We Are the Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Artwork from Grown-Up Readers

By Marisa Crawford, Megan Milks and Mara Wilson

"More than a book about a series of books, it is an ode to the child readers we were, and the ways we have learned to name the experiences we couldn't find written."  —Melissa Febos, author of Abandon Me & Girlhood A nostalgia-packed, star-studded anthology featuring contributors such as Kristen Arnett, Yumi Sakugawa, Gabrielle Moss, and others exploring the lasting impact of the beloved Baby-Sitters Club series In 1986, the first-ever meeting of the Baby-Sitters Club was called to order in a messy bedroom strewn with Ring-Dings, scrunchies, and a landline phone. Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne launched the club that birthed an entire generation of loyal readers. The Baby-Sitters Club series featured a diverse, complex cast of characters and touched on an impressive range of issues that were underrepresented at the time: divorce, adoption, childhood illness, class division, and racism, to name a few. In We Are the Baby-sitters Club, writers and a few visual artists from Generation BSC will reflect on the enduring legacy of Ann M. Martin's beloved series, thirty-five years later—celebrating the BSC's profound cultural influence. Contributors include author Gabrielle Moss, illustrator Siobhán Gallagher, and filmmaker Sue Ding, as well as New York Times bestselling author Kristen Arnett, Lambda Award–finalist Myriam Gurba, Black Girl Nerds founder Jamie Broadnax, and Paris Review contributor Frankie Thomas.The first anthology of its kind from editors Marisa Crawford and Megan Milks, We Are the Baby-Sitters Club will look closely at how Ann M. Martin's series shaped our ideas about gender politics, friendship, fashion and beyond—and what makes the series still a core part of many readers' identities so many years later.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: Jul 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781641604932

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

WE ARE THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB

MARISA CRAWFORD AND MEGAN MILKS

In 1986, the first-ever meeting of the Baby-Sitters Club was called to order in a messy Stoneybrook, Connecticut, bedroom strewn with Ring Dings, scrunchies, a landline phone, and hollowed-out books stuffed with licorice and Milk Duds. Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne launched the club that birthed an entire generation of loyal—dare we say obsessive?—readers.

From The Baby-Sitters Club #1: Kristy’s Great Idea to #131: The Fire at Mary Anne’s House, Ann M. Martin’s wildly popular book series lasted thirteen years: the age of its five core characters—who remained forever frozen in eighth grade—and a remarkably long life for a children’s series. It spawned several spinoffs, including the BSC Mysteries and Baby-Sitters Little Sister, not to mention a TV show, a feature film, and a very riveting board game. The series featured more than three hundred titles and generated close to two hundred million printed copies—copies that millions of readers like us devoured with near-religious fervor in the 1980s and ’90s. We snatched up each new title at our schools’ Scholastic book fairs and libraries, savoring every new adventure, and crafted our outfits, our handwriting, and our personalities to mirror our favorite characters—or quietly formed secret crushes on them.

Thirty-five years later, we’re all grown up. But we’ve never stopped thinking about the BSC—and we’re far from alone. While we couldn’t join the Baby-Sitters Club, as much as we may have wanted to at the time, we’ve become proud members of a different club: a whole generation of adults who grew up under the well-appointed care of these seven extremely reliable babysitters and were impacted by the series in so many ways. Whether it’s talking with our friends about how they use the new graphic novels to teach their kids about blended families, or (still) aspiring to Claudia’s iconic style, it’s become clear to us that the BSC has remained an influential presence in many of our lives. As we’ve watched various homages unfolding over the past decade or so—from Kim Hutt Mayhew’s blog cataloging the books’ sartorial style, What Claudia Wore, to a whole slew of comics and podcasts, and now a Netflix BSC adaptation—we wanted to carve out a space to give this series the celebration and consideration it deserves. After all, media aimed at young girls is so often dismissed as frivolous. But, as Maria Sachiko Cecire of the Data-Sitters Club writes about the BSC books, In giving our attention to texts that meant so much to so many readers as they charted their various ways toward adulthood, we recognize that these books, these structures, and these readers are as important to our world as financial models, canonical literature, and scientific breakthroughs.

The essays and artwork in this book take a closer look at how Ann M. Martin’s series shaped our ideas about gender politics, friendship, family, fashion, and beyond. They celebrate parts of the series that were, in many ways, ahead of their time: a stereotype-defying Asian American girl who loved art and fashion (Claudia); an African American girl confronting racism within a mostly white community (Jessi); a preteen living with diabetes (Stacey); a gender-nonconforming tomboy, who, if written today, many believe would have been overtly queer (Kristy); an assortment of diverse family structures; and a pre-#Girlboss model of young women as serious, successful entrepreneurs who put their business first, even before they’d entered high school.

The pieces collected here approach the BSC series in all its complexities, including its gaps and shortcomings, particularly around race, disability, and queerness. Our contributors explore, for example, why Jessi was so often singled out for and defined by her Blackness, what it means that illnesses and disabilities, like Stacey’s diabetes, were often called secrets, and how queerness in the series and its spinoffs was always coded, never overt. And we put on our metaphorical directors’ visors to ponder what it means that the business-savvy BSC members were also nurturing caregivers, never straying too far from acceptable roles for young women even as they expanded on them.

Throughout, we reflect on the models of lasting friendship the series has given us. For many of us—at least as kids—this kind of friendship may have been more aspirational than realistic. As adults, we’re still taking cues from the BSC and continuing to form new clubs and communities around it: whether it’s Sue Ding’s The Claudia Kishi Club, a film about Asian American artists inspired by Claudia; or Jack Shepherd’s encyclopedic The Baby-Sitters Club Club podcast; or a group of academics known as The Data-Sitters Club, who delve into the language patterns in the books; or the vibrant BSC fan fiction community. Working collaboratively as editors on this collection over countless coffee shop brainstorms, email threads, and phone calls that may or may not have taken place over a landline, we are pleased to add this book to the list.

For us and so many of our contributors, we couldn’t possibly write about the Baby-Sitters Club without also writing about ourselves—the kids we were when we first read the series, and the adults we’ve grown into. We are all the legacy of these books, which taught us to see young people’s lives as serious business. We are the aspirations born out of looking for ourselves reflected in these stories, and not always finding them. We’re the products of reading and dreaming about creative collaborations, joyful friendships, and where the two combine. We are the Baby-Sitters Club.

SAY HELLO TO YOUR FRIENDS

GIRL GROUPS AND FRIENDSHIP CULTURE

FUN WITH ROLE-PLAY

KRISTEN ARNETT

It took months to get your mother to allow you to read them. Those books about babysitters; a series that all your friends at school have already been reading for well over a year. Your family usually only lets you read Baptist Bookstore offerings: Janette Oke novels about widowers who find wholesome Christian love with schoolteachers, a series called the Mandie Collection that features a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl who solves mysteries with the help of prayer and claims to be one-sixteenth Native American. These books are so boring that you want to scream.

You argue that the Baby-Sitters Club books are wholesome, too—what’s more wholesome than babysitting children?—but your mother only relents after another mother at church says they’re actually okay. That they’re not Christian, but they don’t have any KISSING in them. Nothing sexual. Your mom reads the entire first book of the series before handing it over to you. It is something you’ll always remember: how you stared at her reading it, praying she would let you in on the fun.

Once you’re finally allowed, you read the Baby-Sitters Club books religiously. You love them better than anything else in your life. All your friends love them, too, even your church friends. They all start out the exact same way: a description of the club itself, a listing of the different members, and then a point-by-point account of an actual meeting. It should be boring to read the same thing over and over again, but it’s decidedly not. In fact, you delight in the repetition. It reminds you that at the heart of it, they’re kids, but they want to be taken seriously. Ann M. Martin does take these girls seriously, but most grown-ups never do. Especially your parents.

The books are organized in numerical order. You try to read them that way, but your parents don’t buy you books (only those ones from the Baptist Bookstore that they still supply you with every Christmas and birthday). You can only ever get the Baby-Sitters Club books from the library, and you delight in the few occasions when someone’s just returned a bundle of books you haven’t gotten to touch yet. The elusive number three. Any books about Mary Anne, who likes to read and is a dork but is still sweet and smart and cute, which appeals to you. Later in life, when you become a librarian, you’ll realize this is what you were trying to create for yourself. Order out of chaos. Your parents are never on time for anything and they’re always behind on bills, constantly on the phone with collections, and they have three kids even though they can barely afford anything for you, the oldest. They never tell you the truth or trust you with any important information. To be a librarian means to hold all the knowledge and turn that chaos into shareable wisdom. It doesn’t hurt that one of the librarians at your branch looks just like Mary Anne.

You take the books home in a big brown Publix bag and spend hours sorting them into piles, organizing them both numerically and into the order you’d most like to read them. You don’t want to save all the worst ones for last. For instance, when it comes to Mary Anne’s boyfriend, you could care less. He’s soft-spoken and sweet, but he takes up too much space. Time that could be spent on other stories. You’re much more interested in how she fights with her stepsister, Dawn, and how they share a room together. What that would look like: to share a room with a beautiful blonde. All you’ve got as a roommate is your very annoying sister. She’s eight years younger than you and sleeps in a crib.

After reading the books, you want to live inside them. You think about them constantly. You imagine the world they live in—the place, sure, Stoneybrook, but mostly you wonder about the things you didn’t get to read between the pages. What happens after the book shuts?

Do the friends go on living their lives? What happens in their families? Are there stories there—maybe even more interesting, darker ones—places where the girls might act differently than they would through the lens of the author? You like to imagine them dealing with a mother who slaps them when they ask about sex, like your own mother did the first time you brought up the idea of kissing.

There are stories you start telling yourself. First, in your head. About all the babysitters. You get so bored in church—your family goes there at least four days a week—and the services are unbearable. Instead of listening to the same sermon you feel like you could recite in your sleep, you imagine what all the girls would be doing right at that moment. Sometimes you imagine yourself there with them, but you’re never really yourself. The girl you conjure in your mind is taller, more daring. She’s good at tennis, which is a sport you’ve never played but sounds so fancy and you love the outfits that those women wear. Everyone in these fantasies babysits, but it’s about more than that. There are sleepovers. Notes you pass each other during class. Hanging out in Claudia’s bedroom after school where you all raid her junk food and eat candy and chips, share sips of soda when you pass the bottle back and forth. You imagine the lips of the other girls touching that same place on the bottle where yours had been. This makes you feel important; it makes your chest fill with heat. You squirm there in your seat in the middle of the sanctuary. You think about the girls some more, anyway, even though you know Jesus is listening.

You want to write the stories down, so you do. Or, you try. It’s hard when your handwriting is so bad and you don’t have things like journals or even pens that work very well. Your parents don’t want you to use any of your school paper for activities that don’t include homework because they don’t have the money to buy more paper right now. That’s what your mother tells you, anyway. Regardless, it’s hard to shift the narratives from your brain—those beautiful fun afternoons in Claudia’s bedroom—onto the page in a way that does justice to how those stories make you feel. It’s easy to get frustrated with yourself when you can’t write it down the way you want it to look, to sound. You wonder if there are other ways to make these stories happen. And then you remember the Barbies.

Your favorite part of Barbies is the role-playing. The fantasy. The out-of-body lived experience. It is also a form of control. You have so little of that in your life. You’re not allowed to choose how you dress, who your friends are outside of church, or even how to style your own hair. It’s a relief and a pleasure to force those dolls to do whatever you want. To make them act out anything you wish. Role-play with the dolls allows you to exit your body. The dolls are an extension of your fingers, your hands, your arms. Your entire self.

And by role-play you mean that you love to call your Barbie any name other than the one she’s born with. She’s never Barbie. She’s Delilah. She’s Sidney. Once she’s even your own name—Kristen—but prettier and cooler and with much better hair than you could ever hope to grow. Barbie is wish fulfillment. She likes playing pretend almost more than you do. As an adult, you still role-play, but oftentimes it’s with the women you date. You can be who they need, you think. You can role-play as anything: smart, charming, a good listener.

But when you’re young, you don’t understand why role-play feels important. You just know that it’s good. And you want to role-play with your Barbies as those babysitters. Even if you can’t yet write those stories down the way you want, you can act them out any way you wish through the dolls. The first thing you do is designate characters. After you do this, there is no going back. The dolls will never be Delilah or Sidney or Kristen ever again. They’ll remain the babysitters until you play with them for the final time, putting them away forever in their vinyl box.

Mary Anne is your newest Barbie with the dark blonde hair, even though Mary Anne isn’t blonde. You braid her hair into pigtails and dress her in a romper with a big lace collared shirt underneath so she can look appropriately modest. Dawn is a beach Barbie who comes in a very tiny bikini and has a clip-on strip of hair that turns bright fuchsia in the sun. Claudia is Barbie’s friend Kira, who is so beautiful you spend almost all your time after you receive her staring directly at her face. Stacey is not technically a Barbie. You’ve been given another doll that was popular at the time called Maxie—a line of dolls that have different noses and eyes and mouths, features that are supposed to be more natural looking; dolls with slightly smaller tits and slightly larger waists (but let’s face it, they all still have tiny waists), and she seems much more sophisticated to you, which is what you think of Stacey, since she grew up in New York and you’ve only ever seen that city on TV and in movies. New York City feels like a whole other country.

Kristy is Skipper, obviously. Short. Flat-footed. Underdeveloped. She wears a baseball cap that you snatched from a friend who had a McDonald’s uniform for her Barbies. It looks funny on her head, all that hair stuffed underneath the brim. Kristy feels the most familiar to you, and that’s why she’s the least interesting. You don’t want to be yourself, ever. You want to escape. Kristy is bossy and never likes boys. Kristy argues with everyone and gets dirty and doesn’t know how to dress right. Kristy barely brushes her hair and neither do you, though you like looking at all the girls who do—girls like Stacey and Claudia. You wish you were a Stacey, but you know you’re a Kristy. And there is something so embarrassing about that fact—something you won’t recognize until you’re much older and realize it’s because Kristy is a little queer and so are you.

But before that happens, there are scenes to act out. Roles to play. The girls take phone calls, plan babysitting gigs. But they also do a lot of other things. Stuff that never, ever happens in the books. Those are the stories you’re most interested in—that stuff that happens in your own head that Ann M. Martin never writes about. They talk about breasts, for instance. Trade clothes and do fashion shows. Wear each other’s bras and underwear. The babysitters all own lingerie for some reason. They order pizza and they talk about maybe drinking beers (but they never actually do, even though for some reason one of your off-brand Barbie kitchen sets comes with some wine glasses and a fake bottle of Cabernet). They gossip about each other. They say mean things about their parents. They get in fights. Sometimes the fights are physical. They slap each other, pull hair. They scream and kick. But they hug after, even though it’s so hard to make the Barbies want to bend their bodies in that way. And occasionally they kiss, even though you have never done that with any of your friends, though you’ve sometimes thought about doing it.

You make Kristy get her period. That’s one of the plotlines to a story you make up yourself, one of the first ones you write that you actually like and sounds the way the narrative actually goes in your head, because it’s something you and your church friends discuss constantly and you think the babysitters should too. Period. Blood. Tampons. Pads. The fact that maybe only one of you has gotten your period, but not the others, and you’re all waiting for it eagerly and simultaneously dreading the day it arrives. You wonder why the babysitters never talk about menstruation.

Using a red Sharpie, you draw a patch of blood in Kristy’s underwear. She discovers that she’s bled through them and onto her pants, staining Claudia’s bedspread. It’s the middle of a meeting and all the girls are upset with Kristy for ruining Claudia’s nice things. They yell at her and she cries. It’s cathartic to watch Kristy have to deal with all of that. You get used to making her the brunt of jokes. The babysitters make her take off her dirty clothes in the middle of the room and she stands there naked as they all stare. You realize you’re staring, too, and you hurriedly dress her again. The other babysitters all apologize to Kristy for yelling at her. Kristy forgives them immediately. She is dry-eyed, of course, because Skipper never actually cries. Her eyes are big and blue and always staring openly. You cry all the time. You cry when you get your period at your friend’s house and she calls you disgusting for asking for a tampon.

The stories you make up in your head become more elaborate. The babysitters all take turns being mean to each other. Mostly they’re just mean to Kristy. There is always someone who is getting called out, yelled at, made to feel bad about themselves. It gives you a good feeling when they do this. You like making one of them get into trouble. Part of it is because girls make fun of you all the time, and this gives you the opportunity to be mean to someone else. The other part you like is all the making up they do afterward. They are sorry, they are always so, so, so sorry, and there is always forgiveness. There is nothing that one of the babysitters can ever do that will make the other ones stop loving them. They are like a family in that way, you think. Except the reason forgiveness feels so important to you is because you know there are certain secret things about yourself that your family wouldn’t forgive. You can forgive, though. And you do, over and over again.

Kristy likes Mary Anne, but Mary Anne loves Dawn. Kristy wants to hang out with Stacey and Claudia, but they’re doing a fashion show and everyone knows Kristy can’t dress right. You punish Kristy over and over again for things she

Reviews for We Are the Baby-Sitters Club

[Jenny Olbeda · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Cussing would not recommend. Very disappointed. Will not be continuing to recommend to people.

[lycomayflower · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hit and miss but way more hits. This was a really enjoyable collection with many takes on the BSC. A nice combination of nostalgia, criticism, and love. Recommended, even if you weren't a mega-BSC fan.