Children's Literature

Mothers Fight Back: Feminists Critique Children's Literature

Fisher's "Second Sex, Junior Division" takes the Women's Liberation Movement into the nursery just as educator and author Nancy Larrick's landmark 1965 Saturday Review article on "The All-White World of Children's Literature" reconsidered children's books in relation to the growing civil rights movement. In "The All-White World of Children's Literature," Larrick, surveying hundreds of recent books, found a striking lack of racial diversity in the field. Her article set off a flurry of efforts to tackle the problem, including initiatives at many publishing houses. Her article also helped inspire a new organization, the Council on Interracial Books for Children (Mickenberg 273–82). These efforts affected publishing and school textbooks in important ways, but they were clearly inadequate, as the more recent We Need Diverse Books movement would suggest. A similar pattern followed Fisher's article.

Although "The Second Sex, Junior Division" was not the first article on sexism in children's literature, it was the first in a mainstream venue, and its author was an important feminist. A February 1970 New York Times article about Women's Liberation described Fisher, editor of the feminist literary magazine Aphra, as an "angry writer" whose work typified the burgeoning movement (Bender). This article had predicted, correctly, that "in the immediate and foreseeable future, America will be assaulted with the subject of women's liberation at the news stand and at the office, in the bookstore and in the living room" (Bender). And as with the reaction to Larrick's 1965 Saturday Review article, after Fisher's "Second Sex, Junior Division," essay, dozens of pieces began appearing in mainstream magazines; scholars began conducting studies and publishing their findings in peer-reviewed journals; and feminists began organizing groups to influence publishers and school boards. Most importantly, publishers and educators began paying attention to sexism in children's books. [End Page 52]

Perhaps the most visible sign of the turning tide was in the inaugural issue of Ms. Magazine. It included an article-cum-manifesto, "Down with Sexist Upbringing!" by Letty Pogrebin (a member of the Ms. editorial board) and what would become a regular Ms. Magazine column on child-rearing. It also included the first "Stories for Free Children" feature: "Marcia and Marvin" was written by Merriam, who was well known for her feminism and, increasingly, her non-sexist children's literature.² By the fall of 1972, Free to Be You and Me—a record album, book, and television special, which actress Marlo Thomas launched in consultation with Pogrebin—made non-sexist material for children au courant.³

Given the response that pieces like Fisher's New York Times article provoked, it might appear that the link between sexism and children's literature, as well as the potential of children's books to challenge gender socialization, was a recent discovery. Indeed, Pogrebin told me, "In 1972, the idea that you'd have a children's section in a radical feminist magazine was like cognitive dissonance. I think we made a statement merely by the fact of its presence." Never mind that most people would classify Ms. as a liberal rather than a radical feminist magazine, or that there was discussion about children's socialization among women's liberation activists before Ms. and even before Fisher's New York Times piece. Indeed, Fisher herself acknowledges this in that essay.⁴ Ms. and Free to Be were, in fact, groundbreaking as mainstream publishing ventures and demonstrated that ongoing efforts had finally gained real traction. But Fisher, and those she inspired, were building on a growing movement rather than initiating it. Fisher's reference to Merriam's Mommies at Work suggests much earlier origins than Women's Liberation.

Fisher's very title, "The Second Sex: Junior Division," with its allusion to Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 philosophical treatise, points to her effort's engagement with a longer legacy of feminist philosophy and activism. Even so, her title suggests that a "junior division" within feminism is the product of a new generation's inquiry. Given these dynamics, it is notable that a book Fisher highlights, Mommies at Work—which is also mentioned in just about every other 1970s article and bibliography on sexism in children's literature and even cited in Congressional hearings around the Women's Educational Equity Act in 1973 ("S. 2518")—was published as a picture book in 1961 and, in a slightly different form, in 1955 in Charm: The Magazine for Working Women. As Knopf editor Virginie Fowler remarks in a 1971 letter to Merriam, "the book is really getting a lot of attention and seems to [End Page 53] be the banner waving book and the shining example." This "shining example" of non-sexist children's literature was originally penned at the height of what Betty Friedan would call the "feminine mystique" and also during the era of the Red Scare.

Fisher's article helps clarify why Mommies at Work struck such a chord in 1970—much more, in fact, than it did when originally published. Fisher's critique of contemporary literature for young children is extensive, encompassing not just books she happened to find on shelves but also award winners, and attending to characterization as well as visual depictions and the placement of images on pages. Fisher found that even books about animals and inanimate objects tended to reinforce male dominance and female submissiveness, or at least the idea that men and boys are more interesting, have more fun, do more important things, and are more valued socially: "Elephants, bears, lions, tigers, are male, or, as in the Babar books, isolated females are shown in the company of a majority of males. In the veld it is the female lion who does all the work; in the picture-book world she doesn't exist" (6). If they got to be protagonists, female animal characters tended to reinforce negative gender stereotypes, she found. For instance, "in 'Rosie's Walk' by Pat Hutchins, a hen walks unscathed and unnoticing through all kinds of dangers—reinforcing the stereotype that nothing ever happens to she's. Sylvia the Sloth is the heroine of a not unpleasing book. Somehow the female animals tend to be those whose names are synonyms of derogation. Petunia the Goose, Frances the Badger. …" Fisher adds, "I suspect the choice of these animals reflects the low esteem in which women are held." She notes that even the machines in picture books, with the exception of Mike Mulligan's steam shovel, MaryAnn, are male (6).

Fisher suggests that the problem is even more dramatic in books about African Americans. Noting the way in which Women's Liberation (and earlier women's rights movements) followed on the heels of efforts to improve the situation of African American men, Fisher argues: "Just as black men achieved enfranchisement long before black or white women, so in the picture book world have blacks achieved integration and representation for themselves without a corresponding integration for the female, black or white" (6). Fisher's initial conflation of "blacks" with Black males was common in discourse of the time and so perhaps understandable, but continuing efforts today to create more racially diverse children's literature suggest that Fisher was either over-optimistic or misguided in proclaiming that picture books [End Page 54] had "achieved integration and representation" for African Americans or even for African American men. Similarly, if she overestimated the extent to which picture books had been racially integrated by 1970, she also could be said to be somewhat naïve about earlier feminist efforts and the challenges that foremothers like Merriam had faced in creating anti-sexist work in an era of extremely entrenched gender roles. Though she calls Mommies at Work "commendable," Fisher nonetheless finds it "highly apologetic, ending as it does by concluding that whatever else they do with their days, we find that 'all Mommies loving the best of all to be your very own Mommy and coming home to you,' gives it away" (44, emphasis in original). She adds, "[W]e don't feel the need to say about Daddy that he loves his children more than his work. Couldn't Mommy matter-of-factly like working and baby, too, as I'm sure many do?" (44). Fisher claims that Merriam's message to children here is "it's all right to work, but only if your work is subordinated to your role as mother" (44). I will return to this point later; for the moment, remember that in 1970, feminists could find no other picture book that dealt explicitly with working mothers as a theme.

The norm in children's books was decidedly sexist in 1970, despite efforts by people like Merriam at least a decade earlier. Indeed, sexism was so pervasive that a book likely created as a parody earned the greatest ire from feminists, Fisher among them, who either did not get the joke or did not find it funny. I'm Glad I'm a Boy! I'm Glad I'm a Girl! (1970) by Whitney Darrow, Jr., a longtime cartoonist for the New Yorker and a humorist known for his biting satire, includes two-page spreads showing child-like drawings of children dressed up in costumes, accompanied by text such as, "Boys are doctors. Girls are Nurses" or "Boys are Policemen. Girls are Meter maids," and so on. You'd think feminists would recognize the joke (or the dig, whichever it was) but they were not the only ones to take the book seriously. A short blurb in Early Childhood Education (a peer-reviewed journal) describes "simple drawings with line captions designed to help the young child discover his or her appropriate sex role" (Harrington). This reviewer acknowledges that "followers of Kate Millet [a prominent feminist] may take issue with some of the divisions of duties." But a potential feminist critique is quickly subsumed by a summation of the book as "Good fun and easy reading." In other words, whatever the author's original intent, the book tapped into influential and deeply problematic attitudes.⁵

But, thanks to Women's Liberation, people were suddenly questioning the ways in which children's reading affected gender socialization. [End Page 55] Dozens of magazine and newspaper articles were published in the wake of Fisher's piece, echoing its findings. For instance, in "Little Miss Muffet Must Go: A Mother Fights Back," published in Woman's Day in June 1971, Marion Meade surveyed children's book offerings and came to similar conclusions as Fisher. As Meade puts it, if the Victorian Miss Muffet was "helpless, easily frightened, and dreadfully dull," her "modern-day sisters are not permitted to get off their tuffets, and most of them don't even have enough self-confidence to tell a spider to buzz off" (64). Citing Mommies at Work as the lone exception to a pattern, she adds, "despite the fact that over twenty-two million children under eighteen have mothers employed outside the home, you'd never guess it from picture books" (64).

Early Organizing for Non-Sexist Books

Although one can find many exposés from the early 1970s bemoaning the sexist character of children's literature, activists in the Women's Liberation Movement had by that time already begun working to transform the field. Publishers Weekly (PW), perhaps inspired by Fisher's article, surveyed presses in the summer of 1970, asking juvenile editors how Women's Liberation was affecting their lists ("Subtle Denigration"). Among 38 children's book editors, nearly all of whom were women, sixteen said Women's Liberation was affecting their lists. And quite a few editors said they felt a new self-consciousness when reading manuscripts. For instance, Jean Reynolds, an editor at McCall's, said the movement "may have made her 'unconsciously more careful about watching for silly mothers' in stories" (76). Of course, it is notable that an editor asked about "Women's Liberation" in children's literature would presume that simply looking at representations of mothers was an adequate response. Holt's editor claimed staff at that house "try to never force characters into preconceived molds" (76). Several editors were able to cite children's books or entire series that had been launched directly in response to the women's movement, such as Crowell's Women in America series (started in 1969), with books about Rachel Carson, Emma Goldman, and others. Notably, the editor of Crowell's series, Milton Meltzer, was, like Eve Merriam, a veteran of the Old Left and a founding member of the Council on Interracial Books for Children. Indeed, the Council's founders were all in some way connected to the Old Left (Mickenberg 273–282). The PW report on Women's Liberation and children's books concludes by—surprise—noting that Random House was planning to issue a trade edition of Mommies at Work. [End Page 56]

It should be emphasized that the most dramatic changes in publishing around this issue were inspired by active critique and prodding from feminists. A group of women calling themselves Feminists on Children's Literature, inspired by the earlier example of the Council on Interracial Books for Children, began meeting in the summer of 1970 at the New York City apartment of movement activist and author Alix Kates Shulman, whose burgeoning feminism was reshaping the way she viewed everything in her life (Shulman email). Shulman had already written two children's books by the time she discovered Women's Liberation; newly awakened, she jumped at the chance to contribute to Crowell's new "Women of America" series with a biography of Emma Goldman. She was working on To the Barricades: The Anarchist Life of Emma Goldman—as well as what would become her breakout bestseller for adults, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen—when she "sent out word through the movement—all word of mouth—that anyone interested in working on children's literature/sexism should let me know, and we'll meet at my apartment" (Shulman, Interview). A group began meeting regularly, with more people joining. Participants agreed to read various kinds of works (picture books, middle grade readers, and so on) and report back. Early on in their efforts, this group joined forces with Women on Words and Images, which had grown out of a Princeton, New Jersey, National Organization of Women (NOW) chapter and focused their efforts on school textbooks (Miles, "Harmful").

Women involved in the work of challenging sex stereotypes in children's reading did not necessarily see their effort as a radical feminist undertaking; they wanted changes in the mainstream. When Pat Ross, who worked in the editorial department at Knopf, joined Feminists on Children's Literature, she had already begun creating her own bibliography of children's books "depicting girls and women in children's books functioning as whole human beings with life's choices open to them—not merely as little girls who never climb trees and compete, and mothers in aprons while dad reads his business journal." Ross had been introduced to Mommies at Work by her colleague at Knopf, Virginie Fowler, who'd gotten wind of Ross's "women's liberation persuasions" (Ross, letter to Merriam). Ross, delighted to discover Mommies, immediately wrote to Merriam to ask for her input on the list she was creating. In her letter, Ross explains, "I don't see this 'image' we're looking for as totally 'feminist' (i.e., Janey burns her trainer bra at the local daycare center) but rather 'human'; and in partnership with other human beings, be they male or female." Describing what kinds of books she [End Page 57] has in mind, she offers, "I immediately think of Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret… and, of course, Mommies at Work."

After doing research, women working on these efforts began publicizing their findings. Feminists on Children's Literature (later renamed Feminists on Children's Media), representing a combination of Shulman's group and Women on Words and Images, presented their findings at a meeting of the Authors Guild and the Children's Book Council in October 1970. This led to a write-up in the New York Times and more presentations at meetings of the American Library Association and the Modern Language Association, as well as at local schools and libraries. They also published a discussion of their findings in School Library Journal in January 1971 and reprinted this discussion in the 1973 collection, Radical Feminism. And they created a 47-page booklet, Little Miss Muffet Fights Back: Recommended Non-Sexist Books About Girls for Young Readers (1971).

Little Miss Muffet basically affirms Ross's vision by including classics like Pippi Longstocking, Mary Poppins, and One Morning in Maine, as well as more unconventional books like Suzuki Beane (about a girl beatnik); Harriet and the Promised Land, a picture book with spare text and vivid images by the African American "expressive cubist" painter and activist Jacob Lawrence; and Virginia Hamilton's ghostly and powerful Zeely, along with Mommies at Work and Harriet the Spy. By the time Little Miss Muffet Fights Back was revised and reprinted in 1974, the booklet's original edition had already sold over 25,000 copies.

Other women went beyond critique. A consciousness-raising group in Chapel Hill North Carolina, Group 22, decided to "write, edit, and publish" children's books themselves, starting a press they called Lollipop Power. Other new presses, including the Feminist Press (launched in 1970, publishing for both children and adults) soon followed (Evans 12).⁶ Sara M. Evans, a member of Group 22 and, at the time of its founding, a graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina, wrote the press's first book, Jenny's Secret Place (1970), "sitting at a friend's kitchen table while three babies were napping." Now an acclaimed historian of women, Evans still has Jenny's Secret Place on her vita (Evans, Interview).

"We thought of upending sex roles as a very radical vision," Evans recently remarked, acknowledging that a perusal of the early books they published "reveals that our feminism was not markedly different from any liberal feminist group" (Interview). This might have been due to their group's relative homogeneity: "brought together through [End Page 58] friendship, school, and work networks," women in Group 22 were all "white, college-educated, some of us veterans of the civil rights and student movements" (Evans, Tidal Wave 12). Lollipop Power coordinated with the Feminist Press; the former concentrated on picture books while the latter published works for older children.

As Evans's retrospective comments would suggest, women who felt like trailblazers in the early 1970s had some blind spots. For instance, failing to recall the "Mommies who are doctors" in Merriam's book, Fisher insists in her 1970 Times exposé that "though there have been woman doctors for over a century, there is not a single woman doctor to be found" in children's literature (44). Similarly, Feminist Press founder Florence Howe, upon publishing activist Leah Heyn's book on Elizabeth Blackwell, The Challenge to Become a Doctor (1971), would call Heyn's text "the only book for children in the English language on a woman doctor" (Murray). In fact, a juvenile biography of Elizabeth Blackwell by Rachel Baker, who had also written biographies for children of Dorthea Dix and Maria Mitchell, was originally published in 1944 by Julian Messner, which had a record of publishing left-wing authors. Baker's The First Woman Doctor had been through multiple editions and was reprinted in 1971 by Scholastic, following a 1968 edition by Messner.

Ahead of Fisher's article but in a forum with much more limited circulation, in the fall of 1969, Heyn had authored a critique of sexist children's literature for the inaugural issue of Women: A Journal of Liberation, which focused on nature vs. nurture in sex role socialization. Heyn admits in her article that she began researching "The Role of Women Portrayed in Children's Literature" as an afterthought: Her young daughter had asked why there were no women in a book about skyscrapers and the engineers, architects, builders, and bankers who created them. Pointing out the secretary in one picture, Heyn found herself explaining with embarrassment and frustration why this was the only woman depicted (Heyn 23).

Heyn maintains that women are portrayed in positive ways in children's books, but almost exclusively in traditionally feminine roles. The typical woman in children's literature circa 1969, Heyn writes,

keeps her house neat and clean but never constructs anything (not even the doghouse). When she does go out, it is to the store or to the dentist, never to a community planning meeting or union meeting. She is a wise, peaceful, loving person but never extends this compassion to the outer world—she is never seen talking [End Page 59] about current issues, nor registering voters, nor demonstrating for freedom.

(25)

But Heyn acknowledges in her article that women are as much to blame as men when it comes to perpetuating a limited sense of possibility for girls. In the children's book field, for instance, women play a major role at all levels, she notes. Thus, "women writers and illustrators are as guilty of male chauvinism as men authors" (24). (Incidentally, or not, the term "male chauvinism" was directly drawn from communist discourse, growing out of a longer-running effort to combat "white chauvinism.") In looking for material that broke out of the typical mold, Heyn found only one book worthy of praise: Mommies at Work. She writes about it in language that echoes the discourse of the New Left, noting, "There is one young children's book that cracks the ice on sex channeling" (25, emphasis in original). (Student radicals discovered the word "channeling" in a 1965 Selective Service memo discussing means of effectively directing manpower into the military and subsequently adopted the term as evidence of ways powerful forces manipulate society.) Noting the range of places ("in tall office buildings, in spread-out ranches, radio repair shops, supermarkets"), professions ("dancers, writers, teachers, doctors, cashiers in banks"), and activities (from building bridges to splitting atoms to building cars to stitching baseball gloves) that mothers in Merriam's book do, Heyn asserts, "If this book was an eye-opener to my kids, it was a downright revelation to me" (25).

For her part, Heyn was eager to learn from (left) feminist foremothers. Within a year after publishing her article on women in children's literature, Heyn was in contact with Merriam, inviting her to the meeting that would result in the founding of the Feminist Press. In a letter to Merriam, she writes, "Though I have never met you before I feel as if I am writing to an old friend. Your poetry, Mommies at Work, and slim book of poetry biographies [Independent Voices] are an important part of my and my children's reading life" (Heyn, 23 July 1970 letter). Heyn would go on to consult Merriam and even to quote from Merriam's poetic sketch of Blackwell in Independent Voices (Heyn, 5 May 1971 letter). Heyn's comment about children's literature's failure to show women as political activists is suggestive. Even so, generally speaking, the revival of Mommies at Work failed to acknowledge that the book, like its revival, had emerged in the context of earlier social movements, especially the "left-feminism" characteristic of some women in the Communist Party.⁷ [End Page 60]

Initial Release and Reaction to Mommies at Work

When reprinted for a new audience in the 1970s, Mommies at Work was sold as a book ahead of its time. A press release for a Random House reprint declares, "Long before the 'sisters' publicly took off their brassieres or zapped the Miss America contest in Atlantic City, a liberated lady named Eve Merriam wrote a book for children called Mommies at Work." This press release, which also quotes Heyn's comment on "sex channeling," proudly notes, "the bloom of the movement has made Mommies at Work all the rage of liberated mommies at campuses" (Random House).

In a 1970 statement about the book, Merriam claims she originally wrote Mommies "out of frustration" because "I couldn't find a single book that related to our family pattern" (Merriam "Explanation"). The mother of two young sons (born in 1949 and 1950) at the time of her writing, Merriam "worked in an office yet all the mothers depicted [in children's books] stayed at home in ruffly aprons and baked cakes constantly" ("Explanation"). Significantly, unlike Betty Friedan, who borrowed feminist insights, without tribute, from Merriam (Coontz 144), and who minimized her own labor-feminist past (Horowitz), Merriam never claimed to have been "just a housewife," as the saying goes. But in 1955, Merriam's career mom perspective was deemed irrelevant to child readers: apparently, a juvenile editor rejected Merriam's original manuscript for Mommies, explaining that "outside of New York City there were not enough working mothers to justify such a point of view," as she later told it (Merriam, "Explanation").

Was it true that hardly any mothers were working in 1955? According to "Questions and Answers on the Woman Question," a pamphlet published in December 1952 by the Jefferson School of Social Science, a Marxist adult education center in New York City where Merriam had been a featured speaker at an all-day conference on "Marxism and the Woman Question" in 1949 (Weigand 90), women at that time constituted 30.4 % of the labor force, with married women constituting 55% of all women working (Epstein and Wilkerson), figures affirmed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other words, plenty of married women were, in fact, working, and, presumably, some of those married women had (young) children; statistically, unmarried mothers are even more likely to work (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics). But in the 1950s, when the bestselling book Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947) by Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg was warning [End Page 61] that women working outside the home sacrificed their feminine natures "with enormously dangerous consequences" (235), and pundits regularly blamed working mothers for juvenile delinquency, there was little incentive to publish a book for children showing mothers happily working outside the home.

Merriam was undeterred by her rejection. She sent the manuscript, along with the rejection letter, to the editor of Charm: A Magazine for Women Who Work, which published the piece as "Mommies, Mommies" (under Merriam's married name, Eve Michel). This allowed some people to create their own book from the magazine piece: according to Merriam, "many women wrote to tell me they had purchased two copies of that month's issue so that they could scotch-tape the pages together into a book without all the intervening advertising copy" ("Explanation"). Merriam was not especially pleased with the illustrations in Charm's version; from her perspective, the artist had "lived in the charming world of fashion for so long that all the working mommies came out not only of uniform pink-whiteness (apparently no black women worked!), but they all had needle-thin figures and hairdresser coiffures" ("Explanation"). But Merriam's agent kept sending the manuscript to book publishers, and by 1960, Knopf had agreed to publish a picture book, originally set to be called What Do Mommies Do?

I have found little more in the way of pre-publication correspondence, so I cannot say why the book title's name was changed from Mommies, Mommies! (and then changed to Mommies at Work), but we can take a closer look at the book and reactions to it. Mommies at Work is dedicated (from Merriam) to "My sons, Dee and Guy" and (from Montressor) to "all the children of the magical city called New York." The dedication appears on purple banners that two smiling children hold up via poles with multiple waving tails, the latter drawn with pen and black ink. Following the dedication page is a two-page spread of a pen and ink drawing on a mustard yellow page. The bottom quartile shows a tabletop piled high with sweet things to eat: a big bowl of cookies, a birthday cake with glowing candles, and what seem to be stacks of candies in tall glass bowls. The heads of five children just barely reach above the line of the table; the children's hands grip the table's edge, their eyes taking in the display. The text reads, "Mommies make cookies to munch." The next two-page spread is far busier, with five discrete images on the left page and four on the right, illustrating other things that Mommies have, such as "laps to snuggle in," or do, such as "wash dishes and necks and ears" and "Kiss places that hurt and places [End Page 62] that don't." Of the seven images that show the faces of mothers and children, two of those pairs are shown with darker coloring. Notably, when the book was printed in 1961, including those dark faces was very much a conscious political act for authors, illustrators, and publishers (Mickenberg). Even so, as we shall see, this was not reason that the book generated controversy.

These initial spreads are a prelude to the book's core. The next two-page spread shows several tall buildings with rows of windows and, at each one, a different woman sitting: one in front of a sewing machine, one in front of a pen and paper, one in front of a typewriter. Again, at least a few of the women are shown to have dark skin. "What other things do mommies do?" the text asks. "All kinds of mommies do all kinds of work. In tall office buildings,"—and here the page ends, so readers will either turn the page or dwell on the possible jobs that mommies might do in those office buildings. On the next page, the capitalized first word ("In spread-out ranches") following the unfinished sentence is more characteristic of poetry than prose and lends the book a ballad or paean-like quality. If some reviewers criticized the book for not being much of a story, perhaps what really bothered them was that it was more like a celebration.

The book features women working in traditionally male professions (e.g., as doctors or engineers) but also in working-class jobs: building cars, operating elevators, taking tickets on trains. The color palette, apart from the blank-inked drawings, is almost entirely yellow and purple, and the images have a festive, almost theatrical quality; a spread illustrating "circus mommies walking tightropes" certainly adds to this. Such theatricality is fitting, given Montresor's acclaim as a set and costume designer for film, theater, and opera, which he earned alongside accolades for children's book illustration.

As Fisher would, of course, lament, Mommies at Work ends by reassuring children about "all mommies loving the best of all to be your very own mommy and coming home to you!" This text, in the upper-left corner, seems almost like an afterthought on a busy two-page spread showing a yellow house (on lighter yellow background) with children and animals in every window—all, other than a black cat, sporting some element of purple (a color that has, notably, been linked to bisexuality, which is fitting for the gender-norm bending message of the book). One child seems to be dancing on the railing of a balcony with no concern for safety, but the reader is left unconcerned as well. The children are waving flags and banners that say, "BEAUTIFUL MOMMY," "HURRAH [End Page 63] FOR MOMMY!," and "WELCOME HOME BEAUTIFUL MAMA!" They are directing their attention to a woman on the lower left corner of the spread, shown from behind and approaching the house's front door, precariously balancing an armful of packages and also carrying what might be a briefcase. A smaller version of the same picture is on the book's cover. The book's final page simply shows a smiling woman surrounded by smiling, flag-waving children.

On its initial publication, Mommies at Work received quite a few negative reviews. Merriam herself later recalled that "actress Marta Curro (Mrs. Jerry Orbach) declared on a nighttime tv talk show that the book and author should both be burned at the stake, as it was vicious and disgusting to suggest to defenseless little children that not all mothers stayed home all of the time" (Merriam, "Explanation"). The State of Idaho's Department of Education declared the book was "pure propaganda" for implying that "all Mommies should work." A reviewer for the Book Review Service of the Baptist Sunday School Board, responding to the question of whether the book was worth recommending, simply checked the "NO" box on a form the service provided, adding, along with a brief comment criticizing the style of the illustrations, "there is in my opinion nothing of particular value to recommend it" (Ashby). And a Library Journal (LJ) reviewer called Mommies "the poorest excuse for a preschool picture book that I have seen in quite some time" (Reviews of Mommies at Work).

Despite some strongly negative reviews, on its initial printing, Mommies at Work did get its share of positive reviews and even high praises—including a counterpoint in that same LJ issue cited above calling the book "highly original and interesting," along with acclaim from Publishers Weekly, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. Most notably, an extensive write-up by the Gessell Institute for Child Development concluded, "[W]e think there's a real place in today's working world, and in the home of today's working mothers, for just such a book as this."⁸ Merriam would claim the book sold "moderately well" ("Explanation"). In actuality, prior to 1970, it sold an average of only ninety copies a year.⁹

Poor sales are one thing; a more relevant question is, why would a book showing mothers building bridges, directing television shows, and making chocolate ice cream floats provoke such fury? Taken together, the negative reactions suggest concerns that had little to do with the book's quality and more to do with deep discomfort on the part of many adult readers about the book's implications. Historian Elaine Tyler May [End Page 64] has described a Cold War ethic of "sexual containment" that accompanied the Cold War foreign policy of containment and that linked traditional gender roles and norms to a "Cold War consensus" against communism. Especially in this context, introducing young children to mothers who happily worked outside the home, and sometimes even had fulfilling careers, undermined patriarchal presumptions that fundamentally undergird capitalism.

Even more problematically, all these mommies at work raised an obvious question: who was taking care of their children? This was a highly politicized question in the 1950s, when daycare was explicitly associated with communism and the Soviet Union. Indeed, the subsidized childcare centers that arose in the United States in the 1940s to allow more women to join the war effort were eliminated precisely because—as the Congress of American Women (a communist front group) pointed out—the "Soviet Union is the only nation in the world where care for children constitutes one of the most important aspects of governmental and public activities" (Arboleda 139). The issue was still politicized in the 1970s, which is part of why the book seemed like such a find even then. In 1971 Richard Nixon vetoed a bill that would have provided free, universal childcare, explicitly citing the dangers of collectivism and implicitly referencing the Soviet Union (Onion). Even today, many politicians are loath to let the government subsidize childcare, fearing the taint of socialism. Perhaps this explains why there is no mention in the book of people (usually women) who take care of other women's children. Or perhaps the thought was simply a bit too discomfiting for Merriam herself to bring up, not because her own children were in a socialized daycare, but because of the uncomfortable class dynamics that make childcare affordable to some women and not others.

Progressive (and Radical) Politics, Left Feminism, and Writing for Children

Like quite a few others on the communist Left, Eve Merriam began writing for children when it was becoming more difficult for anyone with left-wing ties to publish their work or to find employment thanks to blacklisting and other factors related to McCarthyism. For various reasons that have been explored elsewhere, the children's book field became a key refuge from blacklisting, just as the communist movement's future was looking bleak (Mickenberg). In the early 1950s, when she first had an opportunity to contribute to a non-fiction series published [End Page 65] by Franklin Watts (which published a number of leftist writers), Merriam was not especially enthusiastic about the prospect of writing for children, nor did she think she would be good at it (Merriam, "Real Books"). But by the time she wrote Mommies at Work, she was beginning to see the children's literature field in a new light.

Merriam wrote Mommies at Work the same year she joined the Bank Street Writers Lab (1955). It's not clear which came first. She may have written Mommies under the influence of Bank Street (it certainly seems right in line with their "here and now" approach), but she also may have joined the Writers Lab to become more attuned to the juvenile marketplace, given the perspective of editors like the one who rejected the manuscript when it was first written. In any case, joining the Writers Lab demonstrates Merriam's interest in honing her skills as a writer for children. And by the time she published Mommies as a book in 1961, she was one of the lab's prized authors. In "What's Special About Writers Lab," illustrated by Maurice Sendak and published in 1956 in Bank Street College's annual journal, Children Here and Now, Merriam claimed she came to the Bank Street Writers Lab "attracted by the asterisk on the best of the Little Golden Books ('tested and approved by the Bank Street College of Education, pioneer leaders in research and education for young children')."

The Writers Lab trained and/or influenced some of the outstanding twentieth-century authors of books for young children, among them Maurice Sendak, Ruth Krauss, Margaret Wise Brown, Jean Merrill, and Betty Miles. By the time Merriam joined, its larger-than-life founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, had stepped down from the director's role, handing the reins over to protégée Irma Simonton Black. Still, Mitchell remained active and the group retained the stamp and emphases that Mitchell had established in the 1920s.

That stamp, arguably, included what Mitchell biographer Joyce Antler calls "'feminism as life process,' a personal rather than a collective attempt by women to mold their destinies in the world and achieve autonomy" (xiv). But Antler also acknowledges that Mitchell was no stranger to collectivist impulses and politics. Indeed, in developing her educational philosophy, Mitchell was directly influenced by radical educator Caroline Pratt, "who aimed to put into practice a revolutionary ideal of education in which children would be liberated in the classroom and thus inspired to change the world outside" (Mickenberg 40). Mitchell called for every teacher at Bank Street to "take on some of the problems of his generation" (Mickenberg 41), offered students [End Page 66] internships with groups like the left-wing League for Industrial Democracy (294 n. 46), and even sponsored a celebration for the National Council on Soviet American Friendship at Madison Square Garden in 1944. Mitchell worked not just with Caroline Pratt but also with Patty Smith Hill and other Works Progress Association (WPA) nursery school founders, several of whom traveled to the Soviet Union in 1928 with educator/philosopher John Dewey and later openly acknowledged the inspiration they took from Soviet daycare centers (Arboleda 43, n. 116). Despite these radical influences, by the time Merriam joined the Writers Lab, Mitchell, like many progressives, was wary of appearing to sanction anything suggesting a hint of communist influence.

Merriam arrived at Bank Street already a feminist (although she might not have used that word), and her feminism grew out of involvement with the Communist Party, as well as groups like the Congress of American Women. In addition to lecturing on the "woman question" at the Jefferson School, she had published poems like "Occupation Housewife" (a title that Betty Friedan would later borrow—or steal) in the communist New Masses in 1947 and, with Gerda Lerner (who pioneered the scholarly field of women's history), had written and helped produce what has been called the first play about women's history, "The Singing of Women," in 1951. When Merriam first published the "Mommies, Mommies" piece in Charm, she was working on a collection of poetry, "The Double Bed from the Feminine Side," and developing a groundbreaking left-feminist critique that she eventually published serially in The Nation and then in a book, After Nora Slammed the Door (1964).

Merriam's liberated ideas about women and sex were matched by her ideas about children. In "What's Special About Writers Lab," she writes, "We see children not as guinea pigs to practice on, not as subject-matter for 'cute' anecdotes, but as personalities stretching with tiptoe eagerness, with open-handed desire to grasp the world they inhabit. We try to share their wonderment; we try to understand the growing world together" (14). Merriam was not alone in such attitudes, and she was among quite a few leftists who trained at the Writers Lab, among them Ruth Krauss, Lilian Moore, Nina Schneider, and Helen Kay (Mickenberg 41).

From the perspective of Bank Street School, Merriam offered a model for how to effectively write children's poetry. Mitchell highlighted Merriam's work in the 1956 Bank Street collection, Believe and Make Believe. Mitchell quotes Merriam in that book's introduction, [End Page 67] and Believe and Make Believe includes more pieces by Merriam than any other contributor, including Mitchell or Black.¹⁰ Betty Miles, on the Bank Street staff in the late 1950s and just beginning to write children's books herself, sent poems by Merriam to Muriel Rukeyser when the latter was working on the treatment for a film (about "Everychild") to be produced by Bank Street (Miles letter to Rukeyser). Merriam may have been new to writing for children in the early 1950s, but within a few years, she was being held up by Bank Street leaders and staffers as exemplary, even to poets who today are far better known than Merriam.

Mitchell was in favor of play and make-believe, but she remained, at core, a materialist in the Deweyan tradition. The title of Bank Street's 1956 anthology, Believe and Make Believe—part of a series that originated with Mitchell's 1928 Here and Now Story Book—would seem to suggest that "make believe" is something to believe in. However, in her introduction to Believe and Make Believe (1956), Mitchell emphasizes her ongoing commitment to "the belief that small children live intensely in the here and now; that they welcome stories that help them to see, to hear, and to feel all the rich diversity of their world" (5). Moreover, despite whatever feminist sympathies Mitchell may have harbored privately, her introduction to Believe and Make Believe certainly does not presume a working mother as an aspect of the child's everyday life. Describing the psychosocial development of the young child, Mitchell notes (using sexist language that was the custom in those days), "he identifies easily with things in action … with people who are doing something—his mother cooking, his father putting on his hat and going off to work, with workmen whom he sees in action, from house builders and milkmen to postmen" (8). The child is "he." His mother is cooking, his father is working, and the "workmen" whom the child might encounter in his daily life are men ("house builders" is gender neutral, but presumably they are male).

Although Antler makes a reasonably compelling case for Mitchell's feminism, the latter's more personal (as opposed to collective) politics is reflected in the political limits of books like Mommies at Work, which, even if not directly written under Mitchell's influence, was a product of the time in which it was published. Remarkably few books for children challenged the sexual containment of the postwar era. It certainly is possible to find books for children about outstanding women (like Elizabeth Blackwell), some of whom also had children. But such women were understood to be exceptional. This is quite different from Merriam's mommies, who are regular people who love and dote on their children but are also working—as doctors, nurses, [End Page 68] or makers of chocolate ice cream floats at soda fountains. All in all, it is not surprising that Merriam, especially if under the influence of Mitchell (and in the midst of the Red Scare) would feel compelled to include assurances that the best part of a working mommy's day is coming home to her child.¹¹

Bank Street positioned itself somewhat precariously in the complicated politics of the 1950s. Bank Street books, the series of Little Golden Books that Merriam referred to in explaining how she found the Writers Lab, was arguably cutting edge when it came to racial matters, with people of color populating the books during a period in which this was extremely rare. Bank Street books also tended to emphasize industrial workers in the modern city instead of the typical bourgeois subjects in children's books of that time. Indeed, the Bank Street publications division ran a program—which Merriam briefly directed—that "would provide story material more relevant to the lives and interests of inner-city children than the all-white characters and affluent settings of traditional readers," in the words of Bank Street staff member Joan Winsor Blos, who adds, "In the early 1960s this was a radical idea and it was not easy to find a publisher willing to take the risk."

Though open to working with left-wing writers and what might be considered leftist themes, Mitchell condemned "immature torch bearer[s]" when she herself was criticized for not going far enough when it came to racial integration in her own writings (Mitchell, Letter to Doris Patee). More chillingly, in 1956, when Merriam was a darling of the Writers Lab, Mitchell chided her for publishing a clearly political work, the "pamphlet in poetry," Montgomery Alabama, Money Mississippi, and Other Places (1956), with a "red publisher," Cameron Associates, which would also publish Merriam's 1958 collection of poetry, The Double Bed from the Feminine Side (Merriam, Letter to Carl Marzani). Angus Cameron, who had been fired from publisher Little Brown for political reasons in the early 1950s, started his own press to cater specifically to blacklisted writers. He was hired as a senior editor at Knopf in 1959, in a move often seen as an active rejection of blacklisting on Knopf's part. It is most likely not a coincidence that Knopf agreed to publish Merriam's Mommies at Work at about this time.¹²

Reviving Mommies at Work—and Its History

We see, then, that Mommies at Work found new popularity thanks to the Women's Liberation Movement, whose followers now appreciated a message that seemed out of tune with the times back in 1955. For her [End Page 69] part, Merriam was inspired by the movement to create more consciously feminist material for children as she discovered new enthusiasm for this work. Not only was Mommies at Work recommended on just about every list of non-sexist children's books, it was also featured on Sesame Street, Captain Kangaroo, and Romper Room, the latter explicitly as part of efforts to promote books that showed racial diversity and non-traditional gender roles. Pogrebin, an admirer of Mommies, asked Merriam to write the first Story for Free Children (Pogrebin, Interview). Later repackaged as a book, Boys and Girls, Girls and Boys—with illustrations by Harriet Sherman—showed not mothers but children themselves (now, unremarkably, of many different races), embracing a range of gender roles.

Mommies also echoes through Free to Be You and Me, what may be the most influential example of 1970s efforts to produce non-sexist material for children. Hearing about Mommies at Work from Pogrebin (Pogrebin, Interview), Marlo Thomas arranged for Carol Hall to write a song "about all the different kinds of jobs that mothers and fathers could have," telling Hall that the song "needed to reflect the idea that there was no work that was 'man's work' or 'woman's work'" (Hall 49). Pogrebin was vague when I spoke to her about why Merriam herself (an experienced lyricist) wasn't asked to write the song. In a book about the making of Free to Be You and Me, Hall recalls her agent explicitly saying that "this was not to be a polemic" (49), so it's possible that word about Merriam's left-wing politics had reached Thomas, and she was worried about tainting her ambitious project. In any case, Merriam's importance as a voice for feminist children's literature continued. While Boys and Girls was in the works, she joined with Larrick—who had exposed the "All-White World of Children's Books"—to publish a collection of writings by children themselves on sex roles (Male and Female Under 18). Together they wrote an "Open Letter to Teachers of Girls" that was published in Elementary English in 1973. Merriam began offering workshops all over the country, which included a ten-point program (inspired by the Black Panthers' Ten-Point Program) to challenge sexism in schools.¹³ Mommies at Work was reprinted in 1989 with new illustrations by Eugenie Fernandes, for another generation of children whose mommies worked outside the home. It was a favorite of my own children, born in 2003 and 2006.

Certainly, it is notable that two pioneering writers of feminist children's literature, Merriam and Miles, who wrote groundbreaking books for middle grade readers in the 1970s, had foundational experiences [End Page 70] at Bank Street. But Merriam's ties to the Communist Left point to an even more complicated line of influence, especially given the fact that other left-wing writers connected in some way with Bank Street (such as Rukeyser, Kay, Krauss, Moore, and Millicent Selsam) did not publish children's books with such explicitly feminist sensibilities, whatever the authors' own sentiments may have been. With the exception of a few outspoken people—Merriam and Rukeyser among them—communists were notoriously limited in their efforts to tackle sexism as an issue, most often arguing that the "woman question" would resolve itself under socialism (Weigand 6).

Following the many lives of a picture book—with the help of archives, interviews, and whatever materials can be unearthed—helps us take the long view on continuing transformations in children's literature, which today is one of the most vital and innovative realms in publishing. A growing appreciation for both aesthetically and politically radical books for children, as evidenced by phenomena such as the "Little Rebels Book Award" in the UK; growing attention in the US to children's books promoting activism; and the rise of publishing houses with an activist bent such as Lee and Low, Groundwood Books, and Enchanted Lion; point to a utopian and often radical impulse in children's literature that aligns with historic efforts by leftists and members of the avant garde, feminists among them, to influence children.¹⁴ There is a reason we're excited when we find a fossil. It helps us trace the lines of where we've been and who we are now. This is true also for books read by several generations of children.