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Hush Little Baby: The Invention of Infant Sleep in Modern France

by Gal Ventura
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₹9,928.00
Original price ₹9,928.00
Original price ₹9,928.00
₹9,928.00
Current price ₹9,928.00

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Book cover type: Hardcover
  • ISBN13: 9780228017295
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
  • Publisher Imprint: McGill-Queen's University Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 352
  • Original Price: USD 95.0
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 681 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Europe / France

In the nineteenth century France became fixated on infant sleep. Pictures of sleeping babies proliferated in paintings, posters, and advertisements for cradles and toys. Childcare manuals and medical writings insisted on the importance of sleep as a measure of a child's future health and vigour. Infant sleep was transformed from an unremarkable event to a precarious stage of life that demanded monitoring, support, and, above all, the constant presence and attention of mothers. Hush Little Baby uncovers the cultural, medical, and economic forces that came to shape Western ideas about infants' sleeping patterns, rituals, and settings. By the mid-nineteenth century doctors were advising that infant sleep should be carefully controlled by caregivers according to medical guidelines, and that to do otherwise would risk compromising a child's development. A sleeping baby was seen as the sign of a good mother - an idea that was reinforced through countless pictures of mothers watching vigilantly over their sleeping children, even as the reality of postpartum depression was known to doctors. The medical advice literature also helped to create a commercial infant industry, encouraging the production of clothing, bedding, cradles, and accessories designed to foster sleep, and providing new ways for families to demonstrate social status. In Hush Little Baby Gal Ventura shows how these images and ideas about babies' sleep created many of the standards and expectations that keep parents awake today.

Gal Ventura is professor of art history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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