March 19, 1976

The Spocks: Bittersweet Recognition in a Revised Classic

By JUDY KLEMESRUD

ane Cheney Spock stretched out on the couch in her sunny melon and avocado East Side apartment, a heating pad on her right knee to ease the pain of arthritis. Then she began to talk about another kind of pain--the pain she had suffered for 30 years until her estranged husband, Benjamin, finally gave her the credit she felt she deserved for helping him write his best-selling book, "Baby and Child Care."

Indeed, in his new (third) revision of the book, Dr. Spock has added a full page dedication to her, called "To Jane with Gratitude and Love." In it, he details her painstaking contributions to the book and concludes "The book couldn't have been what it is without her." In previous editions, Mrs. Spock had received only a brief, one-paragraph mention.

"I would have spoken up before," the handsome, grey-haired 69-year-old woman said, "but women just didn't do those things then. Instead of getting good and angry, you went into the other room and cried."

'In Those Days'

She paused for a sip of tea, then stared reflectively at the beige carpet, her brown eyes filling with tears. "Ben seems like this outgoing, loving, easygoing person, but he really isn't," she said softly. "He's a stern person. So I wasn't able to come out and say what I thought because I thought it was wiser not to. In those days, you got into trouble with your marriage if you did.

Why, then, had Dr. Spock, the nation's leading child care guru, decided to give her a full page credit in the new edition?

"It was feminism that did it," she replied. "It just came to him, I didn't ask him for any at all. Feminist groups landed on him like a ton of bricks because they thought his book was sexist. So in the process of taking sexism out of his book, he did this dedication to me."

The dedication, she said was, written before the Spocks separated last July--"he might not have been so kind if it had been written after." She said that they were currently in the process of getting a legal separation agreement, "and then a divorce." They have been married for 48 years, head of the Children's Museum in Boston, and John, 32, a Los Angeles architect; and 3 grandchildren.

A Contributing Factor

Does she think that her previous lack of recognition for her collaboration on the book contributed to the marital break-up? "Yes, I think it did, definitely," she said in her slow, halting manner of speaking. "It made me resentful that I didn't get credit. It made me resentful of all the glory he was getting and I was missing.

"If it had been a co-authorship, like it should have been," she went on, "I would have been asked on televisions shows, too, and I would have been asked what I thought about things. I might have been more of a somebody. But I don't think he could stand it, sharing the spotlight. You know how people are."

When asked what she had contributed to the original edition of "Baby and Child Care," which was published in 1946, Mrs. Spock repeated many of the things that her husband mentions in his full- page dedication to her.

"I was at the typewriter from 9 P.M. to 1 A.M. every night for a year while he slowly dictated to me," she said. "Sometimes I'd say, 'That's not clear,' and I did quite a lot of changing of expressions and other things that weren't clear. And I did endless medical research, which he brushes over. I consulted with all kinds of doctors and nurses, and I wrote down the opinions of experts about what should be in the book on the various diseases. Some of the doctors didn't approve of Ben, so I had to woo them. He was always controversial, because he was one of the first pediatricians in New York who had psychiatric training, and who used it in his practice.

Emotion Shown

As she recalled her contributions to the book, Mrs. Spock grew visibly angry, with veins standing out on her neck and temples, as though the years of silence were about to come bursting through some self-imposed dam.

"He glibly talks about the formulas [in the dedication]," she said. "In those days, there were eight different formulas, and I tested them again and again to make sure they worked, and I found that one, given out by New York Hospital, didn't work. The nipples clogged up. In other words, I found out a great deal by doing all these things."

And then, she insists, there were parts of the book that were totally her own--"the section layettes, how to make a formula, all of the research from the Academy of Medicine, going to a nutritionist to find out how much cheese is the equivalent of a glass of milk, things like that."

Dr. Spock, who was in the Virgin Islands, could not be reached to reply to his wife's comments.

Nervously fingering the gold Mexican necklace that she was wearing with her bright green dress, Mrs. Spock said she thought her husband had failed to give her due credit until now "because he saw me only as a wife and mother. I was expected to have a good dinner ready when he came home. I don't think he realized what he was doing to me."

And while that sounds like a feminist talking, Mrs. Spock is not certain whether that label could be applied to her. "I think I'm one, but I'm not sure," she said. I've hesitated joining the groups because they demand so much of you. And I think that some of their techniques of bothering the male chauvinist pigs are ridiculous."

Changed His Conservatism

Jane Cheney, daughter of a wealthy Connecticut silk manufacturer, married Benjamin Spock when she was 20 and he was a 23-year-old Yale student. A long-time socialist, she said she believed that she could help convert her once-Republican husband to his more liberal political view that eventually led to his active resistance to the war in Vietnam.

"We went on all the peace marches together," she said, with a wistful smile.

Does she still love him? "Yes," she quickly replied, "but I don't like some of the things he's done, like taking up with a 38-year-old girlfriend. I didn't want the divorce; he did. I think we could easily get together amicably. I believe if we went to a good psychiatrist, we could get back together again."

In an interview in the 1975 book, "The Super Doctors," by Roger Rapoport ($8.95, Playboy Press), Mrs. Spock said that she and her husband had in the past visited therapists together. "The could be more helpful if they were more aggressive with Ben," she said in the book. "I recognize my faults, but his aren't pointed out to him. . . .What we really need is a therapist who sees both sides at the same time."

As for the future, Mrs. Spock vowed that she would be "independent form now on--the book was written half by me, so it's not all his money." Still, she said she wished she had a career because she feels she is really not trained to do much of anything.

"If I had had a career from the beginning and kept it up, Ben and I would still be married," she said. "I think he thought I was not satirized with the amount of time he gave me. If I had a career, then I wouldn't have needed anything from him, and I wouldn't have cared as much."

To fill her spare hours, Mrs. Spock said she had thought about volunteer work in a nursery school ("I helped in one once in Charlotte Amalie, and I was a great success"), or serving as a guide in a museum ("where you go around and talk about the art").

She has a lot of thought about getting married again, but has pretty much rejected that idea.

"What I might like to do, though," she said, with an impish grin, "is just live with a man. Now, that's very new for me to say that. Two years ago, I would have said, 'Marriage and security.' But I don't think I want the hurt of a man leaving me again."

She sighed and gazed out the window, her eyes welling with tears again. "Living without a man--I don't like it at all," she said. "The loneliness is the worst. When you have a man around, presumably he admires you and does little things for you. I'm used to that, you know."

By Richard Flaste

With the publication of the long-promised third revision of "Baby and Child Care," it may be that Dr. Benjamin Spock has finally made his peace with feminists, who have often given him trouble.

One actually contributed to his decision in the 1930s to be a pediatrician rather than a psychoanalyst.

He has told his biographer, Lynn Z. Bloom, he tried analyzing a number of patients and failed for various reasons. A woman sticks in his mind:

"I failed in the analysis of that feminist girl," he said. "I think if I had had the experience of helping her to change from a very unhappy person into a happy, well-adjusted one I might have chosen psychoanalysis."

As many of the 28 million people who have bought "Baby and Child Care" since 1946 know well, he has not given up psychoanalysis altogether. He has in fact combined it with pediatrics, explaining such things as teen-age rebellion through the Freudian notion that it originates in the 4- year-old's rivalry with a parent.

An Apology to Make

And he has not given up trying to make feminists happy. In the second revision of his book, copyrighted in 1968, he did have an apology to make.

"I want to apologize," he said, "to the mother and father who have a girl and are frustrated by having the child called him all through the book. It's clumsy to say him or her every time and I need her to refer to the mother."

Yet he did not avoid clumsiness. The section of that second revision that begins, "The Clothes He Needs," goes on to observe, among other things, that "Dresses make a baby look pretty, but are unnecessary otherwise. . ."

And there has been much criticism from the women's movement. So here is the third revision form Pocket Books; it is $1.95; does not contain the advertising Dr. Spock fought in earlier printings, and its cover is suitably androgynous, in a combination of pink and blue.

Dr. Spock writes, "The main reason for this third revision. . . is to eliminate the sexist biases of the sort that help to create and perpetuate discrimination against girls and women. Earlier editions referred to the child of indeterminate sex as he. Though this in one sense is only a literary tradition, it, like many other traditions, implies that the masculine sex has some kind of priority."

The Singular Pronoun

So he has gone through the book carefully changing words and phrases, sometimes perhaps too obviously, other times with considerable grace. When he needs a singular pronoun, he alternates such phrases as, "let's say it's a girl" and "let's say it's a boy."

But that's not all he's done. The whole book vibrates with contemporary concerns that have become prominent since the last go-through, some of them dealt within new sections, others expressed mostly through nuance. Often the entries contain open indications that he feels he was previously in error.

On how boys develop sexual identification, for instance, he recalls that "When one of my sons, at the age of 3, asked for a doll (as most boys do) and my wife, Jane, talked about getting one for him, I was horrified. I realize now that the main thing that gives a boy a strong sex identity is not the toy cars or cowboy suits he's given, but primarily his positive relationship with his father in early childhood that makes him want to grow up to be the same kind of person."

As for the father's role, he says: "I think that a father with a full-time job--even where a mother is staying home--will do best by his children, his wife, and himself if he takes on half or more of the management of the children. . . when he gets home from work and on weekends." He thinks both parents have the right to careers, too.

The discussion of adoption is one of those that illustrate how aware Dr. Spock is of issues that are not necessarily related to feminist concerns.

He has switched the emphasis at the beginning of that section from the need to be sure you want a child before adopting one, to recognition of the present reality: the relative scarcity of babies.

In this revision, he has included a section on hyperactivity, a disorder that has received a great deal of recent attention as part of the concern over "minimal brain damage" and "learning disabilities." Dr. Spock's observations place him among those who are wary of what they see as an overreadiness to diagnose a problem as hyperactivity and an overreadiness to use drugs to quell it.

He writes, "There is no definite evidence of disease in a majority of children labeled minimal brain damaged: so the label in such cases is simply a hypothetical convenience and probably a misleading one."

Some Advice Modified

Dr. Spock is more concerned about violence on television and elsewhere than ever (a reflection of his antiwar activism) and he has modified his toilet training advice one more time.

On training he has dropped the heading "Practical Steps," which was followed by the suggestion that "By the time a child is 18 months old, I believe a mother should begin her training efforts." He has added a section that outlines a philosophy of training that he attributes to the pediatrician Dr. T. Berry Brazelton. In it Dr. Brazelton argues that, through tactful suggestion and flattery, parents should allow children to develop sphincter and bladder control of their own free will.

Dr. Spock has always favored breast feeding, which made him a bit strange in the 40's, but puts him in the vanguard now. He still thinks parents ought to trust themselves, and not take what experts say too literally. He is still less permissive than the critics who blame him for a generation's rebellion would like to admit.

Dr. Spock remains so much a man of his times--the Freudian when psychoanalysis was heading for its greatest popularity, the antiwar activist when the war in Vietnam was expanding, the feminist's ally when feminism is permeating the fabric of American society--that one begins to suspect that he never created a revolution in childrearing, but that he simply expressed it.

And he expressed it so simply and so well that his book became, and remains, the first book many parents buy. Even Benjamin Spock's own stern mother liked it.

"Why, Benny," she reportedly said when the first edition was completed, "it's really quite sensible."

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