Have you ever seen the cult classic Harold and Maud? How about Rosemary’s Baby? Well, then you’ve seen Ruth Gordon! What does she have to do with baby history? Well, it’s not about the spawn of Satan but its still pretty evil. Ruth Gordon was born in Massachusetts in 1896 […]
Transcript (and then some) In March of 1985, Women Against Pornography, eh-hem, WAPs, awarded Kimberly-Clark the makers of Huggies a Plastic Pig aka as a “zap” for their diaper commercials which the WAPs found provocative, even pornographic…. which… says A LOT about their group. Women Against Pornography was founded in […]
You might think that home infant breathing monitors are one of those IOT’s for 21st-century parents but their history goes back around 50 years and is darker than you can imagine. Reader discretion advised This post will include graphic descriptions of infant and child abuse, murder, and death; as well […]
It’s not often that we hear about ghost stories with infants as the protagonists, I’ve heard a couple (the disembodied crying baby or weirdness with baby monitors), but usually, if it’s a halfling ghost, it’ll be a child. But that wasn’t the case in Needham, Massachusetts in 1839– Just past […]
I wrote this article for the Iowa City Babywearers group blog, published February 18th, 2018. We decided to retire the group in March of this year and our website will be expiring in November, so I thought I would salvage a few of the most popular articles and share them […]
Today we’ll be looking at the evolving understanding of sudden infant death in history, focusing on the developments in the United States during the 20th century. Content Warning: This post will discuss sudden infant death, infanticide, and child abuse. If you know that you are uncomfortable with this subject manner […]
The runaway baby carriage is a classic film trope but does it really happen in real life? where did the trope get started?
Today we’re looking at baby carriers in William Hogarth’s The March of the Guards to Finchley from 1750. The March of the Guards to Finchley, depicts a fictional troop of buffoonish British troops in Tottenham Court Road, in London, on their way to fight the Jacobean forces in the uprising […]
This painting by Jan Steen features common baby accessories from the 17th century: teethers, falling caps, and leading strings:
A young woman nursing a baby, was painted in 1868 by Dutch landscape painter, Jacob Maris. He was living in Paris when he painted this portrait of his wife Catharina Hendrika Horn breastfeeding their first baby, Guillaume [gee-um] who was born in April of 1868 and tragically died the following […]
