Talk: “Kingdoms of Babes,” Home Nurseries in Turn-of-the-Century America
Category: Event Calendar
Date and Time for this Past Event
- Thursday, Oct 27, 2022 2-3pm
Location
The University of Akron: The National Museum of Psychology
73 S College St
Details
Directions for constructing and setting up home nurseries were a common feature of child-rearing and domestic medicine manuals, during the mid-to late 19th and early 20th centuries. In this talk, Dr. Elisabeth M. Yang will discuss how the home nursery itself was medicalized and transformed into a sanctified space of science, technology, religion, and politics, as physicians and child-rearing authorities proscribed objects as implements of “moralizing” and “normalizing” the infant. She will explore what the material world of babies—the nursery and its objects—reveals to us about their moral nature and agency, suggesting an intimate link between the physical topology of babyhood and the moral ontology of babies. The talk will address theoretical entanglements between the material and moral in the making of the idealized “healthy and happy” American baby in the home nursery which emerged as an ideological concourse of various babyhoods—mechanistic, plant-like, savage, tyrannical, innocent, and patriotic.
