Clipsheet

In the 1990s, scientists at the University of Wisconsin did some interesting experiments on baby monkeys. One group was separated from their mothers at birth and raised for five months in a “nursery” of other baby monkeys. (We could perhaps call this the “evacuee” group.) The other set got to stay with their mothers, but each mother-baby pair was isolated. This “lockdown” group saw no other monkeys for five months.

Still, “it was a book that was always stocked in gay bookstores and women’s bookstores,” K. T. Horning, who recently retired as the director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me. “A lot of lesbians bought it as gifts for friends who were having children, or even just bought for themselves, because it was the only time they had ever seen themselves reflected in a children’s book.”