Episode 26: A Brief History of Children's Science Toys
1:07:39
Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg
Guest: Rebecca Onion
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Fall asleep under the million stars by Springtide
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In this episode, the hosts talk about the history of children’s science toys and then get a little nostalgic telling each other about their own childhood toys. Historian and writer Rebecca Onion joins in the discussion to talk about science and childhood in the U.S. and about her book, Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Public Science in the United States.
Show Notes
Transcription by Julia Pass
Boys and their toys: the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, 1930-1968, and the making of a male technical domain by Ruth Oldenziel
Presidential Address: Scientific Toys by Gerard L’E. Turner
Gilbert Lap Technician Set for Girls via Science History Institute
Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Public Science in the United States by Rebecca Onion
For more on gender and science in childhood see Sally Gregory Kohlstedt
Transcript
Rebecca: Welcome to episode 26 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and pop culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.
Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Leila: And I'm Leila McNeill, the other founder and editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Leila: Before we jump into the episode, a couple of things. Not necessarily housekeeping, but one thing. Just coming at the end of this year, I wanted to say thank you on behalf of all of the hosts for listening this year, and to all of our listeners who have been with us since the beginning, thank you. And those of you who have just found us, thank you to you, too. I hope you continue in with us for the next year.
Leila: And speaking of the next year, we are filling out our schedule. And so we just wanted to put it out there for you guys that if there is a topic that you wanna hear us talk about, do a deep historical dive on it, come at it with our usual irreverent humor, let us know. You can tweet at us, or you can leave it as a review on Apple Podcasts, but we're happy to hear your suggestions for next year.
Leila: And last thing is speaking of reviews on Apple Podcasts, just a reminder that it is incredibly helpful if you leave us ratings and reviews so that new listeners can find us. It is one of the best ways for new people to find us so that we can get onto Apple's whatever algorithm they have to get us on their front page or whatever. So but that would be extremely helpful, so that can be your Christmas present to us.
Anna: Okay. Well, speaking of gifts, since it is the winter holidays and many of us are engaged in gift giving, gift receiving, fondly remembering the gifts of times past, we thought that we would talk in this episode about the history and culture of scientific toys. So later on in this episode, we will talk to writer and historian Rebecca Onion about her work on the history of childhood and scientific culture to get some broader context on this idea, but I thought it would be fun for us to get a little nostalgic and talk about some science toys from our own childhoods, or maybe ones we coveted and never had. I have a long list of stuff like that.
Anna: First I wanted to lay out a very brief history of scientific toys. In order for there to be scientific toys, experimental science not only had to exist in its modern form, which more or less came into being in the early modern period and especially in the 18th century, but it also needed to be popular enough that people would be interested in buying or paying to see demonstrations of scientific apparatus. For men of science, demonstrations of experiments would happen places like the Royal Society or universities.
Anna: But science was also fast becoming an interest of regular people, too, so to serve that interest and what ultimately became that market, science—especially experiments—was popularized in the 18th century by things like exhibitions, lecture demonstrations, popular science books. Scientific demonstrations were popular for edification and entertainment, and people could make a living traveling around demonstrating scientific principles for audiences and interested amateurs. These kinds of lectures, often given by instrument makers or scholars who wanted to make extra money, would involve demonstrations with instruments like the famous air pump, which you may have encountered. It is a device for demonstrating physical theories like the vacuum, things like that.
Rebecca: So a first thought. There's something a little bit delightful about this image of attending an experimental lecture in the 18th century or in the early modern era. So I can't help but picture men in fancy frock coats or women in giant hats and scientific instruments with lots of cool fiddly knobs and dials.
Rebecca: But I do wanna point out here that we would probably have found some of these demonstrations pretty shocking. So we mentioned an air pump earlier, and the scientist Robert Boyle was known for showing off his air pump and doing demonstrations with it. And John Evelyn, who was a 17th century writer, once described attending a demonstration that Boyle put on.
Rebecca: And here's the thing. Anna just said before that this was used sometimes to describe the making of a vacuum. And the way that the vacuum was demonstrated is putting small animals inside the air pump and then asphyxiating them. Ew. Terrible. This is Evelyn's description of it: "I went to the Society, where were diverse experiments by in Mr. Boyle's pneumatic engine. We put in a snake but could not kill it by exhausting the air. Only made it extremely sick." Side note: I wanna know how they knew the snake was extremely sick.
Anna: No, you probably don't, cuz it was probably thrashing around. Ugh, God.
Rebecca: Yeah. Anyway, Evelyn goes on to say, "But the chick died of convulsions outright in short space." So that's lovely. And he did this with lots of other small animals. Thankfully, lectures and experimental demonstrations weren't just about asphyxiating small animals.
Rebecca: Itinerant lecturers would also be called upon by wealthy people who were interested in collecting scientific instruments and curiosities and to advise them on the purchase of a telescope or the best place to acquire rare specimens. And scientific toys kinda come out of this practice because as time went on, more and more people want to buy scientific instruments and learn about science, and science became a more significant part of children's education.
Rebecca: In the 19th century, many popular science books and articles were written by women, who saw themselves as part of this tradition that said that it was the job of mothers to educate children about God's creation. And those writings encouraged at-home experimentation and observation. And around the same time, simple science toys that demonstrated some scientific principle became popular.
Rebecca: And some of these we're kinda still familiar with today, like Newton's cradle or the drinking bird. Which I actually had to look—I couldn't remember what Newton's cradle was, so I had to look it up. And for those of you who are trying to do the same thing, it's the thing where there's a bunch of steel balls hanging and you hit one on one end, and it makes the one on the other end go. And then they go back and forth. And you see them in dentist offices and stuff if you like.
Leila: Yeah, and I also see them in movies and TV shows where the main character that has them is a psycho or something. It's weird. It's a weird thing.
Rebecca: Yes. Yeah. It is. They tick back and forth in this meditative way that is also slightly creepy.
Leila: Just a little anecdote that demonstrates the way that this went in the 19th century. Humphry Davy used to do chemistry experiments and lectures for the public, and Jane Marcet attended one or several. And it ignited her interest in chemistry, and then she wrote Conversations on Chemistry, which encouraged young girls to do chemistry in the home. And then that book went on to inspire Michael Faraday, who was working as an apprentice in the publisher where Marcet's book was being printed. Just a demonstration of how this public culture of experimentation and science really caught in the 19th century.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. There's another book that is in the collection of the Science History Institute, where I work when I'm not doing Lady Science things, that it's called the Fairyland of Chemistry. It is the most saccharine, Victorian thing ever, and I kind of love it. But the whole thing is it's just different kind of fairies come together and do dances or hook arms, and that makes different kinds of molecules. And it's a way of explaining how elements and molecules work, and it has very adorable drawings. But it feels very much in this tradition of "We're going to teach children science, and especially girl children science."
Anna: Yeah. It's fairy creatures and little mythological beings at the bottom of the garden. It was a very popular trope for that kind of writing, like the water babies and things like that.
Leila: Yeah. Yeah. Fairyland of Science. Yeah.
Anna: There's a lot of books that have Fairyland in the title that are science books for children.
Rebecca: Yeah. Other science toys that we recognize today also began to emerge at this time as well. Around the 1840s is when chemistry sets start being marketed. And also middle-class people transformed the sort of fancy tradition of wealthy people creating cabinets of curiosities into the kind of collecting that we're a little more familiar with now, where people purchase pre-assembled collections of rocks and gems and shells.
Rebecca: This was also when a lot of objects that were originally scientific tools really became toys. For example, spinning tops and yoyos and kaleidoscopes all come from this tradition of demonstrating natural phenomenon. And Victorian children also learned about science using modern wonders like the camera obscura or Kinetoscopes or telescopes and microscopes and other optical instruments.
Leila: And the toy trade really began to take off during the Industrial Revolution, when manufacturing technologies and methods made mass production of these objects possible and profitable. And in the United States, the toy industry was just getting off the ground in the inter-war period, just as the popularity and prestige of science was really reaching kind of a fever pitch following the First World War.
Leila: And chemistry sets, which I think might be the most iconic scientific toy ever, they were extremely popular, despite even some reservations people had about the appalling uses to which chemistry had been put during the First War. But the chemistry industry was booming, and chemistry sets were used by marketers as a way to encourage people—read in big letters: boys—to consider careers in science and industry and to train them in the habits of mind that were seen as essential for scientists and engineers.
Leila: And I think another example are model kits and model making toys, which are to the future engineer as chemistry sets are to the future lab scientist. And historian Ruth Oldenziel has written about an inter-war model automobile contest sponsored by the Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild, which was an organization run by the Fisher company that made automobile bodies for companies like GM.
Leila: The contest was for boys, who would build an intricate model of a Napoleonic coach, and the contest was used in ads for Fisher. These images showed how the contest was designed to promote and codify a gendered world of technical expertise. Boys who participate in the contest were socialized into becoming technophiles who would presumably go on to take their place as engineers and managers in technology firms like Fisher.
Anna: So the thing that these kind of aspirational scientific toys have in common, and it is different from toys in the 19th century, is that in the 20th century, science education for children was less about coming to know the wonders of God or a general well-rounded, middle-class education. In the 20th century, it really became about steering children toward a future career as a scientist, like with the chemistry sets or building the model of the coach to kind of like, "I'm gonna be an engineer when I grow up." And inspiring this love of science in children is something that came to be understood as a larger cultural heritage of being an American, that this is what we do in America.
Anna: So like I said, in the 19th century, science education was particularly useful in the kind of tradition we've talked about of women writers who were writing these scientific texts for children about coming to science as a way to appreciate God's creation and teaching them to see God's work in the working of nature.
Anna: But by the 20th century, this spiritual component has been replaced by the values of sort of individual accomplishment, that very classic scientifically minded American know-how, this whole thing that we're hopelessly mired in in our present day. So this model for 20th-century science toys, in general, that they are objects to encourage structured play with a long-term goal. They're supposed to encourage certain kinds of thinking, promote curiosity, prepare children for a scientific workforce.
Anna: And that becomes increasingly important in American society through the Second World War and into the post-war period. So that's something that I wanna talk with Rebecca Onion about in our interview, so I will leave that here for now. Cliffhanger about the importance of science education and childhood in the, I don't know, World War II/post-war period.
Leila: Cliffhanger for 13 minutes.
Anna: Yeah. Now you just have to get through the episode with us. What…what I wanted to do is talk about some of these toys that we may remember, fondly or not, and also about I wanna get a little more granular into how gender plays into this. So obviously the gendered marketing of toys—all toys—is one of those things that feminist harpies like to shriek about. And I think that in the case of science toys and what we've kinda been talking about, about the way that science is implicated, particularly in the United States, in good citizenship, in a way. That has some pretty important implications.
Anna: So what I did is I made a list of toys. I checked it twice. That's not true. I checked it once. And I thought we could kind of do it like a draft, so we could just take turns and pick something that we just really wanna talk about off of this list and kind of just spin out some stuff on these toys that we might remember and you, the listener, might remember having as a kid or buying for your kids or whatever. So who wants to go first?
Rebecca: I'll go first. I'll go first and talk about my favorite historical chemistry set with weird gendered overtones. Not even overtones. Just weird gendered language. This isn't a chemistry set particularly from my childhood. It is one from the 1950s that is part of the Science History Institute collection of chemistry sets and science toys, which is pretty epic and amazing. So it was made by the Gilbert Company, which they made a lot of these sort of mid-century-era chemistry sets in many colors and varieties and focuses.
Rebecca: This one, it is pink. It has two girls on it, one looking through a microscope, and there are some test tubes and a little notebook where you could write some notes in it. All of which is fine. The title of this chemistry set is "Lab Technician Set for Girls." It's just so perfect.
Rebecca: And it is interesting, looking through the chemistry sets that the Institute has, because there are so many of them where it's a little boy on it. And then we have this one that's for girls. And then when you get a little bit later, like some of them from the '70s and '80s, they're like, "Oh, wait, we should have some people on here who aren't white boys." And then once in a while you'll see a boy and a girl, or a white boy and a black boy. I don't think any of them have black girls on them because they weren't gettin' that radical or anything. But just the really blatant way in which these are marketed in gendered fashion. It speaks for itself, but this one is so blatant that it delights me with horror.
Leila: Yeah. Well, you know, I've even noticed today. I have lots of friends with kids, and it's really hard not to buy gendered toys just because that's what's available. But I've noticed kind of an attempt at diversity on the packaging, and for stuff like that, diversity means a black boy and a white girl, or an Asian person. It's like that's the gamut of it. Rarely will you still see an Asian girl or a black girl or a Latina girl on the packaging for these types of toys.
Leila: One of the things that I remember playing with…I don't remember having—I'm not saying that I didn't. I just don't remember having a chemistry set or a crystal growing set or anything like that. The one I remember the most is a trunkful of toy dinosaurs that my brother and I used to play with. And we had a floor scenescape with streams and mountains and terrain and stuff that we could move the dinosaurs on.
Leila: And this was a massive endeavor. If we were gonna play dinosaurs for the day, it was "Everyone's not going anywhere cuz we have to put this whole thing out on the floor, and it's gonna be a day." And it was really fun, and there's a family video that we still have. My dad was filming us playing, but he was tryin' to do it like it was stop-motion. So he would record, pause, and then we would move the dinosaurs on the scenescape, and then he would start it again. And there's this one thing where we had a wind-up T-Rex. And you just see it gradually moving through a crowd of dinosaurs.
Anna: This is amazing. Do you have this?
Rebecca: This sounds amazing.
Leila: Yeah. Somewhere. I mean, I was really into pterosaurs at the time, and you can just hear me in the background and see a little pterosaur dip in front of the camera, and I'm going, "Waah! Waah!" And that is scientifically correct here what a pterosaur sounds like.
Anna: I am so delighted by this. I know what you mean about toys or sets of toys or whatever that it's a whole day where you're just like, "We're doing dinosaurs today. Prepare yourself." And your parents are just like, "Oh, God." This is such a production. Yup. Yup. Yup. Yup.
Leila: Yeah. It was a lotta fun, playing like that.
Anna: Did you also have lots of books about dinosaurs and read about them and learn about what they ate and all that stuff to make your dinosaurs accurate?
Leila: Yeah. Yeah. This was in the age of the pop-up books. And then you could pull tabs out, and the dinosaurs would move and stuff. And so I remember there was one that we had where it was a brontosaurus, which is maybe why it's currently my favorite dinosaur as an adult. I just thought it was the cutest thing to pull out the tab and watch its long neck and little head go towards the food when I pulled the tab.
Anna: It's extremely good.
Rebecca: I have to say that sounds distinctly familiar. I'm sure many books had that. But I now have a very strong sense memory of doing the same thing.
Leila: Yeah. I mean, it's a great way to learn, I think. I remember distinctly what brontosaurus ate because of that.
Anna: Yeah. I feel like I have stronger memories of Land Before Time and Dinotopia than I do of real stuff that I actually did learn about dinosaurs cuz I was just a huge dweeb as a kid. Still am a huge dweeb. But I must have read Dinotopia 100 times. The local librarian was probably just like, "Oh, it's you again. It's the Dinotopia kid. Here."
Leila: Well, and I don't even know what maybe in my knowledge about dinosaurs that I had from the '80s and early '90s is even correct anymore, to be honest.
Anna: That's the thing, right? How many times have we gone back and forth about whether—
Leila: Feathers.
Rebecca: Aren't we maybe not sure that brontosauruses were a thing?
Anna: Yes. That's what I was gonna say. Brontosaurus, and then there's "Is it an allosaurus or a baby T-Rex? We're not sure." A lot of things that were actually two different animals or if they're at different stages of their lives. I feel like there's new dinosaur news every three months, and I can't keep up anymore.
Rebecca: Which as it turns out a bunch of—yeah.
Anna: I would prefer to be keeping up with dinosaur news to keeping up with the actual news. The other thing I was thinking about dinosaurs is that I always thought—do you remember hearing those news stories about a kid who finds a fossil T-Rex skull in his backyard or whatever?
Leila: Oh, yeah.
Rebecca: Yes.
Anna: I never envied anybody more than those children who discovered a nest of fossilized eggs. And I'd just think about it all the time, how cool it'd be. And I would be on the news. And then the museum would gimme a bunch of money for my dinosaur eggs. Man, I wanted it.
Leila: Yeah. There was actually a time when me and my best friend from elementary school actually started digging up her backyard. It was heinous. Her parents came home and were just like, "What have you done?" We were digging wide and deep.
Rebecca: To be boring and analytical for a second—or maybe not boring—
Leila: Get outta here!
Rebecca: I know! I do think it's interesting, though, that when we were talking about the move in the 20th century away from learning about the wonders of the world and towards "You must have a career," so much of that is around this idea of play must be structured, play must have a purpose. But what are we sitting here feeling super joyful about is the idea of creating weird universes with our dinosaurs. Yeah. We wanted to make sure we got our facts right. Facts, whatever.
Rebecca: But we wanted to—the idea was open space to spend Dinosaur Day on the floor of the family room movin' around all your dinosaurs and making stop-motion videos. That delights me so much. That's what we all have the most distinct memories of, doing those kinds of play as opposed to kind of more structured play.
Rebecca: I don't think I ever had a kit, but I remember having books that were kitchen science kinds of things where it's like, "Test the pH of things" or "Mix these two things you'll find together, and they will do an explosion." And I have, I feel like, less memory of that than of, yeah, playing with dinosaur toys or building things with Legos or other kinds of things that involved telling stories and worldbuilding and also putting information into my story.
Anna: Yeah. I mean, I'll just offer the exception to the rule. For me, personally, very young I wanted to be a marine biologist. I wanted to be a marine biologist until my junior year of high school. Earlier childhood, it was all Dinotopia, all wall-to-wall Dinotopia all the time and fantastical stuff, but I do have memories of thinking about things that I could do or things that I could acquire as a child as being part of this longer-term goal.
Anna: And it happened later on in my childhood, like not when I was really, really a kid, but thinking about things like sea monkeys. Or I had a bug catching kit because I was really interested in science, and I already decided I wanted to be a biologist. And I live in the desert. There's not a lot of marine biology going on here. So I reasoned that it would be still productive for me to investigate other creatures that I could find. And I was really into catching bugs for a couple of summers and investigating all the bugs that live our yard. Which, again, I live in the desert. We don't even have that many bugs here. There's just not a lot of things growing and living compared to other places that have water.
Anna: But the one thing that I wanted so badly was frickin' sea monkeys because I was like, "Those are sea creatures." And my parents absolutely refused to have an aquarium. We had fish when I was little, and they died, and it was a big pain in the ass for my dad. And he was like, "Absolutely not. We're not doing that anymore. No aquarium." But I just spent all this time tryin' to give my parents to give me some sea monkeys. And then I would feed them, and I would make sure they didn't die, and I would take care of them, and I would observe their behavior.
Anna: And I finally got some sea monkeys, and it was the most disappointing thing ever because the kit, I don't know if it used to be cooler. Maybe after this I'll look some up and see if there's some vintage sea monkeys we can post. But the kit that I got, the whole thing was the size of two soda cans side by side, maybe even a little smaller, made of plastic. It's just a clear plastic container. And then you get a little packet of these shrimp eggs, and you get the mix to make the water salty or whatever. And it has whatever it needs, and then it has food.
Anna: And our sea monkeys were a dud. None of my sea monkeys hatched. You know how the container has a little built-in magnifying glass so what when the sea monkeys swim in front of it you can see them magnified? And I would just stand in front of the kitchen window where the sea monkeys were with my face pressed up against the little magnifying glass looking at the little floating particles of salt or whatever and trying to be like, "Is that one? Is that one?" And my mom's like, "I think they're bigger than that. They're not microscopic. You can see them." It was so disappointing to me, and then so I never even tried again. That probably was just when I became cynical. It's like, "Sea monkeys are bullshit."
Leila: I think, looking at this list of stuff, you've got sea monkeys on here, rock collections, bug catching kit, magnifying glass. I remember another one that I had was a beginner birding thing, and then I had a butterfly catching net. How many of these toys harken back to 19th-century natural history crazes? Yeah.
Leila: Cuz I think I'm like you, Rebecca. I might have done the kitchen science stuff, measuring the pH, but it was getting out in the world, collecting things on my own, and then hoping that my sea monkeys hatch or something so I can observe them. You know, stuff like that. Very hands-on, out in the world type of stuff. Those were the things, I think, that probably got me most excited and I think still get me—I don't know. Still get me excited.
Anna: Yeah. And I think about the pop culture trope of raising a butterfly from a caterpillar as an activity that children do and the way that that trope changes. You could imagine that—what is the name of that science in Latin? Butterflies.
Leila: Butterflyology.
Anna: Yes, that's it. You're right. Yes. Oh, God.
Rebecca: Do you mean the process of going from caterpillar to butterfly?
Anna: No. That's metamorphosis, okay? Also the mitochondria's the powerhouse of the cell. I'm on it, Rebecca. What I just mean that in the 19th century there are moral lessons attached to the lifecycles of creatures, that you would observe these things as a moral lesson in God's processes or whatever.
Anna: And then for me, I understood these things as specifically about "I am a miniature scientist, and I'm going to go out into the world and get this caterpillar, and I'm going to observe and document its metamorphosis. And that is an important thing for me to do because I'm told that it's important for me to know about this stuff and for me to have a scientific mind and be curious about the world." So you can kind of trace that change in the way that children are expected to engage with these ideas. And then I wanted to just ask generally, I guess, to wrap up. Were there things like—what was your experience of gender in science as a child?
Rebecca: I feel like on the one hand, it was very much like, "I can do anything," but also when I think about how much it's ingrained in me that "I'm not good at math, and I have never been good at math, and therefore science is never really going to be a thing for me." And it's hard not to, in retrospect, think about that as a gendered thing despite the fact that no one would have ever explicitly said, "Science is bad for you to do because you're a girl." I think it came through this idea of being bad at math.
Leila: I feel like I got that from school and maybe my peers. I don't really feel like I ever got that at home because so much of—me and my brother are only three years apart, and so much of that play that we did, if we weren't playing with our friends, was together. And so I would play with his toys. He would play with my toys. Then we'd do it together. And then we had communal toys like the dinosaurs. So I don't know. I don't think we ever—we didn't really get that at home, which makes sense for my parents being who they are. But it did eventually go the same way as what you were saying, Rebecca, and that definitely came from school and my peers.
Anna: Yeah. I had a similar experience to you, Leila. My brother and I are 13 months apart, so the age gap was even closer. And so we would play together all the time. I don't have a distinct experience of that as a child. But as we got older, there was definitely divergence of interest that went in a way that—I don't know that I was ever specifically pushed toward anything. I do know that in terms of scientific toys and scientific play, I am terrified of electricity, natural gas, fire, really intense [unclear 0:36:05] acids, and things like that.
Anna: So there's a certain point at which I was like, "Yup, I am not into that." So my brother's literally setting the lawn on fire with rocket engines, and at that point I have learned about the things that my proclivities with science are more about collecting and observing and not blowing stuff up. But I think that it's interesting to reflect on not having a personal experience of this, but then if you look at the way that these toys are marketed and the way that they're designed and pushed in terms of who they're being sold to.
Anna: That's, I think, where that cuts in. So even if you get a little bit of it from school and then a bit from home, but the larger marketplace of scientific childhood is extraordinarily gendered even though our experience of it might not be. So it's kind of interesting that—are we doing focus groups anymore? Were they even bothering to learn about the market for these, or is it just "We do it in a gendered way because that's how you market toys"? I don't know.
Leila: This is a good time to bring on Rebecca Onion to talk about her actual research into this thing.
Anna: Instead of anecdotes.
Leila: Instead of just our half-remembered childhoods.
Anna: Yeah. We need an expert. Rebecca Onion is a writer and American Studies scholar currently on staff at Slate writing about history and culture. Her book Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Public Science in the United States was published in 2016 by the University of North Carolina Press. Rebecca, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about your work, and welcome to the show.
R. Onion: Oh, thanks so much for having me.
Leila: Well, to get us started, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be interested in the popular culture of science and childhood specifically?
R. Onion: Sure. Well, I have a PhD in American Studies. And, I mean, it's funny cuz I look back at it, and then in some ways it seems like it came out of nowhere, but I've been interested in childhood and youth for a long time. I even as an undergrad would write seminar papers about things related to that. So that sorta long-standing sense of intrigue for me is just how cultural fixations and commitments get expressed through people's—mostly adult—understandings of what children should be doing and the kinds of pedagogical tools that are created for them and cultural representations of their learning. That's been an area of interest for a long time.
R. Onion: And I realized while I was writing the conclusion to my book, which is a good time to realize it, that I've sorta been interested in this idea, the question of the supposed inherent rightness of scientific thinking in childhood, ever since I was—I think it was in fifth grade, fourth or fifth grade. We had a program called Odyssey of the Mind. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that at all. It mighta been a Northeast thing. I'm not sure. But it was an enrichment program for after school, and they would have you do little projects to try to get your mind outside the box kinda thing.
R. Onion: I remember that we were assigned this project that was "Make a better mousetrap." And they would send you home with a paper bag full of various little mechanical bits, and you're supposed to construct it. And I just remember thinking, "I hate this so much. This is terrible." I was a real words and stories person as a kid and probably now, I guess you could say.
R. Onion: But what's interesting about the feeling that I think stayed with me for a while is that I was almost ashamed of myself for not being interested. I was like, "What's wrong with me? I know that now is the time when I'm supposed to be experimentally interested in the physical world." And, you know, I would never have articulated that to myself as a 10-year-old. But looking back at it now, I'm like, "Yeah, yeah." I definitely thought that something was un-childish about that, about me not wanting to do that.
R. Onion: So, I mean, obviously that's not why I wrote this book. I wrote the book because I took a bunch of classes in the history of science, the history of technology and childhood studies classes in graduate school and got interested in early 20th century children's literature and the tendency to have extremely boring instructional books masquerading as children's literature that were all about various aspects of modernity and the contrast between that boringness and the idea that they would be entertaining to kids. And just what seemed to me a total mismatch between what adults thought kids wanted at the time and maybe what kids actually wanted or whatever. And also the fact that it's very difficult for historians to know what the kids wanted. All that stuff interested me intellectually. And that's sort of how I got into this bigger project, is through that early 20th century children's literature portal.
Anna: So I wanna take a step back and look at this a little broader in terms of the kind of shape of this culture of science and its role in childhood in the United States. Can you give us kind of a potted history of that? So where does this sort of begin? What's kind of the peak of it? Yeah. I mean, maybe along the lines of the science-talented youngster that you read about. Yeah.
R. Onion: Yeah. Sure. Well, one of the things that I found interesting about the history as I looked into it more was that there was sort of a—people come to it from a variety of different angles, of course, like anything cultural. But I first became—whenever I talk to anyone in the general public about the project, everyone's always like, "Oh, yeah, Sputnik." So the Cold War period is the time when people "Oop," probably because it's what people remember if they were old enough. If they're boomers, they remember that as a time when people suddenly started getting really interested in science talent as a concept. But that's sort of the national defense era of it.
R. Onion: But there was a previous era starting in Progressive Era. There is some stuff in the 19th century that's a little more sort of general. It's always inherently male-focused in some ways, although Sally Kohlstedt, who you guys probably know her work, but she did find that there actually was sort of a little tradition of expectation that girls would be doing science at home in the 19th century with their families. Not alone in a room in the chemistry set way, but with their families together. They would be doing sort of parlor experimentation.
R. Onion: And then actually in a way things got worse for girls in the 20th century because in the 19th century it was sort of more expected. But I'm gonna ramble on this question. I can already tell. But the Progressive Era is really when the influence of John Dewey, who really loved the idea of scientific thinking in childhood and experimental thinking and wrote books about it and was obviously really influential in the progressive education movement. I would say that he's probably the person that I would point to who articulated it most specifically, but there was also all kindsa people doing nature study education. Again, Sally Kohlstedt's the writer on that, but trying to bring sort of nature study and science into different areas of the curriculum.
R. Onion: So linking it with writing and linking it with history, but doing it. That is sort of also much more multi-gendered in a way. But some of the same—you start to see some of the same rhetoric in the early 20th century around the child's inherent capacity to do this kind of work that then gets used in service of national defense in the '40s and '50s. So it's sort of this same idea of suitedness or appropriateness is already sort of starting to happen in the early 20th century, but then it gets brought to a level of national rhetoric—or nationalist rhetoric, I guess I should say—in the '40s and '50s.
Leila: So one of the things that you write about is the way that the image of the child is sort of put forward as an ideal image for the adult scientist, this person who retains all that quote "childlike wonder and curiosity." So I'm wondering how this plays out when we look at the larger culture of science and who we see should be a scientist and the qualities we associate with that ideal scientist.
R. Onion: Yeah. So I really had a lot of revelations about the representation question when I was doing this work cuz there's a sort of a way where we talk about "Okay, well, the problem is that girls don't see themselves as scientists" and that that's why you can't see—what is it? You can't be what you can't see? That idea. So that what we need is to show girls more images of women who are scientists.
R. Onion: And but I found that, for at least 100 years, the part of the—the problem goes a little bit deeper than that in my mind, which has to do with the linking of qualities of mischievousness and transgression with boyishness and also with science. So there's a lotta that. Probably it's the most salient in conversations about chemistry sets. And that's another thing people love to talk to me about at public talks, is the boy who blew up his bedroom with a chemistry set or his basement or whatever. And occasionally, every once in a while, the person in that story is a girl, but usually not.
R. Onion: And that's a idea that gets translated in a buncha different venues. I wrote a chapter about the Brooklyn Children's Museum, which was the first children's museum in the US and in the early 20th century had a bunch of after-school programs. And we would call them now after-school programs. I don't know. I don't think they called them that. And weekend programs. A lot of kids would go there and made it their home in a way. At least that's what the official self-representation from the museum people was.
R. Onion: But even in that venue, there were particular kinds of science that the girls were doing and the boys were doing, and the boys would do the things that were kind of cutting-edge and a little bit scary. They got really into the wireless radio, and they would go up on top of the museum and string wires. And there's pictures of boys climbing around on the top of the museum. And girls are kind of collecting moths and collecting birds. The more memorization-based, nature-focused stuff. And the boys are the ones who are really challenging the capacity even of their instructors to do understand what they were doing and also just kind of freaking everyone out with what they were doing a little bit.
R. Onion: And so the way that I see it kind of happening, I see that in representations of—well, really, I see it in representations of tech people now a little bit also, this kind of "Oh, I'm just sort of otherworldly in my genius. I don't follow your rules" or something. And that when people in the 20th century talked about little kids who were interested in science, that was one of the major things that they talked about, was the need for adults not to put too many limits around what the kids were gonna try to do. And those kids were always—because those kids were always boys.
R. Onion: And it's the kinda thing where I don't know. Is it the case that people called for mothers not to limit their boys' experimentation too much because they were boys or because that was supposed to be what science was or whatever? It's a little hard to discern motive in some cases. But that was definitely something that people who'd advocated for what they would call "science-minded youngsters" would say.
R. Onion: And so I think that this idea that science equals mischief is almost in some ways inherently exclusionary of girls. It almost doesn't even matter whether the person who's being represented in whatever cultural object it is is a boy or a girl. It's the qualities that are being identified as science-mindedness are boyish qualities, and girls are not as praised for having those qualities. Maybe especially in 1925, but probably also now in whatever way you can quantify that.
Leila: It sounds interesting because when you were describing the museum and how the boys were kind of shown doing mischievous things and kind of experimenting without bounds, and then the girls were collecting, it seems like what the girls were doing was more along the quality of 19th-century natural history, whereas the boys were kind of doing more towards modern scientific methods of experimentation and things like that.
R. Onion: Yeah. For sure. For sure. I remember—actually, I remember this very clearly because, well, you'll see why. There was a article about those wireless boys in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and it said something like, "Oh, the girls participate in this club, but the girls quote 'do no original work' unquote."
Leila: Mm. Where have we heard that before?
R. Onion: I know. I know. Yeah. And just the fact that it's described—these older boys that are doing it. I mean, they are a little bit older than the other kids at the museum, but the idea is that they're also described as beyond the ability of the women who are—cuz it's women who are running the museum—beyond the ability of the women to help, to assist. So they're not only beyond their female peers, they're also outside of the education system, which is kind of an important sorta subplot in this whole thing, too, is the idea that the education system fails science-minded kids and boys and anyone who is original, basically.
Anna: Their genius cannot be contained by the day-today of the museum.
R. Onion: Exactly.
Anna: When I was looking through your book, I sent Leila this quote that you have here, this Thorndike quote about boys poking unlucky crabs and stealing eggs and stuff and how that is the true way to do science, and if you care about the Earth and have feelings for the creatures and the quote "deer plants," then that's just silly, sentimental [unclear 0:52:48].
R. Onion: Yeah. Yeah. They were supposed to be—they were supposed to be—and I can't remember if I included that in the book, but he actually includes a girl in that quote, if I remember correctly. But he describes his ideal girl as dismembering her doll, basically. So sorta being like, "Yeah, fuck you, femininity." Like, "I'm gonna rip your stuffing out on my way to science." Yeah.
R. Onion: And just this idea that the women—I mean, Sally Kohlstedt makes the point in that book about nature study that that was a place for scientifically interested women to have jobs, basically, and that the decline of the nature study movement in the '30s was a real problem. Or it was sort of a sad loss of opportunity for them. But it's this twist-up where that kind of science is, on the one hand, the kind that girls are encouraged to be interested in largely or generally and also the kind that's devalued. And, I mean, well, yeah, there you go. That's it.
Anna: So we've kinda covered some of the stuff about representation, and I think I'm kind of with you, that maybe the more interesting thing about this idea of representation and who is and is not seen as a scientist has to do with what we consider to be good science or to be the kind of science we want people to do. But you do talk about representation in the sources you find and about how they're not often—girls are not often pictured in books or the packaging of scientific toys, but also that they're represented in a different way from boys, distracted or distracting observer of boys doing experiments. Or they're made out like helpers or just cheerleaders. Were there any things like that that you [unclear 0:54:53] that you really—
R. Onion: Oh, there's tons of stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I should not say that there's not a representation problem fundamentally, but yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, there's tons of stuff like that. I remember I'd sorta took out a buncha the stuff about the boring informational books because it wasn't really fitting into the book, so I can't remember whether this one made it into the book or not, but there was a series of photographic informational books that were The Story of X, so The Story of Trains, The Story of Leather, The Story of Rayon.
R. Onion: And there's a buncha different series of those from the early 20th century, but in this particular one, it was photographically illustrated. And it was two kids that were on a train journey, and it was a brother and sister. And often this kind of representational failure, I guess—I don't know if you could call it that—comes when it's a brother and a sister. And the brother is super interested in how the train works and wants to know all the details and is constantly asking the conductor questions and being sort of a pestering pest.
R. Onion: The sister at some point just sits down and reads a magazine. So there's this idea that she kinda was just like, "Ugh, media. I'll just do media. That's fine. I don't wanna think about anything more." There was tons of that stuff in the chemistry set advertisements, sort of girls at the elbow of the boy, like the boy will be doing whatever experiment it is and the girl's kinda watching.
R. Onion: And there's one very memorable A. C. Gilbert chemistry set from the '50s that is a lab tech set that's marketed to girls. Which was interesting cuz I went and looked at the chemistry sets at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and they have a lab tech set, and they also have all the instructional booklets that are inside. I was both annoyed and disappointed to find that the instructional booklet inside the lab tech set was the exact same as the ones for the boys. They put a cover on it, and they were like, "Ugh, whatever. We'll just have this pink cover with this lab set that has the two girls on it instead of the boys." But they weren't gonna go so far as to write whole new experiments, which that's actually an interesting fact in and of itself. It deprives me of a very nice primary source, but it was interesting to see.
R. Onion: There's tons of that. I looked at the records of the Science Talent Search at the Smithsonian and from the '40s and '50s, and in the press releases describing the winners of the—what it was is the finalists from different states would go to DC and have basically a big party and a lot of events where they would go around and meet different scientists and learn about how science was done within the government and stuff like that.
R. Onion: So there's a lotta covers of that, but there was also these press releases of the different finalists and what their interests were, what they wanted to do with their lives. And the way that the writers for the science service chose to emphasize the domestic ambitions of these girls—they all wanted to do something domestic. Or the ones that were featured, I guess I should say.
R. Onion: And there's also pictures of them with—there's one that's a picture of a girl with a dress that she made for the final banquet or whatever, and it's sure to make the point that she made the dress herself. She's fitting on a dressmaker's form and stuff. And then there's even a picture of two girl finalists looking at the Hope Diamond, which I was like, "Oh, come on."
R. Onion: What's interesting about it to me is that—it's actually interesting to me that the girls were even there. I'm like, "Wow. In the '40s and '50s, they were bothering to have girls be the finalists also." I believe that the way they did it was that they did it by percentage, like the percentage of girls that were in the final pool, they picked a proportionate amount to the boys or something. But yeah. I mean, of course now that wouldn't stand, but we still do have—a couple years ago. Who was it? That British group that was tryin' to get girls into science that was all about an ad a bunch of lipstick in it and stuff.
Leila: Oh. The hack a hair dryer thing?
R. Onion: Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Exactly. There is still stuff like that. Or the small science kits that get sold to kids in toy stores which are pink and whatever. They have all kinds of girly, girly messages.
Leila: Well, the last question that I wanted to ask you is about the geographies of science and childhood that you write about and the development of new spaces for children that come into play in the 20th century with changes in the role of childhood kind of just more generally and modernity. And you mentioned a museum earlier, but how do these geographies interact in places like science museums in the 20th century?
R. Onion: Oh. Well, the science museum stuff is so interesting because that's a place where, I mean, obviously, there starts to be specialized interest in having a specifically children's museum in the 20th century, but there's a lot of debate and conversation over whether it should just be "Oh, this is a adult museum." Like the Museum of Natural History, for example, that just has kids come in, or this is a specifically child-oriented museum, and that this becomes something that the specifically child-oriented museums will use as an advertising lever as a way to get donors, as a way to get people to come, as a way to get coverage. They're all sort of figuring out a way to describe this place as sort of a home but sort of a school but sort of a third place that kids can go.
R. Onion: And, I mean, this is not only happening in science, obviously, or with science hobby-ism, science extracurricular activity because there is a ton of childhood studies work on the Progressive Era and the way that people at the time were trying to reshape children's leisure in a way that they saw as more productive. So at the time there's also people having playgrounds where there'd be a quote-unquote "play attendant" there to watch the play happen and shape it in various ways that were seen as better than just kids going out on the street and kind of just doing whatever they wanna do, which people saw as potentially hazardous or morally corrupt or whatever their problematic thing.
R. Onion: So a better idea, maybe especially for middle-class parents who'd be reading about it, would be these protected spaces that were especially geared towards children's interests. But for science-specific activities, there starts to be this feeling that there could be, like that the answer to the question of "How do we help kids who are not getting their science-mindedness developed at school actually be able to take advantage of—we wanna be able to take advantage of them in our national life. How do we do that?" And some ways, you have a science club. You have science fairs. You have science museums.
R. Onion: I had a chapter on the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which was one of my favorite things to write cuz the guy who started it, Frank Oppenheimer, is just a very interesting person who was J. Robert Oppenheimer's little brother who was blacklisted and stopped being a physics professor and became a physics teacher and then founded the Exploratorium and just was, for my purposes, cuz I'm interested in childishness within science, he was a perfect figure because he was constantly described as a Peter Pan who couldn't be stopped from experimenting. He was this force of nature. You'd be driving in a car with him, and he'd play with the brakes and the gas to make [unclear 1:03:37] patterns. Which, frankly, sounds terrifying.
R. Onion: But he was seen as this person who he just had this big idea, which was that the Exploratorium should be a place where kids could come and just basically have at it, but always within particular bounds because he's coming up with the—he and his exhibit designers are coming up with the exhibits. But then the cool thing about the Exploratorium was that you could touch and manipulate with the exhibits as much as you wanted.
R. Onion: And of course this idea has become de rigueur for a lot of children's museums and science museums now, but in comparison to what was happening at the Museum of Natural History in the beginning of the century when kids were being paraded in front of exhibits and just would look at the exhibit and then the people at the museum would claim that it had changed their lives. The difference between that and what Oppenheimer was doing in San Francisco in the '60s is a huge difference.
R. Onion: I think that what is most interesting about the Exploratorium to me is that in some ways the Exploratorium is still awesome, but it sort of failed what Oppenheimer wanted it to be. When he first started it, it was free cuz he wanted it to be a place where everybody would come. Not just kids.
R. Onion: I mean, it was free in part because he wanted any random 12-year-old who was just walking around the neighborhood to be able to come in and then to be able to come in again the next day if they remembered something they were interested in and they wanted to try to do it again so that it would be more like a park than a museum and also a place where adults could come to kind of recover a childish sense of wonder, maybe along with their children or maybe not. And in that way it's very hippie.
R. Onion: But now it costs I can't remember how much, but $20 or something. It doesn't work like that anymore. It's sort of like any other children's space that you make a plan to take a child to, which you're like, "Crap, I better do it on a time where I can stay for a long time because otherwise it's not worth it and it's so expensive." And maybe Mom and Dad both can't come. Maybe it has to be just Mom and the kid. Whatever. There was all these financial considerations that go into it, that it was supposed to be a space of freedom, and it becomes this whole other thing, which I don't think is Frank Oppenheimer's fault. But whatever.
R. Onion: But yeah. But yeah. This idea that there was a specifically child—sort of a set of para-educational spaces where kids can develop their scientific acumen is pretty uniquely 20th-century. But yeah. But and you can see sort of after-effects of it in maker museums and stuff today, or maker spaces.
Anna: Okay. Well, I think that's a good place to wrap up. So, Rebecca, thank you again so much for talking to us. Really appreciate it.
Anna: If you liked our episode today, please, please, please, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. If you have any questions about any of our segments today, tweet at us at @ladyxscience or use the hashtag #ladyscipod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea, and more, visit ladyscience.com.
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Image credit: Science History Institute. Gilbert Lab Technician Set for Girls. 2017. Photograph. Science History Institute. Philadelphia. https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/4m90dv529 (Public Domain)
