Article ID: CBB001253067

Science in the Cradle: Milicent Shinn and Her Home-Based Network of Baby Observers, 1890--1910 (2013)

unapi

Oertzen, Christine von (Author)


Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Volume: 55, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 175-195


Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Part of a special issue “Beyond the Academy: Histories of Gender and Knowledge”
Language: English

This essay illustrates how members of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), and most prominently among them Milicent Shinn, a University of California, Berkeley graduate, created an unprecedented network of at-home scientific observation of infants that spanned the North American continent. Shinn and her female peers were inspired by contemporary scholarly enthusiasm for the physiological and mental development of infants and toddlers. During the last decades of the 19th century men of science discovered in their own and others' offspring, to borrow Charles Darwin's phrase, `objects of natural history.' This analysis of unpublished archival materials reveals how the ACA's collective at-home observation of babies transformed the nursery into a laboratory and mothers into scientific observers. The practices developed by Shinn and her network of college-educated mothers blurred distinctions between university and home, expert and amateur. The most visible outcome of the network's enterprise was Shinn's 1907 authoritative study, The Development of the Senses in the First Three Years of Childhood.

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Reviewed By

Essay Review Maria Elvira Callapez; Vanessa Silva (2014) 'Beyond the Academy – Histories of Gender and Knowledge'. Icon: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology (pp. 166-172). unapi

Included in

Article Oertzen, Christine von; Rentetzi, Maria; Watkins, Elizabeth S. (2013) Finding Science in Surprising Places: Gender and the Geography of Scientific Knowledge. Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology (pp. 73-80). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001253067/

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Authors & Contributors
Noon, David Hoogland
Yang, Elisabeth M.
Wall, John
José Amador
Johnston, Elizabeth
Johnson, Ann
Concepts
Psychology
Child development
Medicine
Women in science
Physiology
Family
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century, late
20th century
18th century
21st century
Places
United States
North America
Netherlands
Russia
Italy
Germany
Institutions
Cambridge University
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