Bringing Up Baby Sylvia

October 1932 issue

“I was totally imbued with the desire to be a good mother,” said Aurelia Plath, and a pink satin Baby Book now in the Sylvia Plath archives at the Lilly Library shows full-time new mother Aurelia recording joyfully on its pages her infant Sylvia's every gain.

 

Baby Books emerge in the U.S. around 1880. They require literacy and leisure and parents who expected children to grow up; in 1900, that’s three children out of four. Mass-produced baby books reached peak popularity around the time Sylvia was born in 1932. Among the mothers of the twenties and thirties faithfully tracking in writing their children’s progress was Rose Kennedy, inspired by The Care and Feeding of Children (1894), a bestseller by a New York hospital pediatrician who made patient “charts” mandatory after seeing nurses keeping them.

 

Intensified scientific interest in child rearing—the phrase “child care” first appears in 1915—designated “early childhood” the most critical phase. Writing in baby books (kept almost exclusively for firstborns!) made new middle-class mothers feel scientific but anxious, and therefore willing to pay for expert advice. Aurelia subscribed before Sylvia’s birth to Parents’ magazine.

 

Most fatefully for Sylvia, Parents’ in the 1930s mainstreamed in the U.S. the quite novel idea that the goal of education was for children to be happy. Aurelia, like her contemporaries, was raised “to be good,” meaning “to bow to authority.” “Happiness” was incidental; the root of “happy” means “good fortune,” and no parent can guarantee happiness. That churchmouse Aurelia was an ultra-modern mother, raising her children “to be happy” starting with feedings on demand and continuing along the lines set out by Friedrich Froebel, founder of “kindergarten.” He said children should have creative toys, sing and read and hear stories, be reasoned with, and follow their own interests.

A modern Baby Book, 2023 ($27).

 

But it seems that after the kindergarten stage Aurelia imposed happiness as a household norm. Sylvia learned to hate it when Aurelia kept repeating that she only wanted her children to be happy.

 

Sylvia Plath as a mother consulted the manual Baby and Child Care (1946), which moved the child-rearing goalposts: It said the goal was to make children feel loved. Sylvia was rarely happy and did not feel loved, and Aurelia, “good” by any lights but her daughter’s, met the same fate.

 

[1] Founded in 1922, Parents ceased publishing its print edition in 2022.

Sylvia Plath's Mad Grandmother's Ashes

One of 3500 cans of ashes. Photo by "Kim" at Findagrave.com.

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Kottke Plath died at the Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Insane Asylum") in 1919, and her ashes in a canister sat in the hospital's basement for a hundred years with 3500 other such canisters holding the ashes of state-hospital patients. This forgotten "Library of Dust" was the subject of a 2011 documentary film of that name, and the subject of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning newspaper editorial published in Oregon in 2005.

When patients' death certificates became available, an Oregon-based contributor to the site Findagrave.com volunteered to locate living relatives willing to receive the ashes. One of the certificates was for Ernestine Kottke Plath. The researcher, Phyllis Porter Zegers, learned that Ernestine's granddaughter Sylvia Plath became a poet and killed herself, but Zegers focused on finding Ernestine's living descendants.

A family member claimed Ernestine's ashes, finally, in September 2020. It's like Lady Lazarus risen.

Sylvia's father Otto Plath was Ernestine's eldest child. While his mother lived, Otto made himself scarce, leaving home for the U.S. at age 15 and then, when his parents and siblings came to the U.S., attending schools far away from them. Aurelia Plath later wrote that Otto stayed bitter about Ernestine's bad mothering. Ernestine's husband Theodor Plath committed Ernestine to the asylum in Salem, Oregon, in 1916. Zeger wrote that according to hospital records Ernestine was admitted suffering from overwork and a leg ulcer, had two "attacks" of something, and dementia. After three years in the crowded mental hospital, Ernestine died there of tuberculosis.

Sylvia Plath knew little or nothing about Ernestine. Aurelia kept secret from Sylvia her Aunt Frieda's information about Ernestine's mental illness. But we carry our ancestors' imprint always, in ways we might not know. 

Otto Plath and Lydia Bartz Plath, Voter Registration Rolls, 1914

Let's retire the fiction that Otto Plath and first wife Lydia Clara Bartz Plath, married in Washington State in August 1912, were together for three weeks only, because records continue to show it was closer to three years. In 1914 Otto was teaching in Berkeley, California, living with Lydia, and both were registered to vote -- as Progressives. Here's their voter-registration page. [Click the image to enlarge.]

Wait, but it's 1914, so women in the U.S. can't vote!?! In California they could and did.

Otto and Lydia are still at that address in 1915 as she enrolled in UC-Berkeley's summer school.

Source: California State Library; Sacramento, California; Great Register of Voters, 1900-1968.

Aurelia Plath's First Love

Austrian civil engineer Dr. Karl von Terzaghi was invited to the U.S. in 1925 to teach and establish a program at M.I.T. and, incidentally, to explain why new M.I.T. buildings on the Charles River banks had been sinking an inch per year. Terzaghi (1883-1963) founded two new sciences: soil mechanics (the physics and hydraulics of soils; he proved that soil types, like any other building materials, had principles) and foundational engineering, now called geotechnology. Terzaghi hired "Miss A. Schober" as his secretary in 1926 -- not 1927, as Aurelia has it in her introduction to Letters Home. That's where Aurelia, who never gave his name, wrote about:

". . .[w]orking at the close of my junior year (1927) for a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had a handwritten manuscript in German dealing with new principles of soil mechanics. As he had a publication deadline to meet, I usually worked into the early evening, so we often had dinner together before I left Boston for home. It was during these meals that I listened, fascinated, to his accounts of travel and colorful adventures, fully realizing that I was in the presence of a true genius in both the arts and sciences. I came away with my notebook filled with reading lists. . ." (6)

She wrote that this self-education would one day benefit her children, but that is not the whole story. The friendship ripened into love.

For two years they enjoyed the theater, museums, hikes, camping, gardens, evenings with Karl's faculty friends, dining and dancing, and conversation most of all. The above photo was taken in 1926, when Karl, 43 and divorced, Boston's most eligible bachelor, chose Aurelia Schober, 20, moved by her innocence, intelligence, and sensitivity. He took her to her junior prom at the Kenmore Hotel on May 13, 1927 and then at 4:00 a.m. in Winthrop ate the post-prom breakfast Aurelia's mother had left prepared for them with instructions, Austrian style. Terzaghi wrote that in his diary. His 82 volumes of diaries are in Oslo. I learned that by reading his biography. ("Aurelia's boyfriend has a biography?")

Terzaghi centennial stamp, Austria, 1983

Shorthand transcription unlocked his identity; he's the "Karl" in Aurelia's pensive Gregg shorthand annotations in Sara Teasdale's Dark of the Moon (1926; Aurelia bought the book that year) in Sylvia Plath's personal library at the Lilly Library in Bloomington. Find the transcriptions here.

In 1928 Terzaghi left the U.S. for a prestigious engineering professorship in Vienna. Ten years later when the Nazis expelled his Jewish students and pressured him to work on the German Autobahn he returned to Boston, taught at Harvard and consulted worldwide. His legacy works include the Chicago subway system and the Aswan Dam, plus immortal equations and elegant problem-solving designs. Terzaghi's geologist wife Ruth (m. 1930) lived in the Boston area until her death in 1993. In 1975 Bostonians in certain circles, or engineers, or Aurelia's college friends, could have guessed whom Aurelia was describing in Letters Home -- it's obvious, now that we know.

Their story is heartbreaking. I'll tell more of it later. Consider for now that young Aurelia attracted two extraordinary men. Sylvia, taking her cue from Mom, married her own foreign-born male genius.

References: Karl Terzaghi: The Engineer as Artist (Goodman, 1998); Letters Home 1950-1963 (Plath, 1975); Norwegian Geotechnical Institute Terzaghi Library; Geoengineer.org; Wikipedia: Karl von Terzaghi (mentions Aurelia Schober, future mother of Sylvia Plath); Wikipedia: Ruth Terzaghi; Geotechnical Hall of Fame; American Society of Civil Engineers

Otto Plath's First Wife Lydia, and Her Career

findagrave.com

Otto Plath’s first wife, Lydia Clara Bartz (1889-1988) was “Mrs. Lydia Plath” all her long adult life. She is buried in her home town, Fall Creek, Wisconsin. She and Otto married in 1912, lived together about two years, and maintained some contact after they separated. Apparently Otto’s youngest sister Frieda became Lydia’s friend. Most of this material except where noted came from Newspapers.com. The bracketed material is mine.

I had wondered what became of Lydia. She never remarried. Here's what I've learned so far:

1913-14: The UC student register for Berkeley shows Lydia Clara Plath as an undergraduate (p. 113) and Otto Emil Plath (p. 48) as a graduate student. Both live at 2216 Bancroft Way.
1915: Lydia Clara Plath, "housewife," appears in the register for UC-Berkeley summer session.

1919, June 6: After three years of training, Lydia Bartz-Plath graduates as an R.N. from the Evangelical School of Nursing in Oak Lawn, IL. Frieda “Plath-Hendricks” was in the Class of 1918. [Frieda's married name was actually “Heinrichs.”]

1922: Lydia has four months of post-graduate training in surgical nursing. 

1925: Takes and passes the Wisconsin nursing license exam.

Lydia's nursing school closed in 1988.

Highlights from the Eau Claire Leader, archived at Newspapers.com:

1928, April 21: Mrs. Lydia Plath is identified as “operating nurse, Luther Hospital [Eau Claire].”

1929, June 27, p. 4, “Mrs. Lydia Plath, who has been visiting at Chicago, returned home to spend the rest of her vacation with her mother, Mrs. Mathilde Bartz.”

1930, Sept. 8, p. 8, “Mrs. Lydia Plath has gone to Los Angeles, California, to visit her brother, Rupert Bartz, and her sister Alma.”

1932, Aug. 12, p. 2, “Miss Elsie Roettiger [R.N.] of Fountain City [WI] arrived here Wednesday at the Mathilde Bartz home where she will spend several days visiting with Mrs. Lydia Plath who is spending a month’s vacation from her duties at the Luther Hospital in Eau Claire.” [Had Lydia learned at this time that Otto Plath had divorced her and remarried?]

1932, Oct. 22, p. 3. “Mrs. Lydia Plath motored to Oshkosh Sunday where she will attend a nurses’ convention.”

1934, Sept. 25, p. 12, operating room supervisor; on the faculty of the new Luther Hospital School of Nursing.

1934, Nov. 24, p. 2, contributes to the Eau Claire Community Welfare Fund.

1936, May 14, p. 4, named one of the Directors of the Tenth District of the Wisconsin State Nurses Association.
1939, Sept. 15, p. 4: "Mrs. Lydia Plath described her visit to New York, including her trip to the NBC studios, Radio City, and seeing King George and Queen Elizabeth, guarded by 4000 policemen, at the World's Fair."
1942, Feb. 26, p. 2, "Lydia Plath, R.N., supervisor, shows there was a monthly average of 271.3 cases while in 1935 the average was 179."
1950, Nov. 2, p. 5, "received recognition in a monthly bulletin, 'Ideas of the Month,' published by a hospital supply company," outlining an instrument-sterilization process used at Luther Hospital.
1951, Jan. 11, p. 5, Eau Claire Daily Telegram, the article “Luther Hospital Guild Purchases New Surgical Table for Operating Room” says “Mrs. Lydia Plath, supervisor of the surgical department at Luther Hospital, demonstrated the machine."

1960, Jan. 19 [1]: Lydia took the annual Wisconsin nursing license renewal exam for the final time; she was 71 years old.

Rupert Bartz (1890-1934) introduced his sister Lydia to Otto Plath. Lydia’s sisters were Alma, Dora, Odelia, and Caroline. Of all the girls, only Lydia married.

Small-town newspapers in those days reported on hunting parties, birthday parties, who checked into or out of the local hotel or the hospital, and even the card party thrown for Rupert Bartz when he left town in 1914 to work in real estate in North Dakota.

 

[1] Wisconsin Board of Nursing; Registered and Practical Nurses Permanent Record Cards, Circa 1912-1982; Series: Registered and Practical Nurses Permanent Record Cards; Book Series: 2675 or 2676

 

See the 1912 photo of Lydia Bartz with her four sisters and their mother.