The Disciplining of Children in the Early Years of the Twentieth Century: the Effective Management of Time

The Disciplining of Children in the Early Years of the Twentieth Century: the Effective Management of Time
By Governess
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How many of us have heard a mother tell a disobedient child in the hearing of others that she'll be spanked "when I get you home." In such a case, making the child wait for her punishment is almost certainly a matter of convenience (or prudence) on the mother's part. But in earlier times, making a child wait for punishment was seen by many as an integral part of correction.

In her little manual on disciplining a child, Miriam Gross, an American educator writing in the early twentieth century, makes the point that discipline is like music. "The notes may be of different durations and be played with varying degrees of force but, without the intervals between the notes, music becomes meaningless: and so it is with spanking. To be effective the child should be acutely aware of the pauses between the strokes. Thus, a whipping should be unhurried and allow the child time to feel apprehension and shame."

Mrs Gross was speaking of the technique of administering a single spanking, but the need for "intervals" and "pauses" runs throughout the whole process of discipline. It is only today's rushed life-style and our lack of commitment to a child's discipline that renders that such a strange concept. Indeed in earlier times, the skilful management of time when administering punishment was an accepted procedure.

A number of Victorian writers refer to the practice of assigning a particular day at the end of the week as a time when "any arrears of punishment are paid up." Lady Eleanor Craddock, in her autobiography A Victorian Childhood, recalls vividly how her ten year old brother had spoken in a manner that their governess, Miss Wimbush, judged to be "unseemly." He was quietly told, "We will deal with that on Friday, Master William." However, on the Wednesday of the same week he again misbehaved but this time was promptly birched for the offence. She noted that "the relief of being whipped and knowing that he had been forgiven was denied him, for he knew that the whipping he had just received was but a reminder and foretaste of what was still to come."

We cannot doubt that Lady Craddock's governess knew exactly what she was doing. To place the boy under an agony of "fearful anticipation" that cast its shadow over the whole week was a potent means of control. It was an ever present pricking and stinging in his emotional life that would not cease until, at the appointed time, it was physically transferred to his ten year-old bottom. And to whip the boy during the week, in the knowledge that this would further exacerbate his pent up emotional fear of the anticipated Friday correction, was a most disturbing refinement.

Although she does not directly confirm it, Eleanor Craddock implies that the postponement of punishment in this way was not unusual. Indeed we can believe that a conscientious governess would probably find it irresistible. How easy it would then be for the child to be reminded, perhaps with an almost indecent relish, of the coming punishment. And how he must have squirmed and reddened!

Lady Craddock recalls how as children they tried to ease their apprehension that ruled their lives. Her younger brother used to make a little calendar for himself in which there were no Fridays; and she herself would lie in bed each night and try to convince herself that on Friday her governess would tell her that she had been so good that the dreaded birching could be remitted. "But," she wrote, "sadly, it never was."

While the knowledge of the Friday correction may have overshadowed a child's week, some governesses exchanged certainly for a more calculatingly arbitrary discipline that ensured that their charges were in a state of even more acute anxiety. Cordelia Gimpson's German governess would postpone a punishment until Sunday at four o'clock at which time Cordelia had to fetch the hairbrush from the hall table for the promised spanking to be administered.

However, sometimes when she presented the hairbrush, her governess would smack it ominously across her palm in the usual way, look at her intently, but then instead of ordering her to take down her knickers and lie across the sofa arm, would remit the punishment altogether. "How I loved her when that happened," Mrs Gimpson wrote many years later. "I would sometimes kneel on the floor and clasp her round the legs and cry tears of such gratitude; and she would say 'there, there, my liebling, you are a good girl, a good girl.'"

On the other hand, sometimes, when no spanking had been pre-announced for a Sunday afternoon, Cordelia would nevertheless be sent for the hairbrush and spanked for "the sins you have not confessed, Miss Cordelia, but of which all girls of your age are guilty."

We can imagine how the young lady became increasingly apprehensive as the week passed, until by Sunday she was almost prostrate with anxiety, wondering whether a promised spanking would be remitted or fearful lest she should be whipped for her sins of inadvertence. Just as did Miss Wimbush, we can be sure that young Cordelia's German governess knew exactly what she was doing. By a carefully conceived regime of tightening and loosening the reins of discipline, she exercised an arbitrary authority that was almost diabolical in its power to invade the girl's emotional life and to bind her inexorably to her will.

But the consciousness of passing time could also be used as a more immediate prelude to punishment. A disobedient or wilful girl might be sent to her room to await her correction. Malto Binsey, writing in the 1920s, vividly recalls how as a young girl of nearly thirteen her mother still sent her to her room to await a spanking. "I would sit on the bed anxiously hugging my body. I would nervously stare into the mirror; and sometimes I would raise my skirt and examine my completely bare bottom, clutching it protectively, asserting my ownership of it."

She remembered how as a young girl her little sister when about to be spanked had put her hands across her bottom and howled, "It's mine, Mummy; it's mine!" To which her mother had replied, "Oh no, Anne, until a little girl is much older than you, her bottom belongs to her Mummy to teach her obedience." And at thirteen Malto's bottom was still, too, her mother's. It must be acknowledged that, as befitted her age, her spankings were harder and longer and given "with a large oval wooden backed hairbrush that left my bottom deeply red and smarting and my face hot and tear-stained."

But sometimes the delay before a due punishment was imposed in a more humiliating and public way with the girl being made to stand or kneel, facing a wall, with her dress pinned up and her knickers taken down. Lady Craddock's governess would regularly shame her in this way, making her kneel on a hard slab of stone that had been placed in the hall. She insisted that young Eleanor remained completely upright, completely still and completely silent for the full half-an-hour before being birched. "It was an unbelievable torment," she wrote in her memoirs. "After ten minutes the pain in my knees and the ache in my back were excruciating, but I knew better than to express my discomfort by any movement or even the slightest sound. It was preferable to bear the immediate agony rather than suffer a double swishing with the birch rod and then be returned for a further hour of kneeling on that stone."

Eleanor, to take her mind off the pain in her knees and back, would engage in a whole series of memory games: reciting nursery rhymes, thinking of a number and repeating it to herself and then adding a second number and then repeating both numbers, and then adding a third and repeating all three, and so on. "The time spent on Miss Wimbush's 'shaming stone' allowed me," she wrote, "to develop a quite remarkable memory!"

Another mother, Beatrice Worral, in the aftermath of the First World War, wrestling with her young son, Charles, who believed himself to be more mature than his years, describes in a long letter to Mother's World how she followed a practice recommended in the short book Disciplining Boys by Eugenia Strang. This, she said, enabled her to re-establish and maintain a salutary control over her son.

Each Monday five red buttons would be placed in a row on the mantelshelf. The boy was told that any bad behaviour would mean the removal of a button; while good behaviour might result in the adding of a button: but at no time could there be more than five buttons. The removal of a last remaining button was always a dramatic moment for then a sound bare bottom caning followed. At the conclusion of the punishment, two buttons were then replaced. Any further misbehaviour before the next Monday resulted in the removal of one or more buttons and should the number fall to zero in that time, another caning would be given.

"You can imagine how the tension mounts," she wrote, "as during the week buttons are removed. Since I have total control over whether any deed or misdeed requires the removal of one or more buttons, or is good for adding one, Charles is acutely aware of my control over him, as well as the consequences of a continuing pattern of defiance and wilfulness. When Charles has only one or two buttons standing between his bottom and my cane, then he mostly proves extremely biddable and cooperative!"

However, the management of time was not just for the preliminaries of discipline. For a committed disciplinarian, it ran through the whole process from beginning to end. We mentioned at the outset that for Miriam Gross the intervals and pauses in a whipping were as important for its effectiveness as the strokes themselves.

Algernon Swinburne in his novel Lesbia Brandon, says of Bertie's tutor, Denham, "he knew better than to flog too fast; he paused after each stroke and allowed the boy time to smart." And there is plenty of evidence that mothers and governesses, too, recognised the benefits of slow measured whippings for the children in their charge.

Ann Wilkins, a widow bringing up two boys of eight and twelve in the 1920s, describes in the journal Christian Family how for her discipline fell into two distinct parts. A child caught in some misdemeanour had first to be whipped not to punish him for her wrong-doing but to break his will and render him contrite. Only then did this preliminary whipping cease; to be followed after an interval by a second whipping specifically to correct his fault.

For us contrition may be an unfamiliar and unimportant concept, but for Mrs Wilkins it was a perfectly natural and necessary part of correction. It meant the transformation of a wilful child into one who was willing humbly to acknowledge his sin, and submissively to accept his need for punishment. Only when he had been duly punished could forgiveness be offered and received.

We can be sure that Ann Wilkins caned her sons with an evangelical fervour that caused them much distress. That they were tempted to bring the painful proceedings to a swift and premature conclusion by a simulated contrition cannot be doubted. However, this "devilish temptation" was something that a mother had zealously to guard against. Mrs Wilkins believed that the first whipping should be inflicted "with such thoroughness that there is never an occasion to doubt that the boy's writhing under the rod contains no element of rebellion, and that his tears express not angry defiance, but a broken and contrite spirit." She adds, "for only a boy who is truly repentant will be able to submit his flesh willingly to the further whipping that will correct his misdeed and allow him to appropriate the blessing of forgiveness."

However, once judged contrite and before the "corrective whipping" was given, the boy was made to sit "on a hard kitchen stool" and write out a passage of scripture that had later to be memorised and recited perfectly before bedtime prayers. "This copying should be done under close supervision and if there is any restiveness or impatience that betokens a less than perfectly contrite spirit, then he needs to be whipped again until completely broken and genuinely contrite. His mockery of God by pretending to a sorrowfulness for sin that is not truly heartfelt needs then to be separately and most severely punished along with the correction for his original misdeed that will almost certainly by comparison pale into insignificance."

We can only begin to imagine how one of Mrs Wilkins' boys felt subject to a whipping that had no clear terminal point other than his mother's subjective judgement of whether he was sufficiently contrite. How helpless he must have felt as time after time the flexible rattan was swished upward, pausing momentarily at the top of its rise, and then, with no doubt skilful wrist action on the part of his mother, brought whistling down to crack across his vulnerable young buttocks, sinking for an agonising moment into his soft pillowy flesh.

His frantic writhing and twisting, his sobbing screams, his hopeless pleading, all were ignored in the greater interest of his spiritual well-being. Long after he was reduced to a small, broken, weeping child, desperate to be forgiven and prepared to accept anything, anything, to be reconciled to the source of love and affection, still the whipping continued. Out of a consuming love, his mother wanted there to be no risk that any sinful self-regard, any devilish wilfulness, would remain that might hinder her son from submitting with an open heart to the further correction that would enable him to be forgiven and reconciled.

How did a child cope in such a situation? Agnes Parker, in her autobiography Morning is Broken, recounts how as a child she was spanked without "any indication of how long the hard wooden back of my mother's hairbrush would continue smacking my plump but sensitive bottom." To render the spanking finite and supportable she would inwardly count each stinging smack of the brush as it reddened her skin, and "the fight to continue the count and not to be overcome by the pain and submerged in a sea of hopelessness was an effective means of my maintaining some control of the situation."

Of course, some mothers and governesses delighted in making their charges count the strokes of a whipping aloud. This had a very different outcome to the counting of young Agnes Parker, for it made the child openly acknowledge his acceptance of each stroke, and his submission to the authority of the one whipping him. With such enforced counting, the child was usually liable to suffer a penalty should he fail to call the stroke promptly or to miscall it. Usually the stroke would, then, need to be repeated, but in some cases, where the child needed to brought under the tightest of control, the whole whipping might be resumed from the beginning.

Lady Caroline Cunningham, writing of her governess at the end of the nineteenth century, believed that when she was required to count each stroke of the birch, her governess "deliberately varied the rate of delivery so that I would be so overwhelmed by a succession of rapid and searing cuts to my naked buttocks, that I would lose any sense of ordinal succession, with the consequence that her threat to recommence the flogging from the outset was often horribly fulfilled."

Today, if an obstinate and difficult child were spanked, there would be no question but that, once he had composed himself, he would be immediately speedily accepted back into the community of the family. In times past, however, that might well not have been his experience. Miriam Gross, to whose musical analogy we referred at the outset, was adamant that it was "immensely salutary for a child after being whipped to stand in disgrace for a full half-an-hour, facing the wall, with his whipped hindquarters on display."

She argued that most children experience little sense of shame while being whipped as their attention is focussed exclusively on their buttocks smarting under the rod. "The shame is felt subsequently," she wrote, "as the naughty child stands with his bottom ridged and swollen, now the focus of others' attention: experiencing the shame of seeing himself almost through their eyes. Then, he recalls and relives his helpless writhing under the rod, the marks of which he now displays as a branding that vividly declares his governess's claim over him."

Life today is rushed. We no longer linger over the essentials or relish their delights. We prefer any device that saves time or effort. Regrettably this attitude has infected our whole approach to disciplining children. While some may be prepared to give a hasty spanking, few are prepared to provide the more demanding discipline that is truly needed.

In the past, mothers and governesses were willing to import an awareness of time into the whole disciplinary process. By making the child wait appropriately, by insisting on significant pauses, and by introducing emphatic separations, the experience and value of discipline were heightened and rendered efficacious. In this way, a salutary anticipation and fear were aroused; a sense of shame was both inculcated and deepened; individual strokes of the birch or cane each became a separate smarting agony; and remorselessly
the child's will was broken and he was reduced to a sobbing contrition. Then and only then was forgiveness granted.

Those who are convinced that we have failed in the education and discipline of our children will look to the past with nostalgia. But let us not despair. One day the tide will surely turn, and our children's need for discipline will once again be realised.

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