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In the nineteenth century France became fixated on infant sleep. Pictures of sleeping babies proliferated in paintings, posters, and advertisements for cradles and toys. Childcare manuals and medical writings insisted on the importance of sleep as a measure of a child’s future health and vigour. Infant sleep was transformed from an unremarkable event to a precarious stage of life that demanded monitoring, support, and, above all, the constant presence and attention of mothers.
Hush Little Baby uncovers the cultural, medical, and economic forces that came to shape Western ideas about infants’ sleeping patterns, rituals, and settings. By the mid-nineteenth century doctors were advising that infant sleep should be carefully controlled by caregivers according to medical guidelines, and that to do otherwise would risk compromising a child’s development. A sleeping baby was seen as the sign of a good mother – an idea that was reinforced through countless pictures of mothers watching vigilantly over their sleeping children, even as the reality of postpartum depression was known to doctors. The medical advice literature also helped to create a commercial infant industry, encouraging the production of clothing, bedding, cradles, and accessories designed to foster sleep, and providing new ways for families to demonstrate social status.
In Hush Little Baby Gal Ventura shows how these images and ideas about babies’ sleep created many of the standards and expectations that keep parents awake today.
“[Hush Little Baby] should appeal to a broad audience, from art historians to parents who wonder when and why infant sleep became such a ‘problem’ and such a capitalist commodity. As Ventura tells us, approximately forty million Americans and nearly 50 percent of children ‘suffer’ from sleep deprivation. Her book may not offer a solution for infant insomnia, as she herself points out in the afterword, but it offers a fascinating origin story.” H-France
"Ventura delivers a complex argument: there is no straightforward, unidirectional influence of expertise on design; instead we are left to grapple with how the changing social, political, and economic realities of the modern era have evoked new systems of parenting, sleep, design, markets, and visual culture that all simultaneously inform and reflect one another. Scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds who are interested in medicine and motherhood will find Hush Little Baby valuable for generating new questions about and thinking up new ways to approach the fascinating and complex subject of infant sleep." Design and Culture