Sarah Cramsey: 'We know very little about which systems influence our first thousand days'
It is one of the most personal and simultaneously most universal experiences of human life: caring for a young child. Professor Sarah Cramsey has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to investigate how factors such as nationality, political systems, and religion influence the first thousand days after conception.
‘People in all times have dealt with caring for young children,’ Cramsey explains. ‘I found that fascinating: how can such an experience be both timeless and very specific to a certain period? In my research, I focus on the period from 1905 to 2004, in the area that belonged to the Habsburg Empire shortly before World War I.’
By choosing the now-fragmented Habsburg Empire, Cramsey has access to a large number of different ethnicities and political systems. ‘We're going to look at liberalism, socialism, fascism, communism, and the post-1989 revolution, but also at Muslims, Christians, and Jews,’ she lists.
‘Systems must have influence’
Cramsey's main question is how these systems have taken root in beliefs about childcare. ‘If communism and capitalism are so different, we should see that reflected in this care,’ she explains. ‘In Czechoslovakia, for example, the first 24-hour daycare centres were set up in the 1950s. It's part of the socialist idea that women should have the same access to paid work as men. I'm very curious about the impact of such a change on these women's deeper cultural and religious beliefs.’
To map out this care for a period of a hundred years in such a large area, Cramsey wants to set up a large, easily searchable dataset with her team. We want to examine all medical journals about pregnancy and breastfeeding from many countries, like Austria, Poland, Romania, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, as well as all women's magazines from those places. What do these sources have to say about caring for young children?’
Datasets
Ultimately, Cramsey wants to select the most interesting case studies. ‘I can imagine we're going to write a chapter about bottle-feeding,’ she explains. ‘What does the invention of formula mean for the development of the bottle? And how does that, in turn, influence the way we care for children?’ More culturally, playgrounds and lullabies will also play a role. ‘Which places were considered suitable for children to play? And do lullabies differ by religious group, as I suspect now, or are they actually very consistent?’
Political, cultural, or technical?
By comparing all these factors, Cramsey ultimately hopes to find out which components have influenced childcare the most. ‘I don't know yet if I'm going to tell a political, cultural, technical, or medical story,’ she says. ‘As a historian, I find that incredibly fascinating. This is something everyone has experienced. Everyone was once a baby, but no one remembers anything about it. Thanks to our ERC project, this invisible work of early childcare by parents, grandparents, other caretakers, communities and societies will, have a visible history.’