Eleanor Roosevelt’s Decision to Follow Her Doctor’s Advice Backfired
Eleanor Roosevelt had a brainstorm: she had a chicken wire cage, with a wooden basket in it, attached to a window. As she described it in her autobiography, it was: “a kind of box with wire on the sides and top” out of a back window, in which Anna was placed while her mother napped. Anna was understandably terrified, and made her feelings known. However, Mrs. Roosevelt’s doctor had also told her to ignore babies’ screams, so she ignored Anna’s shrieks. It backfired, because the neighbors were alarmed by the caged baby’s continuous cries, and threatened to call The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Toward Children. Mrs. Roosevelt, by her own admission, “knew absolutely nothing about handling or feeding a baby“. She had thought that she was being a good modern mother, following the best childcare recommendations.
Eleanor Roosevelt was thus shocked by the neighbors’ negative reaction. She was ahead of her times: a few years after she was criticized for sticking her baby in a window cage, the practice became widespread. In 1922, Emma Read of Spokane, Washington, filed the first commercial patent for a “portable baby cage”. It was supposed to be suspended from a window’s external edge, with a baby inside. The cages were intended mainly for infants in city apartment buildings, who lacked backyards or easy access to gardens, so they could get fresh air. As a contemporary newspaper put it: “Flats have notable advantages for residential purposes, but life in them involves undeniable hardships for babies and very young children, who have little opportunity to play out of doors and to get their proper allowance of fresh air“.
