Significant Others - Jane Cheney Spock

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care altered parenting forever and made Dr. Benjamin Spock a household name. But his wife Jane, who not only helped him get the book down on paper but introduced him to the very concepts that were so revolutionary in his work, was ruined by his success. Source List:Dr. Spock, An American Life, by Thomas Maier​​Doctor Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical, by Lynn Z. Bloom“Public vs. Private: Dr. Spock, Mr. Hyde,” by Mary Jo Kochakian“Parents and Dr. Spock”, American Archive of Public Broadcasting“The Man Who Raised America,” by Susan Bolotin“The Spocks: Bittersweet. Recognition in a Revised Classic,” by Judy Klemesrud“Jane C. Spock, 82, Worked on Baby Book,” The New York TimesChristian Nurture, by Horace BushnellHorace Bushnell, Britannica “The Personal Spock: The Controversial Doctor Recalls His Childhood, Which Was Influenced by a Domineering Mother,” by Elizabeth Mehren 

Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and this week we're wrapping up our season with the story of a woman who helped us radically shift our idea of child care, but whose contribution was never properly recognized by the husband she helped make famous. This time, on Significant Others, meet Jane Chaney Spock. Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do. These are the words that launched a revolution,

minted a celebrity, and shaped a country's future. And the man who wrote them, Dr. Benjamin Spock, changed the way the world saw babies. But the woman who helped him commit these words to the page, who mothered his children and shared his life, and without whom he might never have changed a thing, died broken and alone while he found new life with a woman nearly 40 years his junior. It is hard to overstate

the impact of the Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock. It informed millions of parents around the globe and was, for better and worse, credited with creating both the hippies and the me generation. Everyone from Jackie Kennedy to Lucy Ricardo to the sister of the Shah of Iran consulted its pages. And 30 years after its release, the only book that still outsold it was the Bible. Its author became a beloved medical expert as iconic as Mr. Rogers. But the man who wrote the book was, after all, just a man. And so he was, at very best, imperfect, insecure, self-conscious, selfish. And the people he hurt most were, perhaps naturally, the ones closest to him. Primarily his children, whose relationship with him was strained and

awkward, and also the woman who not only helped him get the book down on paper, but introduced him to the very concepts that were so revolutionary in his work. Jane Chaney Spock was a bright, dynamic, and forward-thinking young woman, but all the psychoanalysis in the world couldn't save her from a marriage to the kindly pediatrician with the common touch, who rarely hugged his own children while they were growing up. Jane was born in 1906 to a wealthy family in Connecticut. Her childhood played out like a Hollywood fantasy, with a wealthy patriarch called the Colonel passing out high-quality, handmade toys in a great hall

at Christmastime. One weekend, Jane's sister introduced her to a tall, charming rower from Yale named Ben. They hit it off, and by the end of the night, Ben asked Jane if she might like to get married someday. To him. I immediately said no. I was barely 17. I said I'm very fond of you, but I didn't really know how I felt about him 24 hours after I met him. They stayed in touch anyway while he went back to Yale and she went off to her freshman year at Bryn Mawr. For the 1920s, Jane was cutting edge. She wasn't afraid to smoke, drink, wear lipstick, have thoughts, or show her calves. All of this, boldly revealed to Ben by Jane through her letters, was just seductive enough to keep him hooked.

As an added bonus, Jane once scandalized Ben's mother by going with him to a ball, wearing a fancy shawl over her dress that kept sliding down to reveal one bare shoulder. But their letters weren't pure flirtation. Or maybe it's that Jane was a very brainy flirt. She wrote to him about literature, art, and politics. She convinced him that a woman's place was not, as he had previously maintained, only in the home. She sent him a book of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

that nearly made him weep. She shared her thoughts about socialism, insisting that if he was going to be a doctor, as planned, he needed in some way to contribute to the greater good. She wrote to him of transmigration according to Buddha and her interest in psychology. She got on well with his family, even though his mother distrusted women who went to college. And the romance progressed through Ben's trip to the 1924 Olympics, where he and the rest of his Yale boatmates won a gold medal, and a year's separation, when Jane left for a round-the-world trip with her mother and sister just as Ben was starting medical school. By 1926, his original offer of marriage was being very seriously considered. Ben's mother worried it was too soon. Jane's mother worried they would be poor. It was a sign

of Jane's modern thinking, according to one biographer, that she was willing to marry a man who was not yet earning money. It was even more modern that she planned to get a job herself to help support them both. In the end, both sets of parents agreed to underwrite their life for a while, and in June of 1927, Ben and Jane were married in a large, lavish ceremony on the Chaney family estate with the word obey very modernly omitted from the vows. At the reception, Jane was initiated into Ben's secret society at Yale and given the codename that was picked out for her just after they met, Calliope.

While Ben continued med school, Jane returned to her old interest in psychology, going to work as a research assistant for a doctor studying links between mental health and physical illness. As part of her training, she underwent analysis, and it had a curious effect. At first, she was energized by the process, but within a few months, it had begun, quite dramatically, to upset her. She came home from sessions with red and swollen eyes. She burst into tears when asked about it. What had made her so weepy? The focus of her work on the analyst's couch had turned, as it always does, to childhood. And it turns out that Jane's childhood, while in some ways resembling a fantasy, had at one point become a nightmare. Her family was wealthy, and Jane and her sister were well

loved. But their father, John Chaney, who had died at 49, was a sore spot. John came from a prominent New England family. His grandfather was Horace Bushnell, a highly influential progressive theologian who, coincidentally, had written a popular parenting book of his own in 1847. That book contained such tidbits as, God is from the first looking for a godly seed. The parentage may, in other words, be so thoroughly wrought in by the spirit of God as to communicate the seeds or incipiencies of a godly just as it communicates the seeds of a depraved and disordered character.

Or to quote Jack McBrayer's character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, you have Christ between your thighs. Bushnell's challenge to the idea of predestination nearly got him brought up on heresy charges by the Calvinists, and he is still considered a seminal figure in American religion. But John did not quite live up to this intellectual inheritance. Like his five brothers, he went to Yale, but unlike the rest of them, he dropped out after his freshman year. Luckily, his family owned a very successful silk manufacturing company, so he went to work for them, married Jane's mother, fathered Jane and her sister, and life was pretty much well and good, except for the fact that at some point, the charismatic and dashing John Chaney contracted syphilis. Not only did the disease lay waste to his mind and body, it was a crimson badge of shame for the family.

Syphilis came from sex, specifically unclean, immoral sex. And in the Victorian-era imagination, reflected by John's grandfather's own book, it had the potential to haunt the family for generations by, essentially, tainting the seed. Toward the tragically early end of John Chaney's life, he became abusive both verbally and physically. For his 13-year-old daughter Jane, this was a traumatic turn of events at an already delicate moment. old daughter Jane, this was a traumatic turn of events at an already delicate moment. An adolescent is undergoing enough inner turmoil and is particularly ill-equipped to watch her father morph into a violent madman. And yet, because of the shame factor of his disease, the family never spoke of it. Jane herself could barely admit the truth even many years later. Dredging it all up in analysis in 1930 was causing her misery, but she insisted it was important even when Ben had his doubts. Ultimately, the research

job ended when the doctor running the study decided Jane had become too sensitive for it. Her next job was as a saleswoman at Macy's, but that didn't last long. She soon became pregnant and quit. But even as Jane was starting to dig into her disturbing childhood memories, she and her new husband were enjoying their life. They thrived on the energy of New York City and loved getting dressed up to go out. Ben particularly liked shopping for Jane's clothes and was famous for his own perfectly tailored three-piece Brooks Brothers suits. His sister Hitty said,

He dressed Jane and would not let Jane pick her own clothes. Ben was so fussy about his own suits, just so. His suits were just magnificent. In fact, he so enjoyed shopping for women's clothes that he even loved to do it years later for his daughter-in-law. He would buy lingerie for me, just wonderful things, beautiful things. He loved the whole thing, the sales girls and loved the materials and imagining them on. It was just a great thing for him. It had nothing to do with me at all. Ben and Jane formed a Saturday night dance club so they could show off their waltz. Yeah, they were that couple who loves to dance when other people were

watching them. They even had a signature move in which Ben, who was nearly 6'4", would lift the petite Jane up over his head. During the day, Jane was also earning her reputation as a firebrand by taking to the streets to protest prohibition. A Vogue magazine article at the time read, protest prohibition. A Vogue magazine article at the time read, Jane Cheney Spock drew crowds and astonished everyone who knew her by the power with which she did it. Sadly though, her pregnancy was ill-fated. The baby, who they had named Peter, was born premature and died after just two days. Ben blamed himself. after just two days. Ben blamed himself. Unconsciously, I connected the death of my first child to my guilt over sex. However, life moved on. Ben finished med school with the highest average in his class, which was shocking to at least one classmate who told him,

I thought you were stupid. Then he started an internship in pediatrics. Jane continued to get pregnant and have miscarriages and take care of everything else. I was overcome with everything in married life. I'd never had a full-time paying job before. I had to take a long trip on the subway every day. I was learning how to cook and run a house. And I was married. All this at once. I had never boiled an egg before, not anything. I did all the laundry at night and smoothed Ben's wet shirts along the edge of the bathtub to get out the wrinkles. But he was wonderful. He only expected me to iron the parts that showed. We put his pants under the mattress to get the crease back in. In those days, I mended everything,

even stockings. And there were no frozen foods. I had to go to the market every day and prepare all the vegetables. I was busy every minute. I was exhausted. Whether or not it was also difficult for Ben to work with babies while his wife struggled to carry one to term, he didn't say. He was a devoted caregiver to his patients and their parents, and he was noticing, even as an intern, that many of the conventions seemed outdated at best and harmful at worst. For example, thumb-sucking was seen as public enemy number one to be stopped at any cost. Infants had their hands tied to the edges of their cribs to keep them from putting their fingers in their mouths. Bowel movements were another fixation of doctors at the time. Rigid evacuation schedules were

enforced. Mothers were told to dangle their three- and four-month-olds over the toilet at specific times and to tickle the anus or stick a piece of oiled paper into the rectum to produce the desired effect at the correct time. We now know that thumb sucking can be an effective method of self-soothing and that bowel movements might reflect a child's emotions, but many of us only know these things because of a book that Ben Spock, as of 1930, had not yet written. The most popular baby care book of that day, called The Care and Feeding of Children, by Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, held that instinct and maternal love are too often assumed to be a sufficient guide for a mother, which couldn't have sounded more wrong to Ben.

After all, he had been raised by a woman who took mothering to its highest form of perfectionistic expression. His sister Hiddy told an interviewer once that their mother wanted all six children to be these glorious advertisements for the human race. The domineering Mildred Spock was a textbook example of Victorian Moors who had occasionally been abused by her own mother. She terrorized her eldest son, Ben, while also making it clear that he was her favorite of all the kids.

She liked to joke with them. I prayed that we would have six glorious children. You can imagine how disappointed I've been. I've had the six, but... When she tried to teach Ben to read, he didn't take to it quickly enough. She shook him by the hair, yelling, Benny, how can you be so stupid? Later, when she saw him noticing girls walk by, she told him he was disgusting and unattractive and that touching himself down there would cause deformities in his future children. Hence his panic after the death of his first infant and all of Jane's subsequent miscarriages. When Ben wrote to his mother from boarding school that a girl had asked him for a kiss, meaning to brag that he had resisted the temptation,

she was so threatened by his close call with immorality that she forced him to live at home for his first two years of college. Ask a pediatrician what is the hardest part of their job, and they'll likely tell you it's not the patients, but the parents. For future pediatrician Ben Spock, Mildred was a one-woman training course. She was difficult and insensitive, but he respected her and knew that everything she did came out of her intense love for him. She took the job of being a mother very seriously and even once correctly diagnosed a problem her own children's pediatrician had missed. Mothers, Mildred Spock taught her son, often do know best. But in 1930s America, mothers everywhere were largely being taught

that everything that came naturally to them was wrong. They were told not to kiss or cuddle their babies too much, and that wrapping a child's knuckles would curb undesirable behavior. Breastfeeding was being systematically eradicated by hospitals. For Ben, all of this clashed on a gut level. In addition, Jane's experience in analysis was making a great impression on him, and he had taken to reading Freud

to try to understand what she was going through. Suddenly, the man who had been so bored by psychiatry classes that he nearly failed the subject in med school found himself developing a deep interest in a field that did not yet exist. Part developmental psychology, part pediatrics. Information about the way human minds are formed, combined with practical advice for those who have the largest influence on how they grow. Ben was beginning to suspect that all the questions his patient's parents brought to his office each day, why can't I wean my child? Why won't she go to the bathroom? Why does he want to put everything in his mouth?

Could maybe be answered by Freud. And that if parents had a better understanding of the why, they would be less nervous, more confident, and better equipped to respond without doing damage. Ben looked for a residency that would combine both pediatrics and psychiatry, but there was no such thing, so he went for a residency in psychiatry alone. As part of his training, he underwent analysis, as Jane had done. But unlike Jane, he saw it largely as an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional one. I thought I was getting into this for training purposes only. So I naturally thought of Freudian psychoanalysis as appropriate for me.

Regardless of what he thought he was getting into it for, the process ended up blowing his mind. After a few months of talking about his mother, who had been the most obvious scene-stealer of his formative years, he started talking about his dreams. Suddenly, Ben began to realize that his relationship with his father had been on the surface pleasant, but underneath the source of what a preschool teacher might call big feelings, fear, resentment, rage. Putting together the pieces of his own psychological puzzle, Ben was sold on the legitimacy of psychiatric concepts and felt even more certain that they could be helpful to anyone trying to care for a child.

And he might never have found his way there were it not for his wife. When Jane had told me seven years before that it was believed that a child's personality was already fairly well established by two years of age, I declared emphatically that this was nonsense. Actually, I didn't know beans about it. The thinking that would inform his work and the trajectory of his entire family's life may have remained opaque to him had it not been for her. In 1933, Jane finally gave birth to a healthy baby they named Michael. Parenthood was a joy and a relief for Ben, who still hadn't been able to shake his old superstition

about damning future generations with lewd thoughts. However, life was proving difficult in other respects. Jane's mother, on whom she relied both emotionally and financially, died suddenly. And Ben, who was still working toward his board certification, was not yet earning a lot of money. Not only did the Great Depression make the cost of a doctor's visit impossible for many families, Ben didn't get a lot of referrals, since colleagues didn't know what to make of his psychiatric affiliation.

He scrambled to supplement his income with a part-time job as the physician on staff at the Brearley School and by leading seminars at the Psychoanalytic Institute. All this took him away from home for many hours, leaving Jane, a depressed new mother, mourning the loss of her own mother, alone. At work, though, Ben was a new mother's dream, alone. At work, though, Ben was a new mother's dream. Kindly, knowledgeable, and never out of reach. Also, he undercharged everyone. He worried that asking for money would make people dislike him. Having been plagued by insecurity as a child, he still wanted, more than anything, to be liked. The longer this went on, the more Jane resented his absence. Meanwhile, Ben was frustrated by his work in the psychiatric ward. He felt unable to fix or help

anyone. So in 1937, he entered his medical career as a pediatrician. But tensions were brewing at home. Things were still harmonious on the dance floor. But when Jane got tired of dancing and sat down, Ben kept going with whatever other beautiful woman was close at hand. Jane would sit and watch him sweep around the dance floor with his cheek pressed to someone else's cheek, and she would drink. Well, they all drank. Between three or four couples, we'd demolish a quart of scotch.

For Jane, it was more than just a bad habit. It was a dependency, and it fueled a toxic cycle in her marriage that would only worsen in the years to come. She tried to drown her resentment and loneliness with alcohol while watching her husband whirl other women around the dance floor, then drunkenly accuse him of flirting, which he would stoically deny before berating her for drinking. It would be a chronic source of conflict throughout the marriage. In 1938, Ben was approached to write a book, but he wasn't ready to do it yet. According to Spock biographer Thomas Meyer, he hadn't yet bridged the gap between Freudian theory and the practical everyday wisdom he hoped to offer to parents. So he kept hammering it out, one patient at a time, in the advice laboratory of his daily

practice. When he did come home at the end of the day, he told Jane the stories, noticing that no matter how much money or education they had, and regardless of their ethnic identity or age, all mothers seem to have the same problems. To which Jane finally replied, then why don't you start writing that book you've been talking about for so long? She offered to help him however she could, and soon after, Ben was approached by another editor looking to capitalize on what he believed was an untapped market for a cheap child care manual. So Ben, who had never learned to type, started dictating to Jane, who had, while nine-year-old Mike slept in the next room. Ben would pace the living room, thinking out loud, while she sat at a typewriter patiently,

amazingly patiently, with her head between her hands, waiting for me to come up with the next sentence. Jane was respectful of him as the expert, but she also had wisdom of her own to offer. She suggested phrasing that was less doctor-speak and the better to soothe a nervous new mom. She suggested phrasing that was less doctor-speak and the better to soothe a nervous new mom. She helped hash out recommendations for practical things, like how many cloth diapers or rubber nipples to buy, and how often to wash them. Ben tried to liberate mothers from an over-reliance on their pediatrician. Should avocado be mentioned for two-year-olds? Does it make any difference? Why not just ignore the question? But California mothers will want to know.

Put it in. Then the mother won't have to ask her doctor. But Jane reminded him that self-reliance isn't always enough. There are plenty of times when a mother ought to call her doctor. What to tell her so she doesn't call for every little stomachache but isn't taking chances. How to keep her from being frightened without making her too complacent. Together, they recorded everything from when to worry about a fever, 100.4 degrees, to how best to wrestle a sweater over a baby's egg-shaped head.

Spoiler alert, start at the back, not the forehead. Also, pro tip from Jane, get one with buttons. They were united by their common effort. We found that going out socially three times a week slowed the work hopelessly, so we stopped going out altogether. I gave up all my outside activities. Outside activities may have been given up, but inside ones weren't. I had become pregnant just about the time we started the book, I think because I was not tired and tense with all those things, and also because I was very happy working with Ben.

We had gone 10 years wanting more children and were simply delighted. In addition to bringing joy and relief, the birth of John Spock in 1944 complicated things. Ben had enlisted in the war effort and so was living on military bases and not at home. Jane was alone with the new infant and pre-adolescent Mike, and she was trying to help Ben from afar to finish the book. During the day, in addition to solo parenting an infant and a preteen, she functioned as a go-between for the author, editor, and publisher. In the middle of the night, she took calls from Ben with edits to the manuscript. This wentbetween for the author, editor, and publisher. In the middle of the night, she took calls from Ben with edits to the manuscript. This went on for the better part of two years.

But ultimately, the arrangement proved to be too much for Jane. Convinced her husband was falling in love with a nurse, a fear that seems to have come only from Ben's having praised the woman during his calls home, Jane packed the kids up and moved out to join him. In 1946, the family returned to New York. The war was over, the population was ready to boom, and the common sense book of baby and child care

was about to change everything. Released in the spring of 1946, the Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care sold three-quarters of a million copies by the end of its first year in publication, outpacing its publisher's expectations by a factor of 7,500%. The book's optimistic, capable voice, as Meyer points out, spoke to an America who had just helped liberate Europe from the Nazis. Awash in ideological victory and a robust economy,

Americans largely believed they could craft the world into a better place, bomb by bomb or baby by baby. By the mid-1950s, Dr. Spock had become a household name. The success of the book had a relaxing effect on Ben. In the early years of his professional life, his perspectives on child care had confused or annoyed or even alienated his colleagues. Now he had found validation on a grand scale. I felt really appreciated for the first time in my life. It was a great comfort to me to find that the public understood what the book was about and how helpful it could be. It boosted my self-esteem, which had always been on the low side.

It boosted my self-esteem, which had always been on the low side. But the impact of the book for Jane was quite different. First of all, her husband was quickly becoming a celebrity. And while he was opening fan mail and fielding job offers, she was suffering the postpartum void of a finished book project with none of the accolades. Her joint labor with her husband was over, and he was riding on the success of that labor into a vast new horizon that took him further away from her. He was suddenly more absent from her daily life,

and she did not have a career to which she could return. All Jane had to show for her toil and struggle was a single line on the dedication page, which read, To Jane. Then Ben accepted a job with the Mayo Clinic, which meant a move to Rochester, Minnesota. Jane hated it there. She hated the cold, hated being just a doctor's wife, hated that they weren't in New York City anymore. She was angry and isolated and drinking even more. And the only thing her husband could think to do was continue her analysis. In fact, as Meyer notes, she was in

some kind of therapy or analysis pretty much for the rest of her life, though it is not at all clear how helpful this was. On top of all this, she was now married to the most visible parenting expert in the world. Everything she or her children did, she felt, served as a public test of her husband's expertise. Every time we walk down the street, someone recognizes Ben, so we have to be careful. We can't look across or have an argument in public. But I treat Ben like an ordinary person. I'm the only one in the world who speaks frankly to Ben, because I'm not in awe of him. Ben didn't feel the pressure himself. I really don't think of myself as a public person until somebody recognizes me.

I feel like a private citizen. This is lucky, because it would be an awful strain to be as self-conscious about being an author as I've been about other things in the past. For instance, to be walking down the street wondering what people were thinking and whether I was making the right impression. An awful strain is exactly what it was for his wife and children, and even for their children. When Mike Spock was 35, he said that his wife felt the pressure of outside expectations

while raising the grandchildren of the famous child care expert, Dr. Spock. Unless you like being an actor on a stage, this outside concern isn't enjoyable. Not only was the family forced to endure public scrutiny, they were also forced to perpetuate an image of Ben that was not true. He comes across as a lovely, sweet, easygoing, natural kind of person, They were also forced to perpetuate an image of Ben that was not true. He comes across as a lovely, sweet, easygoing, natural kind of person, and this isn't what he is at all. He's highly critical of others and himself, drives himself hard,

and sets terrific standards for me and unconsciously. For the children, although he tried not to say it. To the rest of the world, Dr. Spock was the genteel expert who smiled at babies while letting them play with his shiny gold pocket watch, a patrician ideal straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, wise and warm and forgiving. But at home, he was someone else. The man who famously told mothers to trust their own instincts later admitted, Outsiders' approval or disapproval was very important to me as a parent. To his own children, he was Scary. Really scary. Angry. Overcritical.

Strict. Dominating. Judgmental. He exploded in rage at them for using four-letter words, and once hit Mike for not writing home frequently enough from camp. When Mike was little and he cried, Ben got uptight and said, Don't be a boobie. He dominated playtime, fought with them over facial hair, and freaked out once when John was wrestling with a friend because he registered it as sex play between the boys. He made the kids call him and Jane by their first names. John later said,

His view of childcare and the reason why we were calling him Ben were the same, of parents and children being more equal. The idea that parents are human beings to their children. To pretend that they're equals is really unreal. Ben never pretended we were equals, but it was a gesture, not to me, but the rest of the world. This is my son who calls me by my first name. To quote Ben's sister Sally,

I wouldn't have wanted him as a father. I can tell you that. To know the truth of someone and have to lie about it to everyone else is a particular kind of isolation. And the boys weren't just lying to the world about who their father was, they were lying about their mother as well. They saw her erratic behavior and heard the fights that followed, but no one else did. Ben refused to acknowledge that Jane had a problem, not even to family. And in 1952, that problem was not only getting worse, it was being complicated by a prescription from her doctor for Miltown, the first widely used antidepressant. Jane wasn't

supposed to mix alcohol with the Miltown, but she did. So in social settings, Jane and Ben continued to perform their old romantic devotion routine, dressing up and going out together. But the old toxic cycle was deepening. Jane drank the alcohol mixed with her meds, then she would get unruly and hostile. She spilled family secrets in public, prompting Ben to glare and shush her. His attempts to silence her only made her go further to get his attention, and she would reach for increasingly outrageous things to say. She even told people she feared what he might do to her, which, while it is a serious thing to say, was never substantiated

in any way, even by her. She reportedly threw up at dinner parties and fell asleep with her head on the plate. Ben got resentful and punitive. When they were alone, he would berate and shame her. John Spock said, As she went further off the deep end, his reaction was more and more to control her behavior. He was going to make her behave better.

And this helped to drive her in the direction of psychosis. Jane began to show signs of paranoid delusion while they were in Rochester, believing that Ben's colleagues were conspiring against him and developing a deep suspicion once again of a nurse. Then Ben's division at the Mayo Clinic was shuttered due to a change in leadership, and he got a new gig at the University of Pittsburgh. The move helped buoy Jane for a time, but when her behavior started once again to disintegrate, Ben did the worst thing possible. He ignored it. When she acted inappropriately in public, he acted like she didn't exist.

For someone struggling to stay connected to reality, this could not have been a more disturbing response. Finally, in 1954, Jane suffered a nervous breakdown. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which doctors said had been exacerbated by severe alcoholism. She was 48 years old. Jane spent six months in a mental hospital. Not even close family members knew she was there. When friends asked where she had gone, Ben simply said she was ill. The hospital was good for her, but the cost of her stay there, plus her ongoing medical expenses, took a huge bite out of Ben's annual salary. Royalties from the book were little help, since his initial deal minimized his take in exchange for keeping the cover price low. He had wanted the book to be accessible to all parents, but he also hated asking for money.

but he also hated asking for money. So to boost their finances, Ben started writing a parenting advice column for Redbook, and then he got, you guessed it, even more famous. The story of Ben Spock goes on. It has many more chapters. He became a peace activist during the Vietnam War, protested at the Pentagon alongside Norman Mailer, marched with Dr. Martin Luther King four days before his assassination, was arrested for civil disobedience, and convicted in federal court of conspiring to counsel evasion of the draft. He was lauded by peaceniks who proudly called themselves Spockbabies, and spurned by conservatives who blamed him for having created the hippie generation by promoting overly permissive parenting. He campaigned for President Kennedy, took a swing

at running for president himself, and was lambasted, for good reason, by Betty Friedan for all sorts of things, including this passage from a book he published in 1962. My prime concern is that back at the childhood stage, parents and schools not encourage girls to be competitive with males if that is going to make them dissatisfied with raising children, their most creative job in adulthood. The little girl's envy of the boy's penis and the boy's envy of the little girl's ability to grow babies

create rivalries that persist into adulthood. Maternal instincts and inner passivity, he wrote, make women indispensable as wives, mothers, nurses, secretaries. Women are usually more patient in working at unexciting, repetitive tasks. By contrast, men have an ability to analyze a problem, to focus on one particular aspect of it. Work out the theory behind it. Find some general solution. This is how they become, more often than women, inventors, discoverers, builders. inventors, discoverers, builders.

The feminists gave him hell, and to his credit, he responded, writing an apologetic essay in the New York Times and revising the book to address his mistakes. The third edition, which was more inclusive of fathers, less didactic about gender roles, and called the baby she as well as he, was good enough to turn things around with Gloria Steinem, who named him as a hero of the women's movement in the 10th anniversary issue of Ms. Magazine. Another major change in that revision? A new dedication to Jane in the front of the book. Jane Spock has made the most essential contribution of all in graciously giving up four evenings a week for two years while I wrote and erased and wrote again. It was far too little, way too late. By 1974, things between Ben and Jane were so bad, their children practically begged them to get divorced.

Instead, Ben's allergy to the truth was causing rot to spread through the generations. Even as their marriage was falling apart, they let a documentary crew follow them on a sailing trip with their grandchildren. When the kids, who were at the time not even 13 years old, came home, they reported to their parents that when the cameras were on, Ben tried to bully them into acting like a happy family. When the cameras were off, all Ben and Jane did was fight. In 1975, he suggested a trial separation. But it soon became clear that this was not a trial

so much as a bridge to something else. Their grandson Dan said, It seemed like all the way through, he had a plan that he was following through on. And he was kind of direct and steady about it. And Jane, on the other hand, seemed quite wrecked by it all. Once she was on her own, Jane's alcoholism got worse. Finally, others could see the truth of her illness, which Ben had tried so hard to keep hidden. Friends joined her for a sailing trip and had to cancel the minute they got there and found her weepy and slurring her words.

Within a year, the marriage was over. her words. Within a year, the marriage was over. Jane gave an interview to the New York Times in which she pinned the roots of their trouble on Ben's failing to give her proper credit for her work on the book. 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. She claimed she should have been billed as a co-author from the start. This was not exactly the case. As their son Mike put it, She was a major participant in the process. But I don't think they were her words in any sense.

It was a mutual discipline of them working together. But what is the proper credit for a person who does the following things? I was at the typewriter from 9pm to 1. to 1 a.m. every night for a year while he slowly dictated to me. I did quite a lot of changing of expressions and other things that weren't clear. I consulted with all kinds of doctors and nurses and 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. 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. Writer's assistant barely covers it. She was a combination researcher,

fact checker, advisor, editor, focus group, and, of course, caretaker for the author himself. But Jane never thought to ask for anything in exchange for her labor. It was all part of the general deal of being married. So when, at the age of 70, she found herself single and alone, while Ben fell in love with and quickly got married to a 32-year-old who was known to water ski naked. She felt cheated. If it had been a co-authorship like it should have been, I would have been asked on television shows too, and I would have been asked what I thought about those 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. Her bitterness is on full display here, but she had little else at her disposal. T. Barry Brazelton, a fellow pediatrician who became heir to Spock's literary legacy, knew them as a couple. Well, she was the real intellectual in the family. Not that he's not an intellect, because he certainly is, but she was an intellectual and very deep-seated in her feelings and emotions. I think she got a pretty raw deal out of life. I suspect that Ben's sudden fame and his love of it, because he does love it, was very hard on her.

I think it took him away from her. And she probably did resort to alcoholism as a result of that. I'm not sure this is how the illness of addiction works. I don't know that one resorts to it when things are tough and resists it when times are good. But what can be said is that the same man who was uniquely equipped to deliver a revolutionary message to the world about human psychology was also perfectly poised to be the worst possible life partner for the psychologically complicated Jane Chaney. Her strong character and vibrant mind drew him in. Then he rebelled against her, taunting her in the exact way he knew would get her where she lived. She was upset by my continuing flirtatiousness with other women. I always

denied it. I didn't like being told I couldn't dance cheek to cheek. I think my tendencies were to look for someone who could be dominating, but I also think that I provoke Jane by being flirtatious. When she tried to rein him in, he said, it triggered the old response to his overly controlling mother. When she got sick, he shamed or ignored her. When she was problematic, he erased her. All the while, he remained remarkably obtuse about what was going on with her. I never thought of her therapy, either chemical or psychological, as having a large bearing on her mood swings. I just didn't. Really, man? He was so focused on the nurture part of human development,

it crowded out all consideration for nature. Genetic inheritance simply was not on his radar. her nature. Genetic inheritance simply was not on his radar. When his own grandson Peter developed schizophrenia in his early 20s and died by suicide, the best Ben could offer his shattered son and daughter-in-law was to ask if they wanted to be alone with their grief. There had been no discussion, apparently, of the fact that Peter's grandmother Jane had herself been diagnosed with schizophrenia back in the 50s. Having grown up with an anxious mother who carried the mark of her own unresolved childhood trauma, it's as if Spock's whole career was aimed to prevent unhappiness from forming in the first place, because once it cropped up, he had no idea what to do with it. And this approach, let's get it right from the start so

we don't have to deal with any complicated heartbreaking messes later on, is appealing and an admirable goal. But it doesn't always work, nor is it particularly kind to the ones who are struggling. Believing in the power of nurture as he did, Ben must have felt fear and shame when his children and grandchildren displayed anything less than perfect happiness. He might even have been haunted by his mother's old warning that his lustfulness would cause deformities in future generations. But he didn't talk about any of this. Instead, he looked for environmental factors to blame. Instead, he looked for environmental factors to blame.

He insinuated publicly that his grandson Peter's illness was a result of bad parenting or even unexamined sibling rivalry with his brother Dan. He told reporters when asked about the tragedy, I don't feel it. I don't mean to be evasive, but I simply can't feel it. Peter was a wonderful guy. I'm just not in touch with those feelings. All of this further alienated him from his family. As Dan Spock put it,

Everybody says he's like a marble statue, and mothers everywhere love him. But there has been some family rancor associated with him. Mike said, I never kissed my father. And John said, There wasn't much of a relationship between me and Ben. Not a lot of relating. As to all Dr. Spock's theories,

which is the best way to raise a child, on a strict schedule or with psychological awareness and individual sensitivity, Ben and Jane's son John, who was technically the world's first Spock baby, as he was born right alongside the book, said his own father was proof that the best intentions in the world can't rewrite the code that gets keyed in at the beginning. You are how you were raised. That's what the message is to parents. John's fatalism aside, the book really did have a profound impact. An Esquire profile written in 1983 put it this way. In a society in which significance is almost always a function of power or the bottom line, this child-raising thing, this business of breastfeeding and toilet training, simply didn't seem to matter very much.

Thus it was that ever so quietly, through successive editions of his book and articles in magazines like Ladies Home Journal and Redbook, magazines lying around beauty parlors, for Christ's sakes, Benjamin Spock, more than any individual of his time, was able to reshape the process by which human beings are formed in this country. Jane lived for 13 years after the divorce. She spent much of that time alone and unwell. She did have a brief period of sobriety, but otherwise she floundered in her addiction. Her daughter-in-law Judy remembers her taking dozens of pills at a time. Ben came to see her on her deathbed and she refused to let him in.

Almost no one came to her funeral. We all have our blind spots. Dr. Spock's was, ironically, in the same place as his unique vision. The perspective that formed his professional identity and cemented his spot on Life magazine's list of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th century was the very thing he couldn't grasp in real life. The deeper his wife's trouble got, the more he turned away from her, offloading her problems to analysts, therapists, and other doctors. He knew she had been prescribed pills but didn't pay attention to what they were or what they did to her. Like many partners of addicts and, frankly, many doctors at the time,

he saw her addiction as a moral failing and felt self-control was what she needed most. Dr. Spock did a lot of good for a lot of folks. He eased anxious mothers' minds, promoted breastfeeding, saved countless children from punishments for age-appropriate behavior, and introduced the greater population to the idea that the early years of life are formative. His was the first book of its kind to recognize postpartum depression, admit the importance of the father's role in the family, and honor the innate instincts of the mother. But Ben Spock failed his wife completely. Jane was the first person to take me seriously. I never would have known about Freud if it weren't for Jane's rather painful experience.

The book couldn't have been what it is without her. She did it all. She took care of the children. For Jane's part, even as she blamed him for pretty much everything, she still had moments of clarity amongst the clouds of resentment. If I had had a career from the beginning and kept it up, Ben and I would still be married. Calliope, the name picked out for Jane when she and Ben were falling in love, means chief of all the muses. when she and Ben were falling in love, means chief of all the muses.

He cast her from the beginning in the role of one who exists only to inspire someone else, but she did not live up to that name. Or maybe the problem was that she lived far beyond it. Special thanks to Amanda Lund and Adam Scott Thank you. Additional thanks to my friends, Brian Otaño, Matt Schatz, Chelsea Mercantile, and many Team Coco staffers for providing additional voices. And as always, I'd like to thank my significant other for never making me waltz with him in public. author and host of the podcast Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell, to discuss the influence of Dr. Spock's book and celebrity doctors in general. Significant Others is written

and read by me, Liza Powell O'Brien. I'm not a historian, and I'm greatly indebted to the work of those who are. In some cases, I use diaries or newspapers or court records as sources, but most often I draw from biographies and autobiographies and articles, which represent countless hours of work by people who are far more knowledgeable than I. Sources for each episode are listed in the show notes. If you hear something interesting and you want to know more, please consider ordering these books from your independent bookseller. And if you are a historian or someone who knows something about the people I'm talking about, and you'd like to take issue with an impression I've made or a conclusion I've drawn, I welcome the dialogue. Finally, if you have an episode suggestion,

let us know at significantpod at gmail.com. History is filled with characters, and we tend to focus only on a few of them. Significant Others is produced by GenSamples. Our executive producers are Joanna Solitaroff, Adam Sachs, and Jeff Ross. Engineering and mixing by Eduardo Perez and Joanna Samuel. Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez and Hannes Brown, with additional help from Emily Prill. Research and fact-checking by Ella Morton. Special thanks to Lisa Berm.

Talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista. Thank you.