Speaker
Kate Sheese
Title
Valuing Sympathetic Insight: G. Stanley Hall, Child Study, and the National Congress of Mothers
Abstract
As interest in child study peaked in the United States near the end of the 19th century, the somewhat contested field became the focal point of the efforts and energy of vastly disparate groups of people. Although the participation of “non-professionals” was one of the child study’s most contentious characteristics, a number of psychologists actively engaged the cooperation of interested parties outside the professional discipline. This paper explores Hall’s participation in the first annual session of the National Congress of Mothers (NCM) as an example of how the engagement of women in child study was often a simultaneous act of inclusion and exclusion. Specifically, Hall’s address highlights how engaging women’s participation in child study based on idealized maternal qualifications implicitly drew professional boundaries and gave material form to gendered conceptions of ‘expert’ and ‘amateur.’ In the context of the first annual session of the NCM, his paper serves as an illustration of some of the ways collaboration with mothers’ groups helped to shape psychology’s institutional structure, not only in delineating professional boundaries, but also by transforming the discipline’s social relationship with the public sphere. It also highlights the ways in which psychology and child study, in turn, shaped constructions of motherhood, casting women in the role of consumer, raising the stakes of competent mothering, and standardizing an idealized, racially-biased norm of motherhood.
Directions
Alexandra Rutherford's