visited and interviewed by this “European”—the way all white people were described in the villages where her research took place—woman scientist in their home for two hours every two weeks. Though Mary describes these interactions as more like social occasions than clinical interviews, the women still had to be willing to answer all kinds of questions about their households, their children’s births, their parenting decisions, their children’s development, health, and—most important—separations.
She was led around the villages by a tribal chief who had agreed to help her find mothers willing to be part of her study—perhaps the same male elder who appears in one of Mary’s photographs wearing a Western blazer, holding a baby, and looking very serious. She—impressively—had learned enough Luganda to write and recite a speech about how interested she was in the pros and cons of parenting practices in two very different cultures, framing her study in simple, neutral terms: “As you know, your own customs differ in many respects from European customs. I am especially interested in different customs about caring for infants.”
Mary was riveted by the people and the families she met. She saw babies who looked like they were just nine months old walking in bare feet, a string of bells around their ankle jingling. She would later learn that Ganda parents put these bells on their babies’ ankles because the babies like the music of it, and it inspires them to walk. She writes of the families and their lives in attentive, loving detail:
Their house, although made of wattle and daub with a thatched roof, gave an impression of both grace and substance. Flowers grew in the front yard, and there was a graceful shade tree. Inside it was comfortable. There were simple but comfortable chairs. A woven reed ceiling lent coolness [!] to the rooms. Family pictures covered the walls, and there was one colorful painting that one of the children had done at school. There were several little tables with cross-stitched covers. There was always a vase of flowers. When we came to visit we sat in the cool, dim living room, sometimes outside under the shade tree.
Based on descriptions like this, as well as her photographs, I’ve formed a picture of Mary on that first day of looking for participants: She’s wearing a short-sleeved 1950s day dress, white flip-flop sandals, and no makeup. In her purse are a notepad, a pencil, and her camera. Her hair is up and away from her broad, high-cheekboned face. She wears glasses. She’s hot as hell, but happy.
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WHEN MARY ARRIVED in Uganda, she was forty-two years old. She had received her PhD rather late, having enlisted in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps during World War II, so she was eager to get started on the academic career she had been working toward since she entered the University of Toronto at the young age of sixteen. But her husband, Len, had received a position at the University of East Africa, and she went with him.
She had spent the previous four years working with Dr. John Bowlby in London, another overseas stint she’d gone on because of Len, who had been completing his degree there. Bowlby was working out his theory that the love babies feel for their parents had evolved to keep them close and safe, like geese lined up behind their mother. This attachment, he believed, was at the root of the child-parent relationship, and stood in stark opposition to the prevailing theory of child-parent affection at the time, one that posited that babies love their mothers because their mothers feed them. If the so-called theory of “cupboard love” was correct, it wouldn’t matter if a child was separated from a parent, as long as someone was there to boil the peas. Bowlby, who had been working with orphans and delinquents in post–World War II England, knew that was wrong. He saw firsthand how these separated children were, in fact, deeply mourning the loss of their parents.
Mary, like almost all the psychologists of her day, didn’t buy Bowlby’s theory at first. So she set out to see for herself.
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IN THE 1940S and ’50s, scientific understandings of the impact of parenting were fuzzy, even lacking what we might today consider common sense. B. F.