of pleasure, for it gives the child a sense of the goodness of his physical self. It puts the first stamp on the rightness of physical pleasure, which is one of the basic roads to happiness. The child's body is the tool which introduces him to life, and he must feel that it is a good tool. His mental self and his awareness develop hand in hand with the physical .... Erotic feeling is diffuse in a baby, but it is not misplaced and does not imply something evil which must be weeded out."

Almost every aspect of child development is erotically charged in her account, including sucking the mother's breast, rocking in the crib, or taking a bath. In that sense, she resembles Watson except for one vital difference -- she embraces the sensuality he sought to eradicate. The physical development of the child is both motivated by and helps to facilitate masturbatory impulses:

"His tiny fingers soon begin to explore his own body with evident satisfaction, wandering at times into the navel and genital regions. Baby boys are known to have erections from the time of birth. A one-year old likes to be naked, to have admiring audiences when he is bathing and being dressed, he likes to snuggle into bed with his parents."

Such impulses are safe and healthy, according to Ribble, though she sees some danger that parents may over-respond to children's erotic impulses. The problems arise less from children's sexuality which is pure and natural than from adult sexuality, which often seems incapable of marking proper boundaries: The difficulty lies in those parents who themselves are frustrated or lonely in their personal lives and get too much satisfaction from continuous or exaggerated fondling of the child. If they are not aware of the latent eroticism of the infant they can easily overstimulate him, making him more demanding and creating tensions and anxiety.

* "Healthy" parents, on the other hand, can help the child overcome an undue fixation on one part of the body. A "baby who sucks to excess" can be "helped by diverting a part of this tension from the mouth zone to the skin by means of oil rubs, frequent bathing, and gentle massage." 

Mirroring advice which Masters and Johnson and other sexologists were offering for resolving adult "sexual problems," the mother becomes a sensuality facilitator, insuring that the child develops an erotically diffused relationship with its body. Such physical contact between mother and child was "an important stimulus to sensory growth and awareness," continuing the relationship forged in the womb when "the child was like an organ of the mother's body." Ribble sees a full body eroticism as an ideal embodiment of the sensual potential of childhood, while premature genital fixation involves a closing of stimulation that may ultimately stunt mental growth.

Within the highly charged discourse of permissive childrearing, almost all of the child's activities have an underlying eroticism. As Haim G. Ginott writes: Though not in an adult way, the infant's enjoyment of his body and its functions is sexual in nature. ... He handles his limbs and delights in being touched, tickled, and cuddled. These early touchings and strokings are part of his sex education. Through them he learns to receive love.

Parents should not only tolerate self-exploration as a natural aspect of sexual awakening; it should be facilitated, rendered safe and sanitary. 

Ginott acknowledged that the anal phase posed particularly vexing problems for parents, who do not share the child's fascination with the "sight, smell and touching of feces." Parents, however, were urged to overcome their own discomfort in order not to pass inhibitions onto their children: 

* "Special care must be taken not to infect him with disgust towards his body and its products. Harsh and hasty measures may make the child feel that his body and all of its functions are something to dread, rather than to enjoy." 

Like many permissive writers, Ginnot found the solution to this dilemma through sublimation and redirection, seeking "acceptable substitute ways" to "enjoy forbidden pleasures," such as playing with sand, mud, paint, clay and water. Once again, it seems, that in order to prevent sex from feeling dirty, permissive writers made dirt sexy. 

Consistently, Ginott and the other permissive writers operate on the assumption that children's sexuality is more liberated and uninhibited than their parents, who often are depicted as suffering tremendous anxieties and phobias about bodily contact. He writes, 

* "When a little girl discovers her clitoris and confides in her mother that it is her 'best-feeling place,' it takes both faith and diplomacy not to cry out, 'don't touch.'" 

Yet, within this new understanding of children's sexuality, direct genital stimulation, far from a problem, is read as a sign of normal sexual development since "her most pleasurable sensations now come from the genitals rather than from the anus or the mouth."

Benjamin Spock urges parents to simply ignore children's first masturbatory experiences:

"It's better not to give him the idea that he is bad, or that his genital is bad. You want him to go on having a wholesome, natural feeling about his entire body. If he is scared about any part of himself, it draws his attention to it, gets it on his mind, and may have bad results later."

Parental restraints or interventions can stifle the growth of creativity and sensuality, can cause the child to develop negative attitudes towards itself or its body. In Spock's account, one can see signs of the domestic isolation experienced by suburban mothers, perhaps even the sense of loss from being shoved out of wartime jobs and into full-time maternalism: 

* "A worrisome mother is completely wrapped up in her baby. She has no outside interests or pleasures, doesn't keep up her friendships. She just hovers over the child." 

However, Spock's sympathies lie with the child, who becomes an unwilling vehicle for the mother's excess energies and desires: "He seems to absorb some of his mother's tenseness and uneasiness."

The permissive household was organized around the child with the mother taught to read the child's body (its cries, its excrement, its complexion, its gestures) for signs of desires which were to be facilitated and accommodated. The child's body told it when it needed to eat, when it needed to rest, and when it was ready to go potty. 

Spock cites a study by Dr. Clara Davis which demonstrated that children left to choose their own foods would gravitate towards a well-balanced diet. Discussing this study, Spock appeals to a belief that children, like primitive man, like other animal species, has "some instinctive knowledge of what is good for him," knowledge residing in bodily impulses and sensations. Spock rejected the Watsonian notion that good habits can be conveyed through drill or regimentation:

"His bowels ... will move according to their own healthy pattern, which may or may not be regular .... He will develop his own pattern of sleep, according to his own needs .... The desire to get along with other people happily and considerately develops within him as part of the unfolding of his nature, provided he grows up with loving, self-respecting parents ... You can't drill these into a child from the outside in a hundred years."

As far as possible, the permissive parent was to accommodate the home to the child's "creative" and exploratory impulses. Where this is not possible, the child should be taught to sublimate aggressive, destructive or autoerotic impulses towards some more acceptable outlet. The postwar model saw desire as poly-directional and multi-focused; erotic impulses can be cathected onto a range of possible objects. As Spock writes, "the year old baby is so eager to find out about the whole world that he isn't particular where he begins or where he stops." Crib toys are recommended for parents concerned about their children's autoeroticism; masturbation or thumb sucking, the experts suggest, were often a sign of boredom.

Many factors led to this shifting conception of children's sexuality and psychology. The advent of permissiveness was closely linked to the popularization of Freud, with Spock translating psychoanalytic categories, such as the anal phase, into pragmatic advice on how to toilet train your child. Freud's work had encouraged a wider acceptance of children's sexuality and its importance for their development. 

One of Spock's primary accomplishments was to introduce Freudian concepts as "commonsense" while avoiding the confusing and off-putting Freudian vocabulary. Spock's everyday language made these often foreign sounding concepts comfortable and familiar, even for a Cold-War America charged with xenophobia and anti-intellectualism. Post-war parents, aware of the neurosis caused by various forms of repression, sought to raise children free of inhibitions, to insure children's smooth passage through successive stages of sexual development so they could avoid unnatural fixations.

The child-rearing literature is full of advice, for example, on how to cope with the oedipal phase and its attending traumas. Fitzhugh Dodson writes: In a home where the sexual atmosphere is open and healthy and sexual organs are taken casually, a little boy's fears that something might happen to his genitals by way of punishment will soon subside. As a matter a fact, a little boy generally takes considerable pride in his penis and loves to show it off to his parents and peers. If a mother is able to be relaxed about such things herself, she will probably be able to enjoy the naive manner in which a little boy will show off his newfound masculine characteristics.

Mothers might be given concrete advice about how to help a young girl overcome pangs of penis envy: 

* "A mother may help a little girl build up her confidence and self-esteem by explaining to her that while only boys and men have a penis, she has something that boys do not have: a uterus." 

Through frank talk and sexual openness, the parents could help children deal with gender difference and feel more comfortable with their bodies. Sexual openness and comfort were depicted consistently as something parents owed to their children, so the task rapidly became not only to avoid repressing the child's growing sexuality but to overcome their own inhibitions.

The emergence of this ideal of the sensuous child also reflected the popularization of anthropological discoveries about alternative constructions of sexuality. Margaret Mead's work on the Samoans, in particular, offered post-war America an image of a less sexually repressed society, one free of shameful taboos and accepting of erotic experimentation. 

Mead's descriptions of a culture which dealt matter of factly with casual nudity, social masturbation, and sex play (both heterosexual and homosexual) titillated middle America, challenging it to rethink its own taboos, restrictions, and complaints. Consistently, post-war child-rearing experts use the defamiliarizing potential of anthropological observation to contest puritanism and to urge parents to accept natural bodily urges. In his discussion of masturbation, Spock refers to "lands where childhood masturbation is not disapproved of by anyone" as a contrast to American society where "many people consider genital play in childhood wrong, and almost everybody objects to seeing it in public."

Often, as this anthropological literature was adopted by childrearing experts, children became "noble savages" whose natural wisdom and sensuality needed to be protected from the corruptions of adult civilizations. Spock describes children as recapitulating the evolution of human cultures, starting as a single cell organism, working through lower animal forms within the womb, and then, slowly learning to walk, talk, communicate and participate within the culture. As Spock writes, "he's following the whole history of the human race." 

If Spock saw children's intellectual development as natural and historically inevitable, he never-the-less romanticizes the closer relation between man and nature within the more "primitive" stages of human evolution. Spock, for example, appeals to the organicism of "primitive" cultures to justify his advocacy of feeding on demand:

"It will help you to realize how natural a flexible schedule is if you stop and think of a mother, far away in an 'uncivilized' land, who has never heard of a schedule, or a pediatrician, or a cow. Her baby starts to cry with hunger. This attracts her attention and makes her feel like putting him to breast. He nurses until he is satisfied, then falls asleep .... The rhythm of the baby's digestive system is what sets the schedule. The mother follows her instinct without any hesitation."

Just as Spock saw the child as more knowing about its needs than the parents, Spock saw the "primitive" culture as having a more comfortable relationship to the body, unmarred by civilized society's constraints. Mead, herself, went back and forth between examining the child rearing practices of non-western cultures and commenting on her own culture, offering advice to parents through the pages of mass market magazines.

Between parent and child: making the home safe for sex 

Most of the childcare writers found themselves negotiating between extremes in their advice to parents, offering council to parents who had conservative ideas about sex, nudity and the body and to parents who had embraced "more liberated" attitudes towards child sexuality. 

Spock's discussion of masturbation, for example, deals with a range of differing parental views and values, while pushing towards as much tolerance as the parents could comfortably embrace. 

First, there are the "enlightened" parents "who are well aware of the medical view that no physical or emotional harm results from genital play itself in a well adjusted child." These parents 

* "can matter of factly say something to the effect that this is not considered polite in public, just as urinating in public is not considered polite." 

For Spock, the central issue isn't whether or not to masturbate (since this is something all children do), but whether the child should do so in public settings: "It doesn't help a child to bring him up thinking it's all right to offend the sensibilities of the community." Spock responds to conflicting social attitudes by restricting sexual expression to private space, where individual choice reigns, while insisting that collective values must determine public behavior.

On the other hand, Spock addresses parents "whose religion definitely disapproves of genital play or whose upbringing makes them distinctly uncomfortable when they see it in their children." These parents will want to discourage all forms of masturbation "in a considerate way." The parent's sensibilities (which Spock has isolated from any medical or psychological validity) must be respected since "they can't be good parents in other respects if they are uncomfortable with their children in one respect." Moral reasons are clearly secondary to the issue of maintaining a "comfortable" domestic environment, in avoiding stress and tension within the family. In these cases, however, the psychological climate surrounding the regulation of bodily pleasure is important. Spock wants to keep the focus on sexual acts, not on sexual identities:

When parents prohibit running in the street, it's usually done in a manner which clearly shows that it is the act which is disapproved. But sometimes when parents are disturbed by an act which has moral implications ... their anxiety may prompt them to land on the child with such a vigorous condemnation of him -- as a person -- that he doubts his own goodness and fears his parents will stop loving him altogether.

Ultimately, Spock felt, sexual desires are stronger than social prohibitions. Children should not be made to live in fear of their own transgressive appetites: 

* "Even very obedient small children will yield to temptation again on a few occasions (just as almost all adolescents do), which would then result in an increase in the sense of dread or unworthiness."

This need to address multiple sets of family values suggests that American society was undergoing a transition in its sexual attitudes. The core issue became not whether or not sex was good (since it clearly carries positive values within this formulation) but how individual sexual expression can be negotiated in relation to dominant community values. 

Sexual desires are too powerful to fully repress but they can, apparently, be closeted. However, the goal is to avoid conflict about sexuality within the family and within the community and to avoid heaping too much guilt on the child for urges which can not be fully regulated. Even the most liberated parent, however, may be "quite surprised to find how anxiously they react when they unexpectedly find their child involved in it." It is precisely these latent, inbred inhibitions parents were trying to cure in their children by creating a domestic environment where sexuality was experienced as "wholesome" and "natural."

When American sociologists interviewed parents in the late 1950s, they located many different strategies for confronting parental discomfort about infantile masturbation. 

First, parents sought to prevent stimulation that encouraged children to touch themselves. For some parents, this was as simple as altering basic consumer choices such as buying a larger size of shorts (advice echoing Watson's concern that children's dress encouraged self-examination.) 

For other parents, permissive era strategies of redirection and sublimation proved useful. For the most part, the parents avoided direct reference to the act itself, since they felt to "make an issue of it" would give the child "food for thought" and encouraged increased awareness of genitals. As one parent suggested, "I think it is very important for them to hardly realize any difference between different parts of their body." 

Others borrowed sanctions appropriate to other context and applied them to the problem, suggesting children might catch colds if they went without clothing or could hurt themselves if they handled "tender regions" too often. One mother hit the masturbating child with an all purpose question of the era, "do you want me to get a Band-aid to put on it?" 

Echoing Watson's prewar concerns, some parents did express fears that too much childhood masturbation would result in sexual perversion. As one mother explained, "If they (boys) aren't stopped, as they grow older, I think they'd be more girl than boy, to tell you the truth." The recurring concern was that the child would be unable to abandon masturbation for mature heterosexual relations or that a preoccupation with their own genitals would lead to same sex attractions.

"Some people have a greater-than-average urge to make the opposite sex look at them by means of clothes or the lack of them .... Some of them, without realizing it, may enjoy showing off a bit too much to their children."

Young children might be confused or "puzzled" by looking at their parents genitals, prematurely sparking castration anxiety or oedipal rivalries. Young boys, he warned, often feel rivalry with their fathers about penis size, a trait he saw as pervading masculine culture.

At the other extreme were parents who were too self-consciously struggling to overcome their own inhibitions and as such, passed that tension onto their children. As Spock explains, 

* "a modest parent trying to be a nudist for a child's education can't help being an embarrassed nudist and this is more likely to trouble than to help the child." 

If parents have no obligation to perform erotic displays for their children, they do have an obligation not to over-react to the child's own nudism and exhibitionism: 

* "it's not necessary or wholesome for a parent who is discovered by the child, accidentally, in the bathroom or undressed to scream or act as if the child had committed a crime. Overemphasizing the 'badness' of nudity only produces morbid shame and sometimes, morbid curiosity." 

Here, as elsewhere in permissive discourse, the challenge was to accommodate the child's urges and impulses, rather than to impose adult standards or inflict grownup inhibitions.

What comes through powerfully in Spock is that fact that children's sexuality takes shape within the context of adult sexuality and often gets caught within adult erotic urges, rivalries and inhibitions. What Spock didn't tell us, however, is that adult sexuality is also taking shape in relation to children's sexuality, that mothers and fathers were responding to this changing definition of children's erotic urges and using them to justify a fuller range of erotic expression for themselves. Parental obligations were paving the way for sexual liberation.

Selma H. Frailberg's The Magic Years, another popular child-rearing guide of the late 1950s, voices the questions many parents must have confronted:

"If a child is curious about the way in which his mother's or father's body is made, should he be given opportunities to see the parent nude, to satisfy his curiosity directly by looking? ... If we restrict the child's curiosity, if we interfere with these manifestations of sexuality, won't the child feel that there must be something secret and shameful about such things?"

Frailberg recounts a daughter's seduction of her father, with the daughter cast as "open in her curiosity" and "persistent" in her demands for adult display, while the father is described as uncomfortable in responding to such requests, eager to preserve their own privacy, and "uncertain" about the appropriate response. As Frailberg recounts a stereotypical incident:

"She asked repeatedly to visit her father in the bathroom, showed her interest in her father's penis and recently had asked to touch it. Should he permit it? His wife felt that if this action satisfied the child's curiosity, it should be allowed."

Here, we return to the situation described in The Good Mother. 

In a society where debates about incest and child abuse are conducted in every newspaper and talk show, one naturally wants to question whose desires are being expressed through this narrative, who is seducing whom in this story. 

Yet, reading the story in this contemporary fashion denies children's own sexual desires and interests. In this permissive context, those desires are assumed to be "pure" and "healthy," helping to justify the erotic tensions charging this exchange between father and daughter. That both husband and wife are capable of considering such an action points towards the comfort about child sexuality found in these guides. 

Children's sexuality has been safely domesticated, accommodated to the family space, even if it still poses lingering questions about what role adults should play in its development. The challenge becomes how to deal with a potentially embarrassing situation without simultaneously stunting the daughter's erotic growth and development. In a classic example of permissive redirecting of erotic desires, Frailberg advocates substituting open discussions and even illustrations in books for direct exposure to the father's body. Through such means, 

* "we have denied her the privilege of intimacy with her father, but we have not denied her the right to be curious and to ask questions." 

Here, sex information can become the means of controlling direct sexual activity. It is precisely by setting limits that such books are able to express such transgressive desires in the first place.

Wild in the streets

How, for example, should a parent respond to their children's sex play? Sex play between children, Spock argues, can be wholesome: "They are interested in each others' bodies, have the desire occasionally to see and touch them." The primary danger, once again, is that a mature sexuality may corrupt the purity of these initial erotic urges: 

* "Some children are upset and worried by what is done and said, especially if there is an older child, with an unwholesome attitude, leading them on." 

What should be avoided, however, would be too direct an intervention by adults into the situation: "Parents should not become suspicious snoopers or make accusations."

The Gessell Institute at Yale similarly argues that children should not be "blamed" for their mutual sex play, since such experimentation "just naturally occurs if several children are left together unsupervised, with nothing better to do." Rather, the parent should act to interrupt and redirect these erotic impulses into more acceptable objects without displaying shock or displeasure towards what they have witnessed.

For Lee Salk, the central distinction was between heterosexual sex play and same sex interactions. In the case of heterosexual contact between two children, Salk suggests "react as you would to excessive masturbation, but don't be surprised if, in spite of your attitude, your child continues his sexual expression." 

In many ways, creating an aura of the forbidden about such contact "may intensify your child's pleasure and perhaps encourage the idea that sexual pleasure, sexual activity and sexual stimulation have some special significance in life." 

Same-sex contact, on the other hand, posed a much more serious challenge, since the ultimate goal was to generate a more liberated and pleasurable heterosexuality, not to broaden the range of acceptable erotic expressions. Even at the risk of trauma or inhibition, children were turned away from homo-erotic contact, though even here, the origins of the desire are treated as free from negative adult connotations:

"A child's first experience involving intense sexual satisfaction can have a marked influence on his ultimate sexual adaptation .... All things being equal, if your child finds satisfaction with the same sex in his initial activities, there is a tendency to repeat the experience and the particular type of activity becomes usual. In short, if you want to avoid the possible hazards of a homosexual adjustment, take a more relaxed view of heterosexual experiences and a more disapproving stance towards sexual stimulation that involves members of the same sex."

Writing in the early 1970s, at the end of the permissive era, Salk is more overt about the homophobic dimensions of permissive discourse, yet similar fears surface in many childcare guides, which often included detailed discussions about handling sissy boys and tom boys and how to direct children towards gender-appropriate modes of behavior and desire. Homosexuality and transgender conduct were often seen as responses to inappropriate situations and influences on child development, not as originating within the child itself. The "wholesome" sexuality of the child was presumed to be primarily heterosexual, though as this discussion suggests, the child probably had not developed strong inhibitions against homoerotic contacts.

The issue of sex play was further complicated by contradictory adult standards. Within a suburban neighborhood, parents were unlikely to agree about what constituted the appropriate response, yet the problem became a community interest as soon as it involved children from more than one family. As one sociological study reported:

"Mothers are not entirely free agents in the matter of controlling such behavior. Any mother who does not enforce this rule for her children is subject to considerable pressure from other mothers .... If one child persistently behaved in a manner which the other mothers disapproved, the other children were told not to play with him. Knowing that her child would be ostracized if he did not conform to neighborhood standards, a mother might teach him that he had to conform to those neighborhood standards even if his own family disagreed with them."

Parents often contacted each other by telephone, reporting incidents of sex play, and encouraging them to adopt a response appropriate to prevailing community standards. Most of the mothers adopted "an unwritten rule that one mother must not punish another mother's child" and as a result, the problem was reported to parents for future action. 

Suburban America policed erotic life to insure that liberatory impulses did not spill over into the streets, and to teach children the importance of fitting their sexual desires within dominant social patterns. If the impulse towards erotic expression originates within the child (which then influences the parent's behavior towards more openness and acceptance of sexual feelings), then the impulse towards restraint and regulation comes from outside the family, from within the community which reserved the right to override parents who went beyond its norms. As one mother told the researchers:

"I explain to him that we have to live in the group, and we have to have the respect of the group, and unless he accepts some of those things -- which I always explain are ridiculous to me but we still have to observe some of the amenities -- they will not get along well, and they will not be happy."

The regulation of sexuality was sifting from moral prohibitions (which were now seen as superstitious and unscientific) towards social pressures (which were to be respected and observed within an other-directed society). This conflict between public morality and personal sexual expression would frame the battles around erotic life in the 1960s and 1970s.

Conclusion

The 1960s sexual revolution pushed beyond the limits carefully put into place by the permissive writers. Spock and others had seen their goal as healthy, comfortable, sensuality within heterosexual marriage. The breakdown of the family through divorce, the introduction of sexual experimentation outside marriage, the limited acceptance of homosexuality shocked many such writers, who saw these developments as going contrary to the goal of improved American family life. 

Writing in 1969, Spock saw the promiscuous sexual relations of contemporary college students to be "a mechanical, loveless matter," with students finding in each other what earlier adolescents had been content to discover through masturbation. College students 

* "permit themselves to go far in physical intimacy but unconsciously resist yielding to a tender, idealistic love for these same partners." 

The students he had helped to nurture were pulled by "contradictory impulses" -- 

- "the insistent glandular pressure, 
- the growing curiosity, 
- the compulsion to learn how to make out" 
on the one hand and 
- a sense of stepping outside social norms, 
- "uneasiness about losing self-respect" and 
- an instinctive "desire, strong or faint, to reserve intimacy for the beloved." 

Just as children's bodies knew what they were needed, these adolescent bodies knew what they were doing was wrong.

Utopian sexual fantasies, desires and hopes were not simply the product of the Baby Boom generation's rebellion against their parents. They were fantasies which post-war parents had for and about their children. Recognizing their own puritanical upbringings had restricted their ability to give and receive bodily pleasure, they sought a more liberatory world for their children. In doing so, they used their children to open erotic spaces for expression within their suburban homes and within their marriages. 

These parents did not so much desire their children's bodies (as would be implied by a traditional conception of paedophilia); they desired their children's desires. They desired the prospect of "wholesome," uninhibited, pleasure-driven sexuality. 

Yet, they also feared it. They feared it in themselves and in their children. Those contradictions surface repeatedly as Spock and other writers seek to calm (and yet acknowledge) parental fears and to guide readers towards a more progressive approach. 

For a generation having more children and at an earlier age than any other in the 20th century, being a parent was not a retreat from erotic life, but the means by which they came to understand their own erotic feelings and impulses. Themselves the product of a period when child-rearing advice sought to regulate and regiment bodily impulses, they sought to protect and facilitate children's sexual desires. 

At the same time, they sought to redirect those desires into what were viewed as "normal" heterosexual marriages, into socially sanctioned forms of sexuality. Sexuality was held in check by public opinion, not morality or fear. The shift of public opinion, the loss of social checks on erotic expression in the 1960s, led to a backlash against permissive understandings of children's sexuality and a new definition of what constituted a "good mother."