Babysitter
Subtitle: an American history
By: Miriam Forman-Brunell.
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 315
ISBN-13: 9780814727591
Subjects: Babysitting -- United States -- History -- 20th century
First sentence: “A good babysitter is hard come by,” explained a reporter on CBS News
during the summer of 2007. A year earlier, a mother blogged that
“babysitters seem to care nothing about kids and charge $16 an hour to
watch TV and text message their boyfriends.” And then, of course, reported
Living Safely magazine in the 1990s, there were the “horror stories:
parents arriving home to find their sitter has thrown a party, or gone to
one. . . .” Intrinsic to such typical complaints is a longing for the golden
age of babysitting when teenage girls were both pleasant and plentiful. Yet
the view that babysitters today are hard to take and even harder to find
is not new. In a letter to “Dear Abby” in 1969, one woman described the
batch of hungry sitters “who ate the fridge to the bare walls” and disparaged
the one with “the gall” to raid the “deep freeze.” What is unknown to
these recent observers is that a prior idyllic age of babysitting is more apparent
than real: distressed parent-employers have suspected their sitters
of doing wrong ever since the beginning of babysitting nearly one hundred
years ago. In fact, parent-employers have been complaining about babysitters
since the advent of the “modern” American teenage girl, a debut that
coincided with the creation of babysitting, the job that defaulted to white,
middle-class, female adolescents by virtue of their sex, race, class, and age.
Description: It’s Friday night and Mom and Dad want to have a little fun together on the town. But who can they call to watch the kids? For nearly a century, it’s been the babysitter. Miriam Forman-Brunell brings critical attention to the ubiquitous, yet long-overlooked, role of the babysitter in American history.

Drawing on her extensive research on the history of girls’ culture and employing a broad range of vibrant sources, Forman-Brunell analyzes the figure of the babysitter in the popular imagination. In her quest to gain a fuller picture of this largely uncharted cultural phenomenon, she amassed a wealth of popular artifacts and texts from which to draw: the Babysitter’s Club book series, songs such as the Lunachicks’ "Babysitters on Acid" and the 1960s hit "Baby Sittin’ Boogie," the Little Lulu cartoons, Barbie doll babysitting accessories, the suburban horror movie The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, urban legends, magazines, newspapers, television shows and more. What emerges is a fascinating and multifaceted history.

Forman-Brunell shows that in addition to the obvious fears involved in leaving one’s children in another’s care, babysitters have often been targets for social, cultural, generational, and sexual anxieties, and thus present a fascinating mirror for American society. She also delves into the world of the babysitters, gaining important new perspectives on how the American teenage girl responded to the roles and responsibilities placed upon her throughout the decades.

Maligned as incompetents, airheads, home-wreckers, and worse, babysitters have played an important part in the history of the American home and workforce. With this comprehensive, insightful, and even-handed study, they finally get the attention they deserve.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The beginnings of babysitting; title: Suburban parents and sitter unions; title: The bobby-soxer babysitter; title: Making better babysitters; title: Boisterous babysitters; title: Vixens and victims in soft porn and horror movies; title: Sisterhoods of sitters in the 1980s; title: Coming of wage at the end of the century; title: Quitter sitters : the fall of babysitting.