{"id":1044,"date":"2025-04-01T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-01T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shcydigitalchildhoods.org\/dir\/?p=1044"},"modified":"2025-05-13T09:09:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T09:09:11","slug":"muriels-quintuplets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shcydigitalchildhoods.org\/dir\/muriels-quintuplets\/","title":{"rendered":"Muriel’s Quintuplets"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On a hot August evening in 1935, many of the six hundred residents of Inwood, Iowa, watched as nearly twenty little girls paraded around the town\u2019s brightly lit baseball diamond. Wearing their nicest dresses or more elaborate costumes, they pushed buggies displaying their favorite and best-dressed dolls. Three girls were awarded small cash prizes; the winner was Muriel Leivestad, daughter of Olaf, a plumber, and Lucille, a former teacher and homemaker. Muriel\u2019s striped buggy, with five hot water bottles hanging from its sides, showed off five identical dolls modeled after the famous Dionne Quintuplets<\/a>, who had turned one just over a year earlier. Muriel was dressed as a nurse, while a neighbor boy donned a dark suit and carboard top hat to portray Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe, who took exaggerated credit for the babies\u2019 survival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image 2: Muriel and her older sister Doris pose with their entries in the parade. Used with permission of Linda Gist Marten and Barbara Gist Cook.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Just over a year earlier, the birth of the first known surviving set of quintuplets in a remote part of Ontario, Canada, had captured the world\u2019s attention. The five little girls had soon moved into their own small hospital, with round-the-clock care from three nurses and Dr. Dafoe. They grew up with their every activity, medical checkup, and schooling logged by experts and observed by crowds of tourists. The Dionne Quints\u2019 constrained, even tragic, lives have been well-documented.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image 3: This WPA poster from 1939 encouraged doll and buggy parades. Dusek, Joseph, Artist. Doll & buggy parade–W.P.A recreation project, Dist. No. 2 \/ Dusek<\/em>. Illinois, 1939. [Ill.: Federal Art Project, WPA] Photograph. https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/item\/98509759\/.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Leivestads never made the pilgrimage to Ontario to see the Quints, but magazines and newspapers all over the world\u2014including small-town weeklies in Iowa\u2014closely followed the miracle in Ontario. Sometime in 1935, perhaps on her third birthday in January, Muriel had been given a set of Dionne dolls. And within months she had earned a little celebrity of her own as winner of her little town\u2019s annual doll competition. Such events were common during the first decades of the twentieth century. Just as the \u201cbest baby\u201d contests earlier in the century had encouraged mothers to dress and feed their babies more scientifically, doll parades encouraged little girls to imagine their future responsibilities as mothers. Although Muriel would be a loving aunt to Doris\u2019s two daughters, she never had children of her own. She developed multiple sclerosis in the early 1950s and died in 1989.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

James Marten<\/strong> is professor emeritus of history at Marquette University and the founding secretary-treasurer and a past president of the SHCY. He is author or editor of more than a dozen books on the history of children and youth, most recently the Oxford Handbook of the History of Youth Culture<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) and A Very Short Introduction to the History of Childhood<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a hot August evening in 1935, many of the six hundred residents of Inwood, Iowa, watched as nearly twenty little girls paraded around the town\u2019s brightly lit baseball diamond. Wearing their nicest dresses or more elaborate costumes, they pushed buggies displaying their favorite and best-dressed dolls. Three girls were awarded small cash prizes; the winner was Muriel Leivestad, daughter of Olaf, a plumber, and Lucille, a former teacher and homemaker. Muriel\u2019s striped buggy, with five hot water bottles hanging from its sides, showed off five identical dolls modeled after the famous Dionne Quintuplets, who had turned one just over<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1045,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-childish-things"],"yoast_head":"\nMuriel's Quintuplets - Digital Childhoods<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/shcydigitalchildhoods.org\/dir\/muriels-quintuplets\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Muriel's Quintuplets - Digital Childhoods\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On a hot August evening in 1935, many of the six hundred residents of Inwood, Iowa, watched as nearly twenty little girls paraded around the town\u2019s brightly lit baseball diamond. 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