~David Nasaw,author of Children of the City: At Work and at Play I cannot recommend it highly enough to scholars, students, and the general public."
It is also the best work I have read in years on twentieth-century gender politics, youth culture, sexuality, and family history. In its ingenious use of sources, its interpretive reach, its marvelous prose style, its wisdom and wit, Babysitter is a model of cultural history. ~Grace Palladino,author of Teenagers: An American History The sources are imaginative, the thinking is complex, and the argument is provocativeat times, even startling." "Babysitter offers a sophisticated analysis of the worlds youngest profession that reveals almost a centurys worth of generational and gender-based conflict. "In this first-ever history of babysitting, Miriam Forman-Brunell has written an enjoyable account of class employees who, she argues, does an extraordinary amount of cultural work in addition to its assigned childcare chores." It's a delightful book that I encourage you to recommendnot only to your students and colleagues in the academy, but also to your friends, family members, and former babysitting employers." "Meticulously researched and cleverly written, Babysitter is a must-read for anyone interested in the important yet oft-overlooked history of babysitting and the gendered politics of representation in U.S. "From horror movies and pornography to the squeaky-clean cast of the Baby-sitter’s Club books, our cultural views of babysitters reveal more about our societal hang-ups than they do about the neighborhood teenagers who watch our children." Now, Miriam Forman-Brunell, history professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has analyzed its origins, evolution, and inner workings." "For more than eight decades, baby-sitting has been part of our social and cultural history. "Miriam Forman-Brunells Babysitter: An American History explores the multifaceted meaning of the sitter in popular culture." Its a thorough investigation of our cultural anxieties about childcare and an intriguing look at what happens when a teenage girl rules the roost." "What might have just been an amusing collection of related relics is instead a sophisticated and smooth history of girl culture and shifting family values in Forman-Brunells capable hands. In the end, experts’ efforts to tame teenage girls with training courses, handbooks, and other texts failed to prevent generations from turning their backs on babysitting. In her quest to gain a fuller picture of this largely unexamined cultural phenomenon, Forman-Brunell analyzes a wealth of diverse sources, such as The Baby-sitter’s Club book series, horror movies like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, urban legends, magazines, newspapers, television shows, pornography, and more.įorman-Brunell shows that beyond the mundane, understandable apprehensions stirred by hiring a caretaker to “mind the children” in one’s own home, babysitters became lightning rods for society’s larger fears about gender and generational change. In fact, the grievances go both ways, as girls have been distressed by unsatisfactory working conditions. Informed by her research on the history of teenage girls’ culture, Forman-Brunell analyzes the babysitter, who has embodied adults’ fundamental apprehensions about girls’ pursuit of autonomy and empowerment. In Babysitter, Miriam Forman-Brunell brings critical attention to the ubiquitous, yet long-overlooked babysitter in the popular imagination and American history.
Will the kids be safe with “that girl”? It’s a question that discomfited parents have been asking ever since the emergence of the modern American teenage girl nearly a century ago. But “getting a sitter”-especially a dependable one-rarely seems trouble-free.
Now, she and cowriter Jennifer Jordan reveal the chilling and unforgettable true story of a charming but brutal psychopath through the eyes of a young girl who once called him her friend.On Friday nights many parents want to have a little fun together-without the kids.
Haunted by nightmares and horrified by what she learned, Liza became obsessed with the case. Though Tony Costa’s gruesome case made screaming headlines in 1969 and beyond, Liza never made the connection between her friendly babysitter and the infamous killer of numerous women, including four in Massachusetts, until decades later. Some of his victims were buried-in pieces-right there, in his garden in the woods.
#THE BABYSITTER BOOK SERIAL#
During the summers, while her mother worked days in a local motel and danced most nights in the Provincetown bars, her babysitter-the kind, handsome handyman at the motel where her mother worked-took her and her sister on adventures in his truck.īut there was one thing she didn’t know their babysitter was a serial killer. Growing up on Cape Cod in the 1960s, Liza Rodman was a lonely little girl.
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