Susanne Schmidt (Basel)
25.06.2026
Ort: Historicum, Raum K 401
Zeit: 16-18 Uhr c.T.
Past Tense: How Old Ideas About Motherhood and Race Survived the 1960s
This talk examines how midcentury childcare experts transformed theories about maternal instinct and reproductive labor into weapons against 1960s social movements through minimal editorial interventions. I will show how the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, child-analyst Donald Winnicott, and psychiatrist Margaret Ribble recycled their own work from the 1930s and 1940s during the civil rights and women’s movements, repurposing older texts with subtle revisions that converted them into political backlash. Drawing on the mechanical etymology of “backlash”—the calibrated gap between gear teeth that enables continuous movement — I argue that these practices of recontextualization and revision reveal backlash as ongoing structural feature rather than an exceptional event. While traditional understandings view backlash as dramatic pushback following social progress, I want to suggest that resistance also operates continuously through the mundane work of textual recycling—showing how backlash functions as structural process alongside its more visible eruptions.
Vortrag im Rahmen des Oberseminars: "Perspektiven der Wissenschaftsgeschichte".