I shouldn't really be posting here, but I had to say something somewhere because what I discovered tonight I found to be of profound interest.
Like many of you, I'm sure, I first encountered the so-called "Spencer Plan" years ago on the internet, back in the 90s in fact. I was of course more taken with its salacious details when I first came across than I was concerned with its provenance, and so I read the now-familiar story about this thing becoming something of a sensation when it first appeared in the 30s, and Dorothy Spencer being inundated with requests for information, accepting it for truth without a second thought.
In subsequent years I wondered some about the fuzzy details of this thing, but it hardly seized control of my mind. Many years after I initially read about the plan, I finally came across an article that once-and-for-all articulated the skepticism I had felt in a vague way about this supposed first-half-of-the-twentieth-century phenomenon. The person had done his/her research, and in much more detail than I could have, laid out the case against it (the details I am about to provide come from the talk page on the Spanking Art Wiki article for the Spencer Spanking plan; what became of the original article, or where I found it, are lost to me):
1. There is no verifiable mention of the existence of such a plan before the 1966 publication of a book by John Barry called Chastisement published by Brandon House.
2. Searches for any original copy of the book come up empty, even on rare book sites; this seems odd for a book that was supposedly very popular.
3. A search of the Library of Congress catalogue turns up no such title.
4. A similar search of WorldCat, which catalogues books from all over the world, turns up nothing.
5. Not only can no original copy of the book be found, or any record it was ever published, but contemporary mention of the phenomenon it supposedly started cannot be be found anywhere... before John Barry in 1966.
I read the article I found making these same basic points years ago, and thought that I was impressed by whoever did that research, wished I had done it, and thought, "That is that. It's a fake, as I suspected, and it was written by John Barry."
Occasionally I still think about it and wonder if any more investigation has been done or if the internet has largely caught up with the times and revised its opinion as to the authenticity of the piece. Tonight was one of those nights. On the same page where I read a summary of the case against the Spencer plan (see above), I saw a brief rebuttal, which referred to a catalogue of copyrights for pamphlets. A little hunting to track down what the OP had said and - DAMN - there it is, in black and white:
https://books.google.com/books?id=jl5bA ... ng&f=false
Someone had copyrighted the title Spanking Plan, and the name associated with it was Dorothy Spencer - and this was done in 1937.
So why no copies anywhere? Why no mention? I thought about this and considered that a copyright is not a publication - lots of things get copyrighted that are never published. So perhaps this Dorothy Spencer copyrighted this thing and never got it published or even attempted to get it published. Years later, by pure happenstance, John Barry comes across the title, and, as a writer of erotica, picks up on it and embellishes the story and voila! The legend is born. But the problem with this is, as best as I can tell, this single reference to Dorothy Spencer's Spanking Plan is not cross-referenced in any way, anywhere. So unless he came across it by pure accident - and what was he doing, thumbing through the 1937 register of copyrights? - how would he have gotten the name and title right? Seems like too much of a long shot; it seems more likely that he knew about it because, in some form, it existed.
So, who was this Dorothy Spencer? The listing I link to provides precious little information, not even a place of registration (and, as I said, registration for copyright does not equal publication, so we can't be sure it was ever truly "published" as we would commonly understand that term). So it's hard to limit her by location, since we have no information, and there is also the distinct possibility that "Dorothy Spencer" was a pseudonym.
Nevertheless, I tried searching around for Dorothy Spencer on the internet before it finally occurred to me to search that same record of copyrights for 1937 to see if there was anything else published by someone with the same name. And there was one hit: a young anthropologist who was a sometime lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania was published in a book that was a compendium of essays commemorating, I believe, the 25th anniversary of Penn's anthropology department. Her article was on native Fijians and their dreams. Her name and the title of her article are listed here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=F31aA ... 37&f=false
A little more hunting and I found a scholarly book on Google, published much more recently, which references Spencer's work and explains that she had some interest in the sexual dreams of the people she was studying. I thought that was intriguing enough that I kept digging, and I found that it turns out that the University of Pennsylvania holds most of this woman's hand-written notes from years of research and visiting with native tribes in various parts of the globe; indeed, they have made a recent project of cataloguing those notes and making them available to researchers, although they have not been typed up.
And then, the motherlode:
This article details some of the work that was done cataloguing her notes, and discusses the work that she did. The writer of the article says, about 3/4 of the way down the page:
Here's a link to the image of her hand-written note on the subject: https://pennrare.files.wordpress.com/20 ... page_3.jpg
Could it be that a scholar who lectured at the University of Pennsylvania and researched native peoples in their native habitats was also the infamous author of the "spanking plan"?
There isn't all that much out there about Dorothy Spencer - either one, but in this case I am talking about the scholar whose work we know. A final little interesting mystery here is this: we know when and where she was born - Chester, PA, in 1907 - but one must assume, at 109, she is dead - and yet there seems to be nothing about the circumstances of the end of her life. I've done all the research I can do tonight and assuming she is dead it should be easy enough to find out when and where it happened - but if she is dead, it would appear an institution as big and with as many resources as UPenn doesn't know it (check out the "Creator" listing on page 3).
Like many of you, I'm sure, I first encountered the so-called "Spencer Plan" years ago on the internet, back in the 90s in fact. I was of course more taken with its salacious details when I first came across than I was concerned with its provenance, and so I read the now-familiar story about this thing becoming something of a sensation when it first appeared in the 30s, and Dorothy Spencer being inundated with requests for information, accepting it for truth without a second thought.
In subsequent years I wondered some about the fuzzy details of this thing, but it hardly seized control of my mind. Many years after I initially read about the plan, I finally came across an article that once-and-for-all articulated the skepticism I had felt in a vague way about this supposed first-half-of-the-twentieth-century phenomenon. The person had done his/her research, and in much more detail than I could have, laid out the case against it (the details I am about to provide come from the talk page on the Spanking Art Wiki article for the Spencer Spanking plan; what became of the original article, or where I found it, are lost to me):
1. There is no verifiable mention of the existence of such a plan before the 1966 publication of a book by John Barry called Chastisement published by Brandon House.
2. Searches for any original copy of the book come up empty, even on rare book sites; this seems odd for a book that was supposedly very popular.
3. A search of the Library of Congress catalogue turns up no such title.
4. A similar search of WorldCat, which catalogues books from all over the world, turns up nothing.
5. Not only can no original copy of the book be found, or any record it was ever published, but contemporary mention of the phenomenon it supposedly started cannot be be found anywhere... before John Barry in 1966.
I read the article I found making these same basic points years ago, and thought that I was impressed by whoever did that research, wished I had done it, and thought, "That is that. It's a fake, as I suspected, and it was written by John Barry."
Occasionally I still think about it and wonder if any more investigation has been done or if the internet has largely caught up with the times and revised its opinion as to the authenticity of the piece. Tonight was one of those nights. On the same page where I read a summary of the case against the Spencer plan (see above), I saw a brief rebuttal, which referred to a catalogue of copyrights for pamphlets. A little hunting to track down what the OP had said and - DAMN - there it is, in black and white:
https://books.google.com/books?id=jl5bA ... ng&f=false
Someone had copyrighted the title Spanking Plan, and the name associated with it was Dorothy Spencer - and this was done in 1937.
So why no copies anywhere? Why no mention? I thought about this and considered that a copyright is not a publication - lots of things get copyrighted that are never published. So perhaps this Dorothy Spencer copyrighted this thing and never got it published or even attempted to get it published. Years later, by pure happenstance, John Barry comes across the title, and, as a writer of erotica, picks up on it and embellishes the story and voila! The legend is born. But the problem with this is, as best as I can tell, this single reference to Dorothy Spencer's Spanking Plan is not cross-referenced in any way, anywhere. So unless he came across it by pure accident - and what was he doing, thumbing through the 1937 register of copyrights? - how would he have gotten the name and title right? Seems like too much of a long shot; it seems more likely that he knew about it because, in some form, it existed.
So, who was this Dorothy Spencer? The listing I link to provides precious little information, not even a place of registration (and, as I said, registration for copyright does not equal publication, so we can't be sure it was ever truly "published" as we would commonly understand that term). So it's hard to limit her by location, since we have no information, and there is also the distinct possibility that "Dorothy Spencer" was a pseudonym.
Nevertheless, I tried searching around for Dorothy Spencer on the internet before it finally occurred to me to search that same record of copyrights for 1937 to see if there was anything else published by someone with the same name. And there was one hit: a young anthropologist who was a sometime lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania was published in a book that was a compendium of essays commemorating, I believe, the 25th anniversary of Penn's anthropology department. Her article was on native Fijians and their dreams. Her name and the title of her article are listed here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=F31aA ... 37&f=false
A little more hunting and I found a scholarly book on Google, published much more recently, which references Spencer's work and explains that she had some interest in the sexual dreams of the people she was studying. I thought that was intriguing enough that I kept digging, and I found that it turns out that the University of Pennsylvania holds most of this woman's hand-written notes from years of research and visiting with native tribes in various parts of the globe; indeed, they have made a recent project of cataloguing those notes and making them available to researchers, although they have not been typed up.
And then, the motherlode:
This article details some of the work that was done cataloguing her notes, and discusses the work that she did. The writer of the article says, about 3/4 of the way down the page:
I was quite intrigued by the relatively frequent mention of punishments for mischievous boys, both in the meeting cards and others. I don’t know if we can properly call these boys delinquent, they just seem to be your garden-variety local troublemakers–bored boys being boys, so to speak. Regardless, it was interesting to see how common corporal punishment appeared, with the boys being punished for conscious actions such as stealing and holding a servant boy underwater, to seemingly chance occurrences like being stung by bees. There was no further context around that last one, so I couldn’t ascertain whether the boys were purposefully disturbing the bees, or if there was a taboo on being stung, or what. Regardless, corporal punishment appeared rather commonplace in the Munda villages, with fathers beating their sons for correction, and the wife of a man named Laro beating him for being too careless with their baby!
Here's a link to the image of her hand-written note on the subject: https://pennrare.files.wordpress.com/20 ... page_3.jpg
Could it be that a scholar who lectured at the University of Pennsylvania and researched native peoples in their native habitats was also the infamous author of the "spanking plan"?
There isn't all that much out there about Dorothy Spencer - either one, but in this case I am talking about the scholar whose work we know. A final little interesting mystery here is this: we know when and where she was born - Chester, PA, in 1907 - but one must assume, at 109, she is dead - and yet there seems to be nothing about the circumstances of the end of her life. I've done all the research I can do tonight and assuming she is dead it should be easy enough to find out when and where it happened - but if she is dead, it would appear an institution as big and with as many resources as UPenn doesn't know it (check out the "Creator" listing on page 3).
Statistics: Posted by scholar — Wed Aug 24, 2016 6:54 am