Research report 2012 - Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Science in the nursery: Milicent Shinn’s observations of early childhood development, 1890 to 1910

Authors
von Oertzen, Christine
Departments
MPI für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Abt. II (Lorraine Daston)
Summary
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the development of infants garnered unprecedented scholarly enthusiasm, with men of science discovering in their own offspring, to borrow Charles Darwin’s phrase, “objects of natural history.” In the USA, college-educated women emerged as key interpreters of infants’ mental faculties. Exploring the at-home observations of Milicent Shinn, a University of California, Berkeley graduate, reveals how she and her female network of observers performed fieldwork in the nursery, producing groundbreaking work on the evolving of the human mind.

For the full text, see the German version.

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