Calm down, dear?

In her response to the criticism levelled at early years teachers, practitioners and researchers in the wake of their objections to some of the content of the OFSTED report Bold Beginnings, author Sue Cowley comments: 

The undercurrent of criticism seems to emanate from those who have not worked with the under 5’s and I’m sorry to say that the majority of it comes from male colleagues...lying just beneath the surface of the language being used on Twitter seems to be the idea that the women who make up 98% of the early years sector should just calm the hell down.

Examples of critical tweets she provides include ‘it’s the politicised “why oh why won’t someone think of the children” hyperbole that grates’. This evokes a recurring line from the popular cartoon The Simpsons, which is regularly used to parody a hysterical female response to a crisis.

This debate would be familiar to those who worked in early years education and care a century ago. In the early 20^th century, a ‘social maternalism’ (Brebony 2009) emerged from the ranks of middle class female charity workers, who, from the middle of the 19^th century, had been mobilised to work with families amongst the working class urban poverty that was emergent from industrialisation. Maternalism (Koven 1993) can be basically categorised as a focus on the well-being of young children, particularly those from socio-economically deprived backgrounds, and interestingly, it underpinned initiatives that tended to bind women together across traditional social class and party political differences. For example, fiery socialist prophet Margaret McMillan (1860-1931), stiff, aristocratic Queen Mary (1867-1963) and the first two women to serve as MPs in the House of Commons, wealthy socialite Conservative Nancy (Lady) Astor (1879-1964) and serious, committed feminist Liberal Margaret Winteringham (1879-1955) worked diligently together over a long period of time in order to put the case for nursery schools on the national agenda (Jarvis and Liebovich 2016).

The lesson from history that seems to emerge however, is that where the maternalist agenda conflicts with the view taken by the mainstream (or ‘malestream’) ruling culture (which may be espoused by both men and women), the route taken to slapping down those who take the maternalist position (who again may be of either gender) involves responses, most generally from men, that seek to construct the objections as irrational, emotional and even hysterical- a word that has its roots in the Greek word for womb, hysterika.  

Margaret McMillan herself faced a crisis when her work as an elected member of the Bradford School Board was curtailed by a national policy which moved the responsibility of school administration from school boards to local authorities- to which, at that time, women could not be elected. Despite McMillan’s success in achieving huge advances in the health and well-being of the children of Bradford, the male leadership of the Independent Labour Party, who had initially sponsored McMillan’s candidacy for the Bradford School Board dismissed her protestations as self-absorbed and unimportant; in fact ‘some of the leadership actively supported the rational administration that the Bill embodied’ (Steedman 1990, p.49).

Psychoanlayst Melanie Klein (1882-1960) took the position that very young children were not as emotionally unsophisticated as Sigmund Freud (the founder of psychoanalysis) had proposed, challenging the overwhelming dominance of the father’s disciplinary role in mainstream Freudian theory. Klein emphasised the huge psychological significance of the intense emotional bond between mothers and babies, meeting with much angry resistance from malestream Freudians. John Bowlby (1907-1990) who later became world famous for an infant attachment theory which similarly emphasised the mother-baby bond abruptly dismissed Klein’s theories as those of ‘a frightfully vain old woman who manipulated people’ (Issroff et al 2005, p.57).

Probably the most poignant example of all relates to Margaret McMillan’s ex-student, Miriam Lord, who was Superintendent (head teacher) of Lilycroft Nursery in Bradford in 1932, as the Great Depression began to take hold. When Bradford Education Authority told local nursery schools that children were to receive a maximum of one-third of a pint of milk a day, Lord unleashed a spirited protest against this decision; in her nursery, located in an area of great socio-economic deprivation, one pint per day was allocated to each child. She appealed to Nancy Astor, to put the ‘Bradford milk’ case directly to Parliament. As a staunch advocate of the nursery schools movement, Astor swiftly obliged, but when the Conservative chairman of the Bradford Elementary Schools sub-committee, incensed at challenges to his policy on the national stage, presented his arguments to the overwhelmingly male Conservative contingent in Parliament, Astor’s protests were swiftly dismissed as over-emotional maternalist ramblings at a time of national crisis. Indeed, Lord’s biographer, Ruth Murray (1993, p.12) further comments ‘on reading through Hansard one can practically hear the groans of dismay ... whenever [Astor] raised the topic of nursery education’. Miriam Lord was subsequently left to the mercy of the Bradford politicians, who demoted her from superintendent of a nursery school to assistant mistress of a nursery class located within an infant school, a post in which she remained until her retirement in 1944 (Jarvis 2016; Murray 1993).

In 2011, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron was admonished for his retort to a female MP to ‘calm down, dear’. The comment was aimed at the then Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Angela Eagle, who retorted that ‘a modern man would not have expressed himself that way’. The line ‘calm down dear’ was quoted from a much satirised TV advertisement of the early 2000s, which depicted a famous film director telling a hysterical woman to ‘calm down dear’. In this skit, the scenario that played out ended with the woman succumbing to the man’s superior understanding of the situation, and subsequently fawning over his celebrity. The fact that Sue Cowley has in the past month experienced a male put-down that similarly draws from a highly sexist media meme suggests that David Cameron is far from the only ‘modern man’ who reveals his underlying contempt for female challenge in this way.

So how can we move on from such a construct, which over a century, can be demonstrated to regularly emerge to slap down maternalist arguments when they threaten to pose a challenge to the malestream? Davies (1999) suggests that we use a strategy to increase “visibility” by comparing the underlying cultural constructs to a clear pane of glass that can subsequently be metaphorically ‘broken’ to make it visible, and thence explored, deconstructed and challenged. This brief trip through a few apparently unconnected, but thematically similar events in the history of early years theory and practice is just one way to set the process in motion.

   

NB: Some parts of this blog use extracts from my previous articles

Jarvis, P. & Liebovich, B. (2015) British Nurseries, Head and Heart: McMillan, Owen and the genesis of the education/care dichotomy, Women's History Review, Vol 24, No. 6, pp.917-937, Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612025.2015.1025662 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2015.1025662 

Jarvis, P. (2016) Critical Maternalism: a window on the 21^st century. Early Years Educator. Volume 18, No 2, pp.38-44. Available at: http://www.magonlinelibrary.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.12968/eyed.2016.18.2.38  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12968/eyed.2016.18.2.38

References

Bradburn, E. (1989) Margaret McMillan: Portrait of a Pioneer. London: Routledge.

Brebony, K. (2009) “Lady Astor’s Campaign for Nursery Schools in Britain 1930-1939: attempting to valorize cultural capital in a male-dominated field”, History of Education Quarterly 49:2 pp. 196-210, p.197.

Davies, B. (1999) A Body of Writing, Walnut Creek, AltaMira.

Issroff, J., Reeves, C. and Hauptman, B. (2005) Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby: personal and professional perspectives. London, Karnac.

Murray, R. (1993) The development of nursery schools and child welfare policies and practices in Bradford from the 1890s to the 1950s with particular reference to the work of Miriam Lord, Unpublished PhD thesis; University of Leeds.

Steedman, C. (1990) Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan 1860-1931 New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.