Gender and Society

http://gas.sagepub.com Gender & Society
DOI: 10.1177/0891243205279286
Gender Society 2005; 19; 729
Allison J. Pugh
Selling Compromise: Toys, Motherhood, and the Cultural Deal
http://gas.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/19/6/729
The online version of this article can be found at:
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
On behalf of:
Sociologists for Women in Society
Additional services and information for Gender & Society can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://gas.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://gas.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
http://gas.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/19/6/729#BIBL
SAGE Journals Online and HighWire Press platforms):
Citations (this article cites 4 articles hosted on the
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
1PG0uE.g1Nh1D 7/ 7ES/RE0L8 &9L1 IS2NO4G3C 2CI0EO5T2MY7P9 /2 RDO86eMceImSEber 2005
Articles
SELLING COMPROMISE
Toys, Motherhood, and the Cultural Deal
ALLISON J. PUGH
University of California, Berkeley
The turbulent social conflict over what counts as good-enough mothering and the greedy institution of
work leaves many women trapped in what Joan Williams called the gender system of domesticity. Like
self-help books, advertisements can lead mothers toward a culturally sanctioned compromise. This article
looks at the “cultural deals” being offered for mothers by toy catalogs. The author examined the marketing
of more than 3,500 toys in 11 catalogs fromthe 2000-2001holiday season. She found that the catalogs
presented toys as solutions that would allow mothers to be good mothers without having to
physically be there, even as the advertising copy evoked images of companionship and togetherness.
Catalogs also emphasized skill building over fun, defined only certain skills as skills in the first place,
and dismissed nurturing as feelings at best worth of expression and not of practice. The author argues
that the toys promise to perpetuate for the children the same contradictions the catalogs purport to solve
for their mothers.
Keywords: motherhood; childhood; consumption; work/family; culture
American women with children live within a hotly contested cultural space, in
which different cultural dictums about the terms and obligations of caring for children
battle for primacy, both for mothers to enact them and for policy makers to
codify them (Arendell 2000; Garey 1999; Hays 1996; Hertz 1997; Hochschild
1997). Common beliefs diverge about women’s paidwork and their family responsibilities,
for example, about father involvement and about the nature of the child
(Coltrane 1996; Gerson 1985; Glass 1998). In this environment, mothers cannot
mother, cannot construct a childhood for their charges, without forging some path
through this thicket of cultural schemas, or scripts for action (Blair-Loy 2003;
729
AUTHOR’SNOTE: This article was researched while I was a fellow at the Center forWorkingFamilies,
University of California, Berkeley, and written with support from the Institute for the Study of Social
Change, University of California, Berkeley. I thank Arlie Hochschild, Barrie Thorne, Christine Williams,
Amy Hanser, and Dan Cook, as well as six anonymous reviewers for this journal, for their comments
on earlier drafts.
REPRINT REQUESTS: Allison J. Pugh, e-mail: pugh@berkeley.edu.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 19 No. 6, December 2005 729-749
DOI: 10.1177/0891243205279286
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
Ortner 1996; Swidler 2001). But these choices—and the cacophony of voices that
arise to steer through them—can generate anxiety in mothers about whether they
are making the right decisions, even if lack of resources or information limits how
much they are actually “choices” (Ehrenreich and English 1978; Lasch 1977).
When people feel anxiety as they construct their lives from a range of only partially
sanctioned cultural choices, they turn to cultural intermediaries for guidance.
Arlie Hochschild (2003b) contends self-help books serve as one such intermediary,
acting as a social barometer of our cultural clashes and offering a compromise
between competing notions of cultural ideals. Self-help books tend to “clear an
emotional pathway to a line of action that seems problematic,” she maintains
(Hochschild 2003b, 261). In this way, they are at once a measure of and a salve for
individual anxiety and a flag for collective uncertainty.
In the same vein, perhaps, is the realm of advertising. In someways, we can view
advertising as a cultural intermediary akin to self-help books, proffering its audience
the same sort of cultural deal between contradictory ideas that compete for
allegiance in the same person. To be sure, the advertisement’s often abbreviated
form stops short of the narrative that in self-help books provides explicit coherence
to such a deal (Giddens 1991; Hochschild 2003a). Yet advertisements rely on a
shorthand of coded language and images to point simultaneously to the clashing
ideals (e.g., how can I be there enough for my child?) and to the compromise at
hand (e.g., I can value my child’s needs but not have to be there myself by buying a
caring substitute).
I looked at advertisements to see what they tell us about modern dilemmas of
motherhood by targeting the anxieties and hopes of mothers for and about themselves,
fathers, and children. I analyzed the marketing of more than 3,500 toys in 11
toy catalogs from the winter of 2000-2001. I found that marketers offered cultural
deals that mostly charted the ways mothers could accomplish the disparate component
parts of maternal practice—in particular, the tasks of nurturing and training—
without having to be there. In what follows, I consider the compromises these consumption
opportunities are suggesting. Finally, I look at how these toys serve to
perpetuate for children the same contradictions the catalogs purport to solve.
DILEMMAS OF CONTEMPORARY MOTHERHOOD
Contemporary mothers, whatever their care/work configuration, suffer from the
constraints of domesticity, a gender system JoanWilliams (2000) describes as distinguishing
between market work and family work in a way that marginalizes and
denigrates those who perform the latter. Domesticity also relies on a particular, and
gendered, vision of an ideal worker as one who works full-time and overtime, who
can move “if the job requires it,” and who takes little or no time off to have or rear
children. The penalties thereby incurred by thoseworkers who engage in child rearing
are steep. “Our economy,”Williams writes, “is divided into mothers and others”
(2000, 2; Crittenden 2001).
730 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
Notwithstanding the constraints of this system, many mothers are also paid
workers. In 1975, 47 percent of mothers with children younger than 18 were
employed or looking for work, but by 2002, 72 percent were (U.S. Department of
Labor 2004). The increase was the most rapid for married mothers of children
younger than 6, who went from 30 percent employed or looking forwork in 1970 to
more than twice that at 61 percent in 2002 (U.S. Census 2003a). Of the nation’s
families with children younger than 18, only about one in five follow the domesticity
model, with the father employed and the mother not engaged in the paid labor
force (U.S. Census 2003b).
At the same time, thework of mothering has paradoxically increased, as notions
of what makes for adequate child rearing evolved during the past half century. As
Sharon Hays (1996, 131) argues, “all mothers ultimately share a recognition of the
ideology of intensive mothering,” a “logic” that incorporates beliefs about how
mothers should be the ones to mother children who need sacrifices of considerable
time, money, attention, emotion, and intellect. Ideals of maternal work have
become more demanding, not less, even as increasing numbers of women have
entered the paid labor force.
What are the components of maternal work? The philosopher Sara Ruddick
(1989) contends that mothering practices involve meeting three central demands—
for fostering children’s growth, preservation, and social acceptability. Mothers foster
children’s growth by nurturing them, they fight for their preservation by protecting
them, and they concern themselves with their children’s social acceptability by
training their children to live in their socialworld. Ruddick notes these tasks reflect
the concerns and luxuries of white, middle-class, heterosexual mothering of
healthy children and nods to the cultural and historical specificity of mothers’ ability
to meet these demands as well as their manner of doing so. Still, she insists on a
certain universality of these demands stemming from children, no matter their
backgrounds.
Care scholar Joan Tronto, writing with Berenice Fisher, suggests there are four
different processes of care: caring about, taking care of, care giving, and care
receiving (Fisher and Tronto 1990). Heretofore, ideals of mothering have largely
been the province of “care giving”—the direct physical and emotional shepherding
of a dependent other. To the extent that they are at all involved, fathers have been
more in the range of “caring about,” involving the recognition in the first place that
care is necessary, or “taking care of,” which entails assuming some responsibility
for the identified need and howto respond to it, although not actually delivering the
care one’s self (Tronto 1993).
Mothers live at the convergence of these social messages: (1) that the successful
worker is the unfettered, totally committed, ideal (and thus gendered male) worker
as Williams (2000) outlines; (2) that the work world is more valued and valuable
than the domestic sphere; and (3) that the best mothering is hands on, intensive, all
consuming, and altruistic. That these messages are contradictory has been noted by
many scholars (Blair-Loy 2003; Garey 1999; Hays 1996; Williams 2000). These
contradictions express a deep-rooted cultural ambivalence that surrounds the work
Pugh / SELLING COMPROMISE 731
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
of child rearing. At the same time that individual children become more “priceless,”
to use Zelizer’s (1985) term, requiring intensive nurturing and development, they
are collectively degraded, with a shrinking basis for moral claims to social funding
of schools and other programs (Katz 2004). The work of raising children then is
both exalted and dismissed.
Employed mothers, who live at the heart of these contradictions, have responded
in various ways. Some seek to redefine mothering as “taking care of” instead of
“caregiving,” and to reframe child care work as “custodial,” as Lynet Uttal (1996)
observed. These women are akin to “manager mothers,” good mothers because
they arrange for on-site care by others (Glenn 1994; Katz Rothman 1989). Other
women engage in what Arlie Hochschild has dubbed a needs reduction strategy,
contesting cultural standards of howmuch children should rely on mothers, emphasizing
the independence and resilience of children, for example, as opposed to their
fragility (Blair-Loy 2003; Hochschild 1997).
At the same time, research suggestsworking mothers are not immune to the cultural
dictates of intensifying mothering. Scholars have found thatworking mothers
spend more time with their children than did unemployed mothers 40 years ago and
that they cut back on sleep and leisure to be able to do so (Bianchi 2000; Sayer,
Bianchi, and Robinson 2004). The personal sacrifices they make to meet the twin
demands of working motherhood can be great, as Garey (1995) documented in her
study of night shift nurses.
Despite these findings, working mothers report feeling anxious about the
amount of time they spend with their children (Blair-Loy 2003; Hays 1996). The
juxtaposition of these findings—that working mothers are spending more time
with their kids even as they attest to worrying about spending enough—is evidence
of the cultural trap of domesticity in which they find themselves, in which, one
might say, they can’t win for losing. Mothers’ quest for social honor—no matter
how they handle market work and family work in actuality—can founder on the
mutually exclusive expectations with which they are faced.
In this context, then, a promised “third way” is a seductive call indeed. Arlie
Hochschild describes advice books as “cultural intermediaries” that broker deals
between competing groups that hold warring ideas about how people should act
(Hochschild 2003b). These deals offer a compromise, a way out of irreconcilable
differences in the ideals of mothering, working, or other occupations. Culture, she
writes, “is the result of continually renegotiated deals”; howthe deals are structured
determines how much wiggle room people have to act and still be socially honorable.
She argues that advice books lay out the current proposals for acceptable
behavior and reveal “the amount and the nature of the cultural room they leave
women” (Hochschild 2003b, 60).
I would argue advertisements are a sort of shadow cultural intermediary that,
like advice books, ground their appeal in naming problems in a particular way and
then offering solutions. To be sure, people seek out advice books, consulting them
for the diagnoses and solutions they portray, while advertisements such as toy catalogs
more often arrive at one’s doorstep unbidden and might frequently end up in
732 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
the trash. But the point here is not that people seek out the cultural deals at work in
toy catalogs but that those deals—the contradictions they call on, the problems they
frame, the solutions they urge—form part of the sales pitch. In addition, I would
argue that advertisements express more than just ambivalence or anxiety; while we
can surely read into them for both what we desire and what we fear, advertisements
are also trying towork a certain alchemy, to name the problems borne of our ambivalence
and then turn them into priced and marked solutions. Borrowing from
Hochschild (2003b), I am naming that alchemy the “cultural deal.”
Catalog advertisements for toys and other equipment of child rearing aim
straight at the challenges of contemporary mothering to suggest compromises of
ideal types.Women are sold the notion that a certain product allows them to do the
work of mothering well despite competing social directives. The currency of these
deals is consumption, and ultimately, like advice books, “agreement is shown not
by a raising of hands, but by a ring of the cash register” (Hochschild 2003b, 60).
I looked at toy catalog advertisements to ascertain the choices marketers offered
mothers and thus the problems they named in their push to solve them with their
products. While these problems had a practical cast—Who will teach my child to
play chess? Howwill my children learn to go to sleep alone?—they reflected larger
questions about mothering, childhood, and the social context in which they take
place. What kind of cultural deals are mothers being sold? What compromises are
being marketed as the “possible” ones, the ideals that could be sacrificed and still
preserve one’s image as a good mother? How are marketers reconstructing the
meanings of “good mother” to enable her to pursue other tasks as well, even to be,
as it were, a “good worker?”
Over the course of the twentieth century, toy advertisements have gone from
selling to the mother to addressing the child directly. The rise of television and subsequently
of its deregulation, the ever more specific age grading of markets such as
teens and tweens, and the greater role children play in household buying are some
of the factors inviting marketers into children’s lives (Cook 2004; Cross 1997;
McNeal 1992). But as Ellen Seiter (1995, 222-23) notes, toy catalogs in particular
remain more the province of adults, a prerogative they pay a premium for:
For a higher price than parents would have to pay for similar items at Toys “R” Us,
parents can avoid public skirmishes with children over toy selection. The parent
selects the items and makes a phone call, and the goods appear at the door—thus circumventing
the child’s attempt to participate more directly in the selection of toys.
Some catalogs do, of course, target children (the American Girl catalog is one notable
example); certainly catalog makers aspire to having children peruse them, circling
what theywant (and some catalogs offer stickers or exhortations to encourage
kids to do exactly that). Still, the catalogs sampled for this article are mostly aimed
at mothers of younger children, however, to whom Seiter’s observation applies. In
addition, that children are looking through the catalogs does not preclude mothers
from doing so. This research focuses on the texts of advertisements, which targets
Pugh / SELLING COMPROMISE 733
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
mothers even as pictures might try to entice their progeny. Last, the catalogs’ language
belies their true audience, as when Rosie Hippos suggests, “You can put a
fewchunks [of modeling beeswax] in a little yogurt container in your purse for doctor’s
office or plane rides, etc.” (30, $19.95; subsequent quotations from the data
will follow this format of noting the catalog, page and toy price) or when Creative
Kidstuff sells a secret black-light-illuminated diary with the query, “Wherewas this
when we were kids and sneaky siblings were making our lives miserable?” (42,
$19.95). Marketers frame their sales pitch accordingly, and the cultural deals they
offer in toy catalogs are thus aimed at the mother.
How do we know that advertisers are talking primarily to mothers in these catalogs,
and not parents or grandparents, for that matter? The above reference to a
purse notwithstanding, catalogs are usually careful to avoid gendering their reader.
Ellen Seiter’s (1995) studied gender neutrality in the above quote resembles that of
the toy catalogs in much of their text, which most often avoids explicitly naming the
reader they target, instead addressing them directly as “you,” or other times using
the word “parents,” as in “kids (and parents too) will fall head over heels in love
with [this toy]” (Constructive Playthings, 2, $39.95). Nonetheless, I base my
assumption on three factors: First, the catalogs do pepper their pages with references
to mothers, as in the “mom-to-mom” sidebars in the Fisher Price catalog.
Second, when fathers are the target, or women shopping for fathers, they are
explicit, mentioning men or fathers, marketing toys with labels such as “Just like
Dad’s” and other strategies (although there was only a handful of such approaches
in the sample). Doing so emphasizes that women are the unmarked category, the
default buyer. Last, and most important, mothers are the primary caregivers of children,
responsible for 80 percent of the child care by one measure (Williams 2000).
Care giving involves buying, as a growing number of scholars have found (DeVault
1991; Miller 1998; Pugh 2004; Zelizer 1985), and for children in the developed
world, some of those caring purchases include toys.With gender-neutral language,
marketers avoid alienating men caregivers and women who do not want to downplay
some men’s active child rearing, but their sales pitches must still win over
mothers to be effective.
The mothers whom most toy catalog marketers are courting are middle class, as
Seiter (1995) contends, and thus the cultural deals on the table are shaped for their
consumption. The problems the marketers purport to be solving—to meet the
meanings these mothers impute to the core tasks of mothering—are particularly
middle-class ones. For example, scholars have documented the seriousness with
which middle-class mothers regard the task of training children through skill building
(Hays 1996; Lareau 2003; Ruddick 1989, 1998). In Unequal Childhoods,
Annette Lareau (2003) dubs middle-class parenting “concerted cultivation” to capture
this sense of the paramount importance of developing skills. In contrast, in her
study, low-income parents by and large strove for “the accomplishment of natural
growth” in their children. The distinction implies a certain role for consumption: as
opposed to the accomplishment of natural growth, concerted cultivation clearly
734 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
involves buying the right toys to appropriately “cultivate” children’s skills, these
catalogs would aver.
THE SPECTRUM OF SELLING:
METHOD AND SAMPLE SELECTION
In this research, I undertook an in-depth analysis of toy catalogs and the ways in
which they marketed their wares. Direct mail composes but a small fraction of the
$23 billion annual “traditional” toy market (excluding video games) in the United
States, responsible for just 5 percent of sales in 1999. According to the trade group
Toy Manufacturers of America, most people bought toys at national discount
chains such as Wal-Mart or at national toy chains such as Toys “R” Us; together
those two types of sales outlets compose 60 percent of the market (Toy Manufacturers
of America 2000).
But several factors make toy catalogs perhaps one of the most useful windows
into the marketing of good mothering, particularly good middle-class mothering.
First, as collections of text about toys, catalogs are a frozen moment of representation,
offering a vision or set of visions particularly accessible to research and indepth
analysis. Second, catalog buyers are predominantly women, and toy catalog
shoppers are predominantly parents. Third, catalogs are sent to addresses carefully
culled for demographic purposes—the most likely buyers are in households with
more than $80,000 in income—suggesting the sales pitch is sharply honed for the
presumed members of these households (Beaudry 1999).
For this article, I chose 11 catalogs from the December 2000 holiday season.
Using purposive sampling, I aimed to capture the broad groupings of the toy catalog
industry. Seiter suggests that mail-order catalogs mimic the markups, merchandise,
and sales strategies of upscale toy stores; she describes a mainstream set of
catalogs from relatively small companies and another set devoted to an “alternative,
‘green,’ hippie aesthetic” relying on images of “natural mothering” and folk traditions
(Seiter 1995, 221; see also Bobel 2002). I sampled catalogs in each of these
two groupings and then added another grouping of catalogs affiliated with larger
toy stores or manufacturers, such as FAOSchwartz and Fisher Price (see Table 1 for
a description of the sample). With an average of 345 products per catalog, I analyzed
the sales pitch behind approximately 3,770 products. In steps described by
Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (1995), I identified several “themes,” or observations
about repeated tactics the catalogs use to sell these products, and the larger issues to
which these tactics appear to be linked. Themes included such repeated topics as
the ability of toys to stimulate children, the claims of toys to authentic simulation
(“just like a real cash register”), or the difference in parent and child perspectives
(“sounds awful to adults, totally awesome to kids”). I gathered together instances of
these themes to develop them into analytic memos, which subsequently guided my
evaluation about those themes most pivotal in structuring the marketing that is the
subject of this article. This analytic process involved an interactive effort that
Pugh / SELLING COMPROMISE 735
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
736
TABLE 1: Description of the Sample
Number Approximate Average
Catalogs Sampled of Pages Number of Toys Price ($)a Additional Notes
Mainstream, small
Constructive Playthings 52 260 52.06 Affiliated with 7 stores nationwide.
Creative Kidstuff 56 390 29.93 Most kid-friendly display of catalogs sampled, but most text still targets adult consumer.
Most kids of color pictured of sampled catalogs (31 out of 97).
Playfair Toys 40 280 49.39 Motto on title page: “Non-violent, educational fun for boys and girls . . . because all
children are created equal.”
Sensational Beginnings 60 420 34.18 Opening “letter” from company president: “As always I encourage you to spend as
much time with our children as you can. That is my dream for you.”
Mainstream, large
Back to Basics 87 520 196.99 Affiliated with the Internet giant Amazon.com. Company address: “One Memory
Lane.”
FAO Schwartz 108 400 163.28 Cover motto: “Wish big.” Includes a $650 stuffed elephant and a $12,000 Range
Rover ride-on “toy,” as well as items standard in other catalogs.
Fisher Price 60 150 35 Bright colors and roomy layout make this eye-catching for kids, but the text aims
straight at mothers with features such as the “Mom-to-Mom” testimonials and “Play &
Learn” insets with expert advice about children’s development.
Lilly’s Kids 80 400 32.13 All but three toys sold for a child’s solitary play.
Alternative
Magic Cabin Dolls 48 300 26 Dubs itself the purveyor of “childhood’s purest treasures.” Prices range widely, from
$2 doll socks to $250 wooden houses.
Natural Baby Company 48 300 22.99 Includes clothing (not analyzed here). Toy section features five-point treatise on the
superiority of wooden toys.
Rosie Hippos 48 350 29 Family business introduced on first page (with kids aged two and seven). Unusual
among sampled catalogs for sometimes selling sheer fun, still includes heavy
emphasis on skills gained.
a. Average price represents the average cost of all toys listed on the first five pages of each catalog, in 2000 dollars, unadjusted.
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
included exploring several themes, returning to the catalogs to test the salience of
these identified themes, and using that dance of exploration and testing to siphon
out a sense of which themes are more present, more apt, or more explanatory than
others.
There are specific claims that I can and cannot make based on this research. This
project cannot address the ways in which the consumer receives or even shapes the
messages these catalogs purvey. Scholarship in the sociology of consumption and
in cultural studies generally has sought to demonstrate the variety and unpredictability
of consumer response; these studies assert a place for agency and resistance
in studies of cultural discourse (Holt 1997). In other work, I analyze why parents
buy, developing a typology to capture the variety of motivations I found in interviews
and fieldwork (Pugh 2002). People alter, view askance, and even play with
cultural images, however carefully they are constructed or soberly they are tendered
(Chin 2001). This article cannot broach that process.
Nonetheless, as a study of text, indeed a study of deliberate propaganda, my data
allow me to consider the ways in which these catalogs are purveying a particular
image or set of images in their efforts to sell.With these data, I analyze howcatalogs
attempt to hook the buyer, and I look beyond the marketing claims to consider what
broader visions they are selling. I identify and elaborate on the themes underlying
toy catalog marketing and demonstrate the specific kinds of anxiety and reassurance
catalogs bring to bear in their efforts to sell.
I organize the following material within the frame of Ruddick’s (1989) core
tasks of mothering, looking at the “cultural deals” toy catalogs offer with regard to
maternal tasks of nurturing and training. I found that in this sample, few data
coalesced around the third task Ruddick outlined, that of protection, at least not in
the way Ruddick intended, as the preservation of children during their long state of
fragility and dependence. Rather, catalogs focused on property and privacy, offering
mothers means of surveillance of kids, of ensuring kids’ privacy from sibling
incursions, and of protecting against thieves. Other kinds of catalogs—the Safety
First brand comes to mind—certainly frame their products as (maternal) protection
for sale,1 but their wares do not generally overlap with that of toy catalogs in general,
such as those sampled here, which have more products in common than not.
Most of the data did fall within the categories of nurturing or training, however,
which itself suggests something about the cultural space in which these mothers
and marketers operate. Marketers could have put forward ideals of mothering to
include providing for their children, for example, solving the contradictions faced
by white, middle-class, working mothers in a more gender-radical way. Such a redefinition
would bring their mothering ideals closer to low-income and nonwhite
mothers, who have long been both providers and caregivers (Collins 1990; Segura
1994). I outline these potential marketing alternatives to emphasize the paths these
catalogs did end up taking—not because I expect marketers will lead theway to the
revolution but rather because their decisions reflect the horizons of what seems possible
for their target market. In this case, marketers restricted their bargaining to
white, middle-class concepts of what constitutes maternal practice, suggesting that
Pugh / SELLING COMPROMISE 737
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
women themselves do not have a lot of cultural room to transform idealized motherhood
into providing, even though for most mothers, white women as well as
women of color, their actual practices involve doing just that.
NURTURING: “EVERYTHING’S FRIENDLIER WITH TWO”
In the coveted last-page spread in the Fisher Price holiday catalog, a young
white boy is pictured sitting cross-legged on the floor, one arm around the big yellow
teddy bear on his lap. The boy and the bear both have on red shirts, and each
holds open purple plastic “books.” This picture covers two pages, with the headline
announcing, “Disney’sWinnie the Pooh.”A speech bubble is drawn to come out of
the bear’s open mouth, saying, “Tigger bounced by with a neworange ball.”Winnie
the Pooh is “reading,” while the boy looks down, involved, intent, raptly following
the text.With this battery-operated toy, Pooh comes with two books, and when the
child turns pages, Pooh “magically turns pages in his book too.” Afterwards, the
bear asks questions about the stories. The ad copy declares, “Everything’s friendlier
with two . . . especially when you’re reading with Pooh” (59, $43.00).
Many expert voices exhort parents to read to their children, often for at least 20
minutes a day. From government organizations to private foundations to published
child-rearing experts, these messages point to research demonstrating that kindergarten
readiness and other measures of success reflect exposure to books. In addition,
reading is portrayed not only as important to the child’s academic future but as
a way to bond with the child. The Association of Booksellers for Children, for
example, launched a national outreach literacy program featuring books and posters
and supported by Rob Reiner and Hillary Rodham Clinton; it was titled “The
Most Important 20 Minutes ofYour Day . . . Read with a Child.” While the language
of these campaigns most often uses the gender-neutral terms “parent” or “primary
caregiver,” the message is clear: Good mothers are those who introduce their children
to reading.Aparenting adviceWeb site maintained by the same company purveying
the catalog, Fisher Price, joins the chorus: “Perhaps nicest of all, books foster
a sense of intimacy. Reading together offers your child the chance to have your
undivided attention and a cozy cuddle, too” (Fisher Price 2004).
Pooh the reader promises to fulfill half of that ideal. In the end, the child gets
exposure to words, and some cuddle time in the bargain, but not with the mother.
The mother’s task to read to her child, as dictated by experts, is redefined as the
child’s need to be read to, and not necessarily by a person. The cultural deal offered
by this type of toy preserves the need for nurture, but redefines nurture as the act—
of reading, of putting the child to bed, of cuddling—and not the relationship.
But the catalog does not merely offer this toy as the happy compromise, the cultural
deal, for the busy mother. As are most of the children pictured in the sampled
catalogs, the boy in the picture is alone. By using thewords “Everything’s friendlier
with two . . .” as a caption for a picture in which the child in question is not actually
with anyone else, or at least not with anyone animate, the ad copy is highlighting a
738 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
central tension underlying the cultural deal at stake here. The marketers stoke a very
particular maternal anxiety—is my child lonely? If I am not here to give him what
he needs, will he be lonely?
In the Pooh ad, the copy meets the anxiety it elicits with the second half of that
sentence, “. . . especially when you’re reading with Pooh.” Thus, the catalog first
raises the mother’s guilt and concern about her ability to be there. Then it offers
consumption as the honorable solution, one that allows her to be a good mother,
who effectively manages and meets her child’s need for nurture, even if she must be
absent.
Pooh here offers a cultural deal that I found again and again in my analysis of toy
catalogs. One of the most important tasks of mothering is to nurture, or provide loving,
attentive primary care for children, according to Ruddick (1989). Yet this task
is also one of the most challenging, for every mother to be sure, and particularly for
the employed mother, who cannot be in two places at once. The toy catalogs offer
their readers cultural deals that appeal to the mother torn by competing demands on
her time and presence.
If the child is afraid of the dark, for example, Fisher Price has the nonparental
solution: “This huggable friend helps kids fall asleep as he hums a lullaby, talks and
softly glows when his tummy is squeezed” (57, $14.00). Parents struggling with
sleep issues are urged by Fisher Price to buy an electronic aquarium with classical
music, lullabies, and twinkling lights, “activated by remote control, so you won’t
disturb baby.” (The picture shows baby asleep with an inset of awoman holding the
remote.) A “testimonial” in the catalog—titled “Mom-to-Mom”—reads, “We
struggled to get our twins to sleep by themselves. . . . Night after night, nothing
helped but holding them. [After buying the aquarium,] soon we’d creep out of the
room, and before the aquarium turned itself off they’d fallen into a peaceful sleep.
Our boys use this wonderful product every night!” (43, $30.00). Note that in this
advertising copy, the problem is that “nothing helped but holding them.” Indeed,
the last line turns the consumption over to the children, and the parents are absent
altogether: “Our boys use this wonderful product every night.” Like the reading
Pooh, the aquarium product is billed as weaning the children of their parents so that
they can still be nurtured but without the parents (or another adult caregiver) to
provide it.
As mentioned, the vast majority of ads depicted children as playing alone. “Just
fill the vinyl mat withwarmwater, place it on the floor and let your baby play away,”
Constructive Playthings (8, $8.95) urges, in just one of plentiful examples. Just as
Sutton-Smith (1986) contends, toys are given for solitary play, paradoxically even
as they are most often given in communal settings such as birthday or Christmas
celebrations. Nonetheless, the catalog copywriting reflected a sense of unease
about that: Marketers who sold toys to be played with alone did so by promising the
child would find companionship in it. Advertisements express and legitimate
ambivalence, as Hochschild (2003a) argues, including the social ambivalence
whirling around child rearing.
Pugh / SELLING COMPROMISE 739
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
Upscale FAO Schwarz addresses mothers’ conflicting desire for their child’s
solitary play and their fear of that child’s loneliness with the most technologically
advanced toys in its arsenal; it sells toys that use voice technology and artificial
intelligence to make for more lifelike companions. The catalog urges, “Parents can
program a ‘Barney’ doll to become a child’s very own, one-of-a-kind, talking
friend, so that Barney knows the child’s name, birthday, favorite things and more.
Just squeeze Barney’s hand and all the customized fun begins” (63, $69.95).
Another doll “grows physically and emotionally,” the catalog promises (42,
$99.99). (The only abilities the catalog mentions, however, are skills in numbers,
letters, and vocabulary.) “When is a doll more than a doll?”, FAOSchwarz asks, and
answers, “When she is made with breakthrough technology that customizes her
‘memory’ to form a one-of-a-kind friendship with a child. . . . Tell her your
secrets . . . she’ll remember!” (47, $69.99). For older kids, a set of dolls “talk and
have life-like conversations with you or each other about things like self-discovery,
sports and fashion” (91, $39.99). Other catalogs use technology to the same ends,
as when Fisher Price offers a similar pet-friend: “He listens and responds only to
you . . . can sense and respond to your touch . . . has all the actions and emotions of a
real dog . . . is so lifelike, so convincingly canine. . . . It’s Rocket and he is looking
for a loving home here on earth!” (23, $105.00). FAOSchwarz also sells responsive
toy canines and other animals, which change their projected emotions depending
on whether the child has been playing with it. “The more care and attention he
receives, the more he is willing to do tricks,” FAOSchwarz writes (73, $49.99). The
toy and the ad text accompanying it thus transfer the “need” for companionship
from the child to the toy; the ad promises an interactive and emotional connection
for a child, albeit with an inanimate object.
The Reading Pooh ad, and others like it, maintains the contemporary received
wisdom of children as needing nurture or an emotional connection but with one
important compromise: The child does not need people, specifically a mother, to
actually provide it. The child will get what he needs (and the child pictured is male),
which is to be nurtured. The sleight of hand underlying this cultural deal is in the
passive tense “to be nurtured” as applied to the child, which elides the question of
exactly by whom, or in this case, by what.
TRAINING: “THE RIGHT TEACHER CAN
MAKE THE WORLD OF DIFFERENCE”
While nurturing and protecting may be central maternal tasks, toy catalogs
focus their efforts most aggressively on the work of training, or rearing children to
be acceptable within their own social milieu. That training can be in skills or values.
As in the cases of nurture and protection, toy catalogs perform the same sort of
magic for thework of training. Even though a mother might conceivably have more
invested in the particular content of the child’s training—what skills get explained
and emphasized, what values get introduced—the promise of these products is that
740 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
her absence will not matter. As before, the catalogs separated the fact of training
from the relationship that formerly served as its conduit and context. Once again,
however, the catalogs remind the mothers of their anxiety before they assuage it.
One electronic language toy, dubbed “Little Linguist,” is sold on the pretext that
itwould “let children learn other languages theway they learned their first: by hearing
a word, associating it with an object, and using it in simple sentences” (Back to
Basics, 28, $69.99). At first glance, we might be surprised that the copywriter
seemed to forget that the way children learn their first language is through constant
interaction with a primary caregiver. Notice, however, that the structure of the passage
produces the same emotional trick as earlier examples: recalling for the reader
that idealized image and then tucking it neatly away. Like the pitch for the reading
Pooh (“Everything’s friendlier with two”), copy for the Little Linguist effectively
brings up the notion that infants first learn within a caring, nurturing, dyadic relationship,
subtly reminding the mothers of that caring ideal, and then reshapes that
learning experience into a solitary phenomenon, something the mother can “take
care of” by consuming.
Fisher Price straddles the same line in a different way, by emphasizing the relationship
that undergirds childhood learning and then transforming that relationship
into something the child can have with branded characters: “When children interact
with characters they already know and love, they play longer. And the longer they
play, the more they learn. Help your child find out how the right teacher—the right
friend—can make a world of difference with learning toys” (50). The mother reading
this text can be forgiven for a moment of anxiety or guilt when she reads the
words “the right teacher,” as she has perhaps been told that she is her child’s first
teacher. But in keeping with the pattern thus far established, just as quickly, the catalog
assuages that guilt with a new image—“the right friend”—to promise all the
learning for her child that she would have provided.
Training is a central motif for these catalogs, particularly skill building. To at
least some degree—and sometimes for almost every toy—each catalog espouses
the stimulating, educational value of its toys, positing them as worthwhile because
they deliver more than “just” fun. Atoy “combines the fun of playing store with the
value of learning basic math skills,” contends Sensational Beginnings (28, $39.95).
Or, to sell a water table, Playfair Toys asks, “Will a rock float? What is erosion?”
(26, $249.99). Natural Baby Company, in selling the Skwish, a toy for children
aged four months to two years, intones that it “demonstrates the engineering principle
of tensegrity: the wood rods always pop back into place because of the evenly
placed tension of the plastic” (catalog insert, $18.95). As Lareau (2003) documents,
the development of skills is a central component of the middle-class
mother’s child-rearing strategy of “concerted cultivation.” In these catalogs, the
steady drumbeat of learning, learning, learning itself evokes some anxiety in the
reader, which is fed and soothed by the same products promising to teach the
necessary skills.
What counts as skills for these catalogs and their audience? In most instances,
certain physical skills and select academic skills are worthy of targeting through
Pugh / SELLING COMPROMISE 741
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
play. Physical skills such as manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination are relentlessly
advertised in toys sold for infants and toddlers but also in copy describing
timed board games, arcade games, and sports toys sold for older kids. “Used by
coaches and trainers,” Back to Basics promises, “strengthens the muscles and
develops coordination” (12, $54.99). “Hopping along this brilliant playmat, children
develop coordination, balance and number recognition as they’re having fun,”
observes Constructive Playthings (32, $24.95). Academic skills are generally
pushed in toys aimed at preschoolers up through preteens, from letters, numbers,
and math symbols to geography, chemistry, and programming. “This set has really
helped my son to understand basic math concepts,” Rosie Hippos noted (11,
$31.95). Creative Kidstuff (47, $20.95) offers “fun experiments about solids, liquids
and gases every child should do before the 4th grade. If air is colorless, odorless
and tasteless, how can you prove it’s there?” Particularly for the younger set,
the more of these skills a toy includes, the better. “Sorting board teaches them a lot
more than a thing or two! It helps them learn about hand/eye coordination, counting,
size order, shapes and colors” (Lilly’s Kids, 74, $14.98). Another toy “offers
tactile and visual stimulation,” then “becomes a path to encourage motor skills and
crawling,” finally to offer “peek-a-boo activities and shape-sorting” (Sensational
Beginnings, 38, $49.95). As always, all of these skills come about via the child’s
solitary play.
Rarely are other skills described, making their occasional appearance particularly
noteworthy. The gendered nature of which skills are valued as such and which
skills are not is ever present, albeit hidden by the mostly gender-neutral language.
Interests commonly coded as masculine, such as those in math or science, are
always referred to as skills, while those commonly stereotyped as feminine, such as
role-playing or caring, are most often not. As an exception, Fisher Price sells a
supermarket checkout set with the tag line “smart little shoppers love all the activities
and sounds,” suggesting shopping as a skill unrecognized in the other sampled
catalogs (9, $21.50). Most important, only one of the sampled catalogs refers to the
“nurturing skills” that might arise from doll play. “What better way for children to
practice their nurturing skills than with this soft, natural baby doll?” asks Magic
Cabin Dolls (17, $99.95).
The other catalogs momentarily abandon the skills discourse to sell dolls,
appealing instead only to the notion that the toy will “steal your child’s heart”
(Rosie Hippos, 24, $8.95), noting “the instinct to love and nurture” (PlayFair Toys,
17, $49.98), or calling them “nurturing feelings” that can grow with the right toys
(PlayFair Toys, 14, $29.98). Recognizing nurturing feelings seems a step forward
from leaving them unnamed, and surely close to recognizing nurturing skills, but
PlayFair Toys ends up lumping together nurturing feelings and aggressive feelings,
suggesting that what they are talking about here is very different from skill. “We all
have nurturing feelings, and this easy-rocking cradle gives your child a goodway to
express them,” PlayFair Toys suggests (9, $39.98), and just a few pages later, it
notes, “We all have aggressive feelings. This [boxing] set gives kids an acceptable
way to deal with them” (13, $19.98).
742 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
While Lareau (2003) finds that middle-class mothering is dedicated to the development
of skills deemed useful for future success, these catalogs are offering that
plus something more. The promise of these toys is twofold: (1) Yes, your child will
learn the skills and values that matter, but also (2) no, you do not have to be there to
do it. These catalogs, then, are selling mothers a cultural deal that allows them to be
concerted cultivators of their children while they are absent.
Part of training also includes values, and catalogs offer products to provide that
as well. Creative Kidstuff sells a video that it bills as a “tool for improving selfesteem,
strength and respect for nature,” family values perhaps but in this case
taught by the TV (16, $15.95). In case kids will not sit still for values teaching from
nonhuman objects, PlayFair Toys promises “eight catchy original songs with
danceable beats and sing-along lyrics hold kids’ attention as they teach valuable
lessons about accepting people different from ourselves” (8, $17.95). Readers
might think cultural values are passed down via continued observation or thoughtprovoking
conversations. Now, these catalogs promise, even off-site mothers can
ensure that their children develop core social values and personal strength, managing
the process from afar by buying the right product.
TOYS FOR THE SOLITARY CHILD:
“ADULTS NOT INCLUDED”
It is also worth attending to what these advertisements do not offer. They are not
suggesting that, for example, children still need nurturing or training within a relationship,
but that a father, other relative, or paid caregiver could provide it. They are
not selling toys as the means for deepening the bonds between other caregivers and
children or as a way for groups of kids to establish friendships and community.
Rather, in these catalogs, the child has no other human option for attachment or love
but the mother; without her, the child can turn only to toys.
A handful of the toys I perused did make reference to fathers, but mostly by
offering to replace the absent father. “Yeees! A weekend of fishing, canoeing,
cooking-out and more. Great fun . . . even if it’s only pretend!” Constructive Playthings
crows, under a “camping” set with dolls (a man and a boy), tent, and other
equipment. “These two articulated figures can spend lots of quality time together,
in touch with nature” (3, $29.95). Once again, the language of the text is designed to
tug on normative values of what should be, as in the notion that fathers and sons
should go camping together—“great fun . . . even if it’s only pretend”—while meeting
those anxieties with the “two articulated figures” who actually get to spend the
“quality time.”
Back to Basics offers an electronic toy that teaches the child to pitch, taking the
place of any human tossing balls back and forth in the backyard. “A personal
pitcher to follow your batter’s development,” the catalog declares. “Radiocontrolled
bat works with speed control dial to let kids be in charge of when and
how fast the pitch flies” (77, $59.99). FAO Schwarz, which targets the uppermost
Pugh / SELLING COMPROMISE 743
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
end of the mail-order class ladder, sells an electronic chessboard named Ivan that
will “teach you, then play you with a 500-word spoken vocabulary, with Ivan commenting
on your play . . . in a most amusing way” (98, $100). These catalogs seem
to be holding out the promise that, thanks to these toys, children will not miss
fathers who are not around to camp, toss balls in the backyard, or teach them to play
chess.
The limited options, the sense that the woman has to go it alone—if it is not she
who will solve a child’s needs, it is no one, not the father, not another caregiver—
hearkens back to Hochschild’s (2003b) study of Japanese and American advice
books. Unlike the Japanese ones, American advice books present social bonds not
as a help but rather as a hindrance to awoman’s achieving her goals. Perhaps that is
one reason why there is no one else there in the catalog text. It is also possible that
advertisers do not want the toy to provoke in the mother/buyer jealous feelings
about a child’s attachments to other caregivers. In the toy catalog venue, toys must
meet the anxiety they stir up.
FATHERS: “IT DOESN’T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS”
While the vast majority of toys in these catalogs were sold with the image of the
child in solitary play, promising that he or she would be nurtured, protected, and
trained without the mother, a small subsample of toys were sold with the image of
the child in relationship. Some of these relationships invoke a mother, others invoke
a father, and still others a larger community. These toys numbered only one or two
out of hundreds in most of the catalogs I sampled, although in the “alternative
mothering” subset of catalogs I sampled, as many as 10 to 15 per catalog fall under
this category.
Similar to the “fun” traditionalism Hochschild (2003b) found in those advice
books preaching allegiance to the “domesticity” system, toys sold with the image of
mothers and children together did so most often by saying it was fun. Creative
Kidstuff notes, “Delightful game for preschoolers and adults to play together” (29,
$7.50). Back to Basics lures adults into sledding fun: “The snow family toboggan
lets parents ride too” (85, $109.99). Rosie Hippos, aimed at mothers who aspire to
construct a “simpler, gentler” childhood, describes one product as “a neat project to
do with the wee ones” (25, $15.95) and says another is “an adventure game
designed for parents to play with their children” (33, $14.50). At Fisher Price, sections
titled “Mom-to-Mom” attest to the parent-child play value: “We immediately
set up camp and began roasting marshmallows with the delightfully realistic
‘crackling’ sounds stick.We listened to all the outdoor sounds as we sat under the
tent for a long while and ‘camped’ ” (11, $29.50).
In a context in which literally thousands of toys are sold on the basis that they
will develop skills—with ad copy that mentions fun, if at all, only as a reward, lure,
or smokescreen for kids who are really practicing skills—the use of “fun” to sell
toys for mother-child play is noteworthy. In these rare instances, toy catalogs lure
744 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
mothers with portrayals of quality time: conflict-free, playful moments with their
child free of pedagogy or pressure.
Even fathers were able to have fun in a few advertisements. As Magic Cabin
Dolls puts it, a tree fort they sell is “guaranteed to captivate children 3 years and
older (especially men—they love this)” (30, $199). Yet the language here underscores
that the cultural deal at stake—that the father will be so entranced by the toy
that he will get involved in the child’s play—is one for the mother. By infantilizing
men, this sales pitch is offering the mother another sort of cultural deal bent on
resolving the collision between market work and family work, and the attendant
devaluation of the latter. By turning men into children, the toy marketers are recovering
for the mother the superior vantage point of moral adulthood from the rational
autonomous worker, the father. She remains the mother, buying a toy so that it will
“captivate” her charges, and she becomes the adult, surrounded by children, who
include even their father.
Other catalogs offered a more potentially satisfying cultural deal, however, by
taking on the “stalled revolution,” or women’s primary responsibility for caregiving.
Several catalogs sold toys, like the dollhouse above, with the “guarantee” that it
will bring the father into the home, lure him into playing with children, perhaps
entice him to assume more caregiving responsibilities. This might be the wish of
many mothers, employed or not, but it is the key to validation for the stay-at-home
mother, whose social denigration rests in part on the fact that so few men “mother”
(Hochschild 1989; Williams 2000).
Magic Cabin Dolls offers several dollhouses with which, it suggests, adults—
even men—willwant to play too. “Our unique treehouse has been designed to cross
the lines of gender and age,” it maintains (31, $249). FAO Schwarz offers a “Just
like Dad’s” line of toys, endorsed by baseball player Cal Ripken Jr., which are
essentially collections of tools, baseball equipment, and other items transformed
into “Dad Gear” with the help of childlike lettering (a backwards “S” in “Just” completes
the look). FAOcreated the line “to give children the chance to celebrate—and
emulate—one of their very favorite role models,” the catalog reads (69, $20-$34).
Natural Baby advertises a potty for kids with a telling portrayal: “Just imagine, Dad
on his potty, you on yours. He’s got his toilet paper, you’ve got yours. He’s got his
newspaper, you’ve got your nursery rhymes. His feet can reach the floor, and so can
yours. It doesn’t get any better than this” (29, $69.95). In this scene, of course, the
connection portrayed is perhaps a tenuous one—Dad and child are not talking with
each other, not playing together, not interacting, but rather just sitting side by side in
the bathroom. For a cultural deal that portrays men and children together, however,
constrained of course by the limits of what seems culturally possible, perhaps “it
doesn’t get any better than this.”
The cultural deal offered here has transformative potential: Mothers can fight off
the tyranny of domesticity by enlisting their husbands in domestic tasks.Yet even in
the utopian world portrayed in advertising, the father’s involvement in child care is
weak in these examples—at best, he is playmate, role model, or bathroom companion.
To the extent that he is a dabbler in a series of tasks still maintained by the
Pugh / SELLING COMPROMISE 745
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
mother, she retains the moral accolades and the social contempt of domesticity and,
if she is a working mother, most of the second shift as well (Hochschild 1989).
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Toy catalogs offer the middle-class mothers who read them “cultural deals” that
promise a resolution to the conflicts that bedevil them, conflicts rooted in the contradictory
valuing of market work and family work. Most of the toys are sold with
the promise that the child will be as nurtured, developed, and stimulated as middleclass
child-rearing norms dictate, but with the innovation that the mother need not
be there to have that happen. Some toys are sold with copywriting pitches that
nonetheless recall ideals of companionship and togetherness, even as they are selling
assurances that the child can grow up appropriately in solitary play.
The anxieties that coalesce around these deals might conceivably fester within
any middle-class mother beset by the dictates of the intensive mothering ideology
that Hays (1996) outlines, wondering whether she is doing enough to properly
develop and nurture her child. Nonetheless, I would argue these ads seem to be
more directly stoking and targeting the anxieties of working mothers, who, like the
innovative professional mothers of Mary Blair-Loy’s study, still “mourn the time
they have lost with young children” (2003, 141).Working mothers may actually be
spending more time with young children than they did previously, perhaps in an
effort to assert their adequacy as mothers, but they are still combating the stern legacy
of domesticity, which requires that they prove it again and again.
If it is the working mother to whom these toys are directed, these ads free her up
for the demands of the workplace by redefining what counts as good mothering.
The child’s needs are held constant—he or she needs to be read to, needs to be distracted
from imminent sleep, needs to be cuddled—but the mother’s obligations are
reshaped significantly. These catalogs are giving mothers, arguablyworking mothers
in particular, permission to remake their caregiving, in Fisher and Tronto’s
(1990) terms, into “taking care of,” as in buying the toys that will take care of the
particular maternal task. The reading Pooh and other such sales pitches enable
women to be good mothers and still be away from their children, by extension to be
good workers, just as reliably available for the long hours in the workplace as the
ideal (male) worker Williams (2000) identified as the social standard. The
employer’s needs, meanwhile, are not redefined at all; in the zero-sum battle for the
mother’s time, this toy offers a compromise between home and work in which only
home is compromising.
It isworth noting that these toys actually do not free mothers, or adults more generally,
from child care. Children can play by themselves, but at the young ages for
which these toys are developed, they certainly still need adult supervision. What
these toys offer is the promise that it will not matter who is there—that the caregiver
746 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
could be even a nonnative English speaker with a relatively low level of education,
say, without detriment to the child’s accumulation of social and personal capital.2
These cultural deals thus open the way to the global commodification of love subject
to Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild’s recent scrutiny (2003).
While these cultural deals might feel like salvation to those mothers trying to
wend their way to an honorable life through the thorny thicket of opprobrium, they
do not ultimately make that thicket disappear. Marketers sell toys that will nurture
and train children on their own and that will turn men into children or helpmates, in
part because mothers are trapped in a system that devalues care work and defines
the ideal (paid)worker as a (male) person with no caregiving responsibilities.Yet as
we have seen, the toys these catalogs sell replicate this value structure: They focus
almost exclusively on teaching skills, they emphasize only certain skills as skills at
all, and they dismiss nurturing as “feelings” at best worthy of expression but not of
practice.
Most important, perhaps, most of these toys take the relationship out of child
rearing. They redefine mothering as something the child can do on his or her own,
with the help of the right toy. It is not that with this transformation, middle-class
child rearing comes closer to that which Lareau (2003) finds practiced by lowincome
families, for example, “the accomplishment of natural growth.” Rather,
these catalogs do not abandon the primacy of skills that is central to “concerted cultivation”
but instead use toys to do the cultivating. By eliding the relationship that is
the basis of mothering, the catalogs help accelerate the further marginalization of
care stemming from the system of domesticity. These toys push care, and children,
ever more into the margins, until they do not even need an adult to do the caring.
I argue that like self-help books, advertisements act as cultural intermediaries,
carving out these alternative paths through cultural conflict. As such, their analysis
highlights the fissures that make for that conflict and that threaten to split apart the
lives of women who try to straddle them. Further scrutiny would be useful to
explore the visual dimension of these advertisements. While space did not permit
such an analysis here, the power of advertisements is often visual and can also
underscore certain messages that the text ignores or de-emphasizes. An analysis of
visual imagery in toy advertisements might expand or add to the themes explored
here.
The toy advertisements scrutinized in this research worked their cultural
alchemy on meanings of motherhood, childhood, and fatherhood. Thework world,
and meanings of a good worker, escaped intact, free of the need for compromise.
We can explain this omission by the power of work in U.S. society, but we can also
anticipate it might have been exaggerated by the fact that this study looked at toy
catalogs as opposed to, say, those selling office supplies. Nevertheless, mothers’
lives and choices about marketwork and familywork will continue to rest on seemingly
irreconcilable contradictions until both mothering and working are redefined
to make space for the other.
Pugh / SELLING COMPROMISE 747
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
NOTES
1. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this observation.
2. Thanks to Amy Hanser for clarification of this point.
REFERENCES
Arendell, Teresa. 2000. Conceiving and investigating motherhood: The decade’s scholarship. Journal of
Marriage and the Family 62 (4): 1192-1207.
Beaudry, Laura. 1999. The consumer catalog shopping survey. Catalog Age, 1 May.
Bianchi, Suzanne. 2000. Maternal employment and time with children: Dramatic change or surprising
continuity? Demography 37: 401-14.
Blair-Loy, Mary. 2003. Competing devotions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bobel, Chris. 2002. The paradox of natural mothering. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Chin, Elizabeth. 2001. Purchasing power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black feminist thought. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Coltrane, Scott. 1996. Family man. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cook, Daniel T. 2004. The commodification of childhood. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Crittenden, Ann. 2001. The price of motherhood. New York: Henry Holt.
Cross, Gary. 1997. Kids’ stuff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
DeVault, Marjorie. 1991. Feeding the family. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. 1978. For her own good: 150 years of the experts’ advice to
women. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press.
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Hochschild. 2003. Global woman. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Emerson, Robert, Rachel Fretz, and Linda Shaw. 1995. Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Fisher, Berenice, and Joan Tronto. 1990. Towards a feminist theory of caring. In Circles of care: Work
and identity in women’s lives, edited by E. K. Abel and M. K. Nelson. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Fisher Price. 2004.Pages of fun: What your child learns from books. Retrieved 20November from http://
www.fisher-price.com/us/parentingsolutions/article_view.asp?articleid=36403.
Garey, Anita. 1995. Constructing motherhood on the night shift: “Working mothers” as “stay-at-home
moms.” Qualitative Sociology 18 (4): 415-37.
⎯⎯⎯. 1999. Weaving work and motherhood. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Gerson, Kathleen. 1985. Hard choices. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and self-identity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Glass, Jennifer. 1998. Gender liberation, economic squeeze, or fear of strangers: Why fathers care for
infants in dual earner households. Journal of Marriage and the Family 60:821-34.
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 1994. Social constructions of mothering: A thematic overview. In Mothering:
Ideology, experience and agency, edited by Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Change, and Linda Rennie
Forcey. New York: Routledge.
Hays, Sharon. 1996. The cultural contradictions of motherhood. NewHaven,CT:Yale University Press.
Hertz, Rosanna. 1997. A typology of approaches to childcare: The centerpiece of organizing family life
for dual-earner couples. Journal of Family Issues 18 (4): 355-85.
Hochschild, Arlie. 1989. The second shift. New York: Avon Books.
⎯⎯⎯. 1997. The time bind. New York: Metropolitan Books.
⎯⎯⎯. 2003a. Gender codes and the play of irony. In The commercialization of intimate life, by Arlie
Hochschild. Berkeley: University of California Press.
748 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007
Hochschild, Arlie, with Kazuko Tanaka. 2003b. Light and heavy: American and Japanese advice books
for women. In The commercialization of intimate life, by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Holt, Douglas. 1997. Post-structuralist lifestyle analysis: Conceptualizing the social patterning of consumption
in postmodernity. Journal of Consumer Research 23:326-50.
Katz, Cindi. 2004. Growing up global. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Katz Rothman, Barbara. 1989. Recreating motherhood. New York: Norton.
Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal childhoods. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lasch, Christopher. 1977. Haven in a heartless world. New York: Basic Books.
McNeal, James U. 1992. Kids as customers. New York: Lexington Books.
Miller, Daniel. 1998. A theory of shopping. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Ortner, Sherry. 1996. Making gender. Boston: Beacon.
Pugh, Allison. 2002. From compensation to childhoodwonder:Why parents buy.Working paper no. 39,
May. Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley.
⎯⎯⎯. 2004.Windfall childrearing: Low-income care and consumption. Journal of Consumer Culture
4 (2): 229-49.
Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal thinking. Boston: Beacon.
⎯⎯⎯. 1998. Care as labor and relationship. In Norms and values: Essays on the work of Virginia Held,
edited by M. Halfon and J. Haber. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Sayer, Liana C., SuzanneM. Bianchi, and John P. Robinson. 2004. Are parents investing less in children?
Trends in mothers’ and fathers’ time with children. American Journal of Sociology 110 (1): 1-43.
Segura, Denise L. 1994.Working at motherhood: Chicana andMexican immigrant mothers and employment.
In Mothering: Ideology, experience and agency, edited by Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace
Change, and Linda Rennie Forcey. New York: Routledge.
Seiter, Ellen. 1995. Sold separately. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1986. Toys as culture. New York: Gardner Press.
Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of love. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Toy Manufacturers of America. 2000. The 2000-2001 toy industry fact book. New York: Toy Manufacturers
of America.
Tronto, Joan C. 1993. Moral boundaries. New York: Routledge.
U.S. Census. 2003a. Statistical abstract of the United States. From Table 597, Employment status of
women by marital status and presence and age of children: 1970-2002.Washington, DC: U.S. Census
Bureau.
⎯⎯⎯. 2003b. Statistical abstract of the United States. Table 599, Families with own children—
Employment status of parents, 1995 and 2002. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau.
U.S. Department of Labor. 2004. Women in the labor force: A data book. Report no. 973. Table 7,
Employment rates of women by presence and age of youngest child, 1975-2002.Washington, DC:
U.S. Department of Labor.
Uttal, Lynet. 1996. Custodial care, surrogate care, and coordinated care: Employed mothers and the
meaning of child care. Gender & Society 10:291-311.
Williams, Joan. 2000. Unbending gender. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zelizer, Viviana. 1985. Pricing the priceless child. New York: Basic Books.
Allison J. Pugh is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She
is writing her dissertation on inequality, consumption, and children’s lives and will graduate in
May 2006.
Pugh / SELLING COMPROMISE 749
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com at Ebsco Host on February 16, 2007