My father used to say, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” That is what I thought when I read the following comment from Luther Gulick, one of the most influential writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on the issue of physical exercise. Gulick was one of the founders of the American Boy Scouts, Camp Fire Girls and a leader in the YMCA. But he was also a composite of conflicting and sometimes dangerous philosophical and theological error. This problem was not unique to Gulick. Many thinkers of Gulick’s day struggled with the need to wed the historic worldview assumptions of Christendom with the philosophical presuppositions of Modernity. (In my view, many modern Christians suffer from a similar intellectual schizophrenia—they hope to maintain Christian values and Christian outcomes, while operating on humanistic presuppositions and methodologies.) Thus, Gulick would, on the one hand, advocate sexual morality and involved fathers, but, on the other hand, embrace philosophical assumptions advanced by the unholy trinity of Evolutionism, Eugenics and Feminism.

At one point, Gulick decided that it would be unhealthy for his daughters to play with dolls. This is his account of the failure of that experiment. Note his interesting conclusions about the differences between boys and girls:

If you want to know what a child is, study his play; if you want to affect what he shall be, direct the form of play...Girls have, however, plays which are peculiarly their own. Many years ago, when my first daughter was born, my wife and I planned for her a childhood which should omit dolls. Most of the disorders in my family had been of a nervous type—headaches, earaches, backaches, rather than any organic troubles—and we wished our children to be out of doors a great deal in order to counteract this tendency. So we encouraged our daughter in all forms of boys’ plays, and gave her much opportunity for playing outdoor games. We gave her no dolls, because dolls lead to sedentary occupation. We decided that she should not play indoors with other girls, for we feared that through such association the habit of doll play would be acquired. She was not taken down-town to the shops where dolls are prominently displayed lest she should be attracted by them. The plan seemed to work very well for a few years. But one Christmas she was asked what gift she wanted more than anything else. To the astonishment and confusion of her parents she answered: “Oh, if I could only have a doll.” She received that doll and so did the three sisters who came after her.

Some years afterward I took a doll census and discovered that there were in the house thirty-seven members of the doll family, each with its own name and relationships. That number did not include the clothes-pin dolls, spool dolls, paper dolls, dolls made from acorns, or any other of the great community of ephemeral dolls that come and go. It included only the regularly established members of the household. These girls had no more intense relations to the dolls than most girls have. A remarkable development of domestic feeling was brought about in connection with this doll family. Doll play is essentially girl play. Much of the rich, social life of women and the ready use of the hands come through playing with dolls. The manual skill that boys acquire is different in kind.

A Philosophy of Play, 1920, Charles Scribner and Sons, by Luther Gulick