Ask an Academic: Babysitters as Bad Girls

Ask an Academic: Babysitters as Bad Girls

posted by: Andrea Walker



Miriam Forman-Brunell is a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the author of “Babysitter: An American History,” which has just been published by New York University Press. The book considers the history of the babysitter in American culture, and why she has so frequently been perceived as a dangerous figure. An edited version of my conversation with Forman-Brunell appears below.

Why babysitting?

Babysitting has served as a formative work experience for the majority of American girls since its emergence in the nineteen-twenties. For nearly a century, the babysitter has been a prominent figure in our communities and also in the cultural imagination. But despite the fact that babysitting usually takes place without major problems, the sitter has often been portrayed, in urban legend and in the popular media, as causing danger or courting it.

Why have so many people had it in for the poor babysitter?

Teen-age girls have been contesting traditional gender ideals in highly visible ways since the nineteen-twenties. The babysitter has conveniently served as a lightning rod for adults’ uncertainties about what the limits of girls’ autonomy and empowerment should be. These uncertainties have played out in the media: for instance, unease about the influence of feminism, the sexual revolution, and the counter culture on girls’ behavior in the nineteen-sixties led to depictions of delirious babysitters who endangered children and slutty sitters who destabilized marriages in soft-core-porn novels. In the nineteen-seventies, maniacs in horror movies like “Halloween” and “When a Stranger Calls” sought vengeance on teen-age girls unwilling to curb their pursuit of personal independence. In the eighties, it was the babysitters themselves who turned murderous in made-for-TV movies, a fantasy created, perhaps, in response to girls’ uninterrupted determination to achieve authority and self-sufficiency.

But then why did parents continue to employ young girls, if they had so many anxieties?

They needed someone to watch the children (and at an affordable rate). Since the twenties, there’s been a steady decline of other child-care providers, such as household servants and parents and kin. The expansion of suburban communities, the influence of feminist ideals, and a rising divorce rate that drew more women into the formal economy also played a role. Unlike house cleaners, grandparents, and others who had historically provided childcare, teen-age girls became more readily available. While the rise of a commodity-based youth culture provided girls with a financial incentive to babysit, the expectation that, as females, girls are naturally maternal diminished parent-employers’ apprehensions about hiring teen-age girls.

What about the “Baby-sitter’s Club” series, which I thought was full of responsible young women?

The “Baby-sitters Club” featured highly capable pre-adolescent “super sitters,” as did a new generation of babysitter manuals for girls and advice literature aimed at parent-employers in desperate need of sitters during the baby boom-let of the nineteen-eighties. As teen-age girls left babysitting for service-sector jobs in malls, helpful pre-adolescent sitters became idealized in a girls’ popular culture that sought to acculturate a workforce of youthful sitters. Unlike the many transgressive teen-age babysitters in made-for-TV movies of the era, perky pre-adolescents were depicted as more endearing than dangerous.

What surprised you in the course of your research?

I was surprised to learn of the number of boy babysitters before the nineteen-sixties, and that they were depicted as more competent, reliable, and responsible than girls at babysitting. From the Great Depression to the New Millennium, Henry Aldrich, Donald Duck, Archie Andrews, Tom & Jerry, Carl the Dog, and numerous other males who babysat on radio and TV shows, in cartoons, and in children’s books, were unfailingly portrayed as helpful heroes. As such, they bolstered the more unfavorable view of teen-age girls as irresponsible, irrational, and unreliable, despite the fact that, in reality, teen-age girls are the least likely to perpetrate crimes against children in their care.

What also surprised me was the realization that girls have felt more ambivalence than enthusiasm about the job that has been the gateway to female employment in the twentieth century. In addition to deliberately turning down offers to babysit for those who gave them a “hard time,” girls in postwar America drew up manifestos and established babysitter unions that largely succeeded in eliminating housework from the field. More typically, babysitters drew upon teen-girl culture to both adjust to and contest unfavorable working conditions. The ultimate evidence of sitters’ dissatisfaction over the past century has been the frequency with which girls faced with other options turned their backs on babysitting.

From: The New Yorker