Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history.

I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and this week we're wrapping up our season with the story of a woman

who helped us radically shift our idea of childcare, but whose contribution was never properly recognized by the husband she helped make famous.

This time, on Significant Others, meet Jane Cheney Spock.

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.

These are the words that launched a revolution, minted a celebrity, and shaped a country's future.

And the man who wrote them, Dr. Benjamin Spock, changed the way the world saw babies.

But the woman who helped him commit these words to the page, who mothered his children and shared his life,

and without whom he might never have changed a thing, died, broken, and alone while he found new life with a woman nearly 40 years his junior.

It is hard to overstate the impact of the common sense book of baby and childcare by Dr. Benjamin Spock.

It informed millions of parents around the globe, and was, for better and worse, credited with creating both the hippies and the me generation.

Everyone from Jackie Kennedy to Lucy Ricardo, to the sister of the Shah of Iran, consulted its pages.

And 30 years after its release, the only book that still outsold it was the Bible.

Its author became a beloved medical expert as iconic as Mr. Rogers.

But the man who wrote the book was, after all, just a man.

And so he was, at very best, imperfect, insecure, self-conscious, selfish.

And the people he hurt most were, perhaps naturally, the ones closest to him.

Primarily his children, whose relationship with him was strained and awkward.

And also the woman who not only helped him get the book down on paper, but introduced him to the very concepts that were so revolutionary in his work.

Jane Cheney Spock was a bright, dynamic, and forward-thinking young woman,

but all the psychoanalysis in the world couldn't save her from a marriage to the kindly pediatrician with the common touch,

who rarely hugged his own children while they were growing up.

...