Coming of Age in the Spanking Era

In 1999, on the last day of her long career, the petite head of the Anthropology Department finally reveals the most embarrassing part of her graduate research, to an all-female Cultural Contrasts class. The status of women, and the very age of adulthood were far different in the 1950s. The professor was inspired by the book Coming of Age in Samoa, written by Barnard College graduate Margaret Mead, who had studied adolescents in the Samoan Islands in the 1920s and became a world-renowned cultural anthropologist. "Choosing to follow in her footsteps, I attended Barnard College as she did, but my focus was on the education of adolescent females in modern countries." Pursuing her Master's and Doctorate at Columbia College, as Margaret Mead had done, she added a new wrinkle. The founder of the Anthropology Department at Columbia preferred candidates who conducted 'participatory observation,' so the future professor decided to study high school females by going undercover as an 18-year-old pupil. She was able to do that because her father was an intelligence officer in Her Majesty's Secret Service, MI-6. He was able to provide forged papers identifying his daughter as a transfer student from England, so she could live with him or his closest associate for half of each year. She told her students, "Thus, despite being in my 20s, my personal adolescence lasted longer than any other woman, interspersed with equal periods of graduate-student adulthood back at Columbia College." Since her mother died giving birth to her, she learned about having a mother from her high school classmates. And her undercover studies revealed aspects of education not previously reported, not to mention romantic adventures which she did not report. In New York she read the works of Doctors Spock and Seuss who held that children are thinking human beings who should be guided with affection rather than intimidation, however, their wisdom had not yet trickled down to the instructors who taught the faux adolescent. "Currently, spankings adult women would be denounced as 'infantilization,' but in the 1950s the spanking of fully-grown females was grossly unremarkable, particularly those younger than 21, which was the legal age of adulthood in those days. "Witnessing other 18-year-olds getting spanked at school—and sometimes getting spanked myself—had a deep emotional impact on me, such as hearing about it is having on some of you right now, but it seemed irrelevant to my research and reporting at the time." In 1951, at the age of 22, our central character traveled to Melbourne, Australia, to join her father who was working there. On her first day at high school, she got into a punch-up with a local girl. The headmaster stopped the fight and marched both girls to his office where he paddled their panties with a leather strap. It was the impostor's first spanking ever. The girls were then required to give one another a proper hug and promise to be "mates" from then on. They kept those promises and our heroine learned of no further spankings during her time in Australia. She told her father about her punishment, and he told his closest associate, Harry Byrnes, much to her chagrin! Although she called him Uncle Harry, she had long felt loving fantasies about Mr. Byrnes. The following year, she attended a high school in Montreal while her father worked on a confidential project with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. They both boned up on their command of the French language. She did not learn of any corporal punishment applied to students until her last week in Montreal when she learned about it the hard way. All the girls had a huge crush on the Chemistry teacher, a tall handsome 24-year-old. She daydreamed about him, too. In her notebooks she wrote fantasy variations of her name, as his Mrs. or Mme (when she was thinking in French). In a childish effort to get his attention she pulled a destructive prank that caused him to ask her to stay after