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100 Books, #21: Understood Betsy
Apr. 26th, 2013 12:06 amAs part of my quest to find a fandom beginning with U (still looking for X and Z too, if anyone has thoughts on those), I remembered Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Understood Betsy, a 1910 children’s book I adored as a child.
It occurs to me that almost all the books that my mother read to me - the Little House books, Caddie Woodlawn, Understood Betsy - were some variety of historical. Clearly I was marked from the beginning for an interest in history.
Unfortunately I’m not quite sure what I would write for a fic for Understood Betsy. Betsy Does Something Quaintly New England? Possibly involving cider doughnuts? Mmm. I might have to make cider doughnuts as research.
But fic aside! It’s such an interesting book, quite worth a review: it’s fun both in itself, and in its reflection of its time.
Probably my favorite scene is the one where Betsy starts school at the one-room school house, and the teacher puts third-grade Betsy into seventh-grade reading and second-grade math. Betsy is so confused, because until now she had thought grades were immutable facts and the whole point of school to pass from one to another, and now suddenly she has her first inkling that no, school is about learning.
My memory is too hazy to tell me if this book was also the first time I realized that. But I was enchanted by the idea of being able to just skip a few grades into an appropriately difficult reading class, just like that.
Another great scene: Betsy and her adopted little sister Molly are forgotten at the county fair, and ten-year-old Betsy - just turned ten that day - has to think fast how to earn enough money to get them the fare to take the train home.
One of the main themes of the book, actually, it’s Betsy learning how to take care of herself. At the beginning of the book she lives with her Aunt Frances, who is extremely overprotective (but nonetheless quite sympathetically portrayed: Fisher has a talent for showing different sides of characters).
But then Aunt Frances takes ill, and Betsy has to move out to the Putney farm, in New England - the dreaded Putneys! - who make children do chores! The Putneys pretty much assume that Betsy, who has never been expected to do anything, is capable of doing everything, and Betsy discovers that she is - that, in cases like the fair, she can even go beyond their expectations.
The author, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, was active in both the Montessori and the child study movements. I suspect she saw the early version of the helicopter parent (dirigible parent?), because child study particularly allowed middle- and upper-class white women (this was when middle-class was still a pretty specific class description in the US, not a catch-all category including everyone who doesn’t live in a shack in the Appalachians), many of whom were college-educated, to basically make a career out of their own children.
Despite her sympathy for Aunt Frances, who is trying her best according to the latest research - Fisher notes that she read stacks of child-rearing books when Betsy landed at her doorstep - you can sense Fisher’s exasperation with this sort of hand-holding. None of that when Betsy is about to start school at the Putneys! They basically say, “Off to school! It’s thataway!”
No, seriously. Betsy has no idea where the school is beyond “thataway”; she almost walks right past it. Such independence they reposed in her: such trust! I found that exhilarating when I was a child.
I suspect it is no longer considered good child-rearing practice to be quite that cavalier, though.
It occurs to me that almost all the books that my mother read to me - the Little House books, Caddie Woodlawn, Understood Betsy - were some variety of historical. Clearly I was marked from the beginning for an interest in history.
Unfortunately I’m not quite sure what I would write for a fic for Understood Betsy. Betsy Does Something Quaintly New England? Possibly involving cider doughnuts? Mmm. I might have to make cider doughnuts as research.
But fic aside! It’s such an interesting book, quite worth a review: it’s fun both in itself, and in its reflection of its time.
Probably my favorite scene is the one where Betsy starts school at the one-room school house, and the teacher puts third-grade Betsy into seventh-grade reading and second-grade math. Betsy is so confused, because until now she had thought grades were immutable facts and the whole point of school to pass from one to another, and now suddenly she has her first inkling that no, school is about learning.
My memory is too hazy to tell me if this book was also the first time I realized that. But I was enchanted by the idea of being able to just skip a few grades into an appropriately difficult reading class, just like that.
Another great scene: Betsy and her adopted little sister Molly are forgotten at the county fair, and ten-year-old Betsy - just turned ten that day - has to think fast how to earn enough money to get them the fare to take the train home.
One of the main themes of the book, actually, it’s Betsy learning how to take care of herself. At the beginning of the book she lives with her Aunt Frances, who is extremely overprotective (but nonetheless quite sympathetically portrayed: Fisher has a talent for showing different sides of characters).
But then Aunt Frances takes ill, and Betsy has to move out to the Putney farm, in New England - the dreaded Putneys! - who make children do chores! The Putneys pretty much assume that Betsy, who has never been expected to do anything, is capable of doing everything, and Betsy discovers that she is - that, in cases like the fair, she can even go beyond their expectations.
The author, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, was active in both the Montessori and the child study movements. I suspect she saw the early version of the helicopter parent (dirigible parent?), because child study particularly allowed middle- and upper-class white women (this was when middle-class was still a pretty specific class description in the US, not a catch-all category including everyone who doesn’t live in a shack in the Appalachians), many of whom were college-educated, to basically make a career out of their own children.
Despite her sympathy for Aunt Frances, who is trying her best according to the latest research - Fisher notes that she read stacks of child-rearing books when Betsy landed at her doorstep - you can sense Fisher’s exasperation with this sort of hand-holding. None of that when Betsy is about to start school at the Putneys! They basically say, “Off to school! It’s thataway!”
No, seriously. Betsy has no idea where the school is beyond “thataway”; she almost walks right past it. Such independence they reposed in her: such trust! I found that exhilarating when I was a child.
I suspect it is no longer considered good child-rearing practice to be quite that cavalier, though.
