Governing Bodies. Rachel Louise Moran
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pushed the idea of nutritional equivalency. This meant that cheap cuts of meat could be nutritionally equivalent to more expensive ones, and stale bread just as full of needed calories and carbohydrates as bread fresh from the oven. As a result, the onus of nutritional health was firmly on the private realm. Wages did not need to be raised; food prices did not need to be regulated: the health and efficiency of American labor was in its own wives’ and mothers’ hands. Individual responsibility, not welfare state building or labor laws, was the adjustment Atwater’s research justified.
Both Atwater’s nutrition science and his politics directly influenced prominent home economists of the Progressive Era, members of the “dominion in reform” at the time. Early home economics activists, like Ellen Richards, worked directly with Atwater. Another generation, including prominent nutritionist Caroline Hunt, learned nutrition science by working under him. Other nutritionists, including his daughter Helen Atwater, based assumptions of their own research and writing on the senior Atwater’s publications.33
The dominion of female reform, often discussed in the Progressive Era, included women’s hands-on reform work, as historians have established, as well as the unrecognized work of the advisory state. Women doing this work sometimes moved from nongovernmental positions into the growing state apparatus of the early twentieth century. Home economists funneled into local and national government with the 1915 founding of the federal Office of Home Economics.34 There, they worked toward changing American nutrition habits. Around the same time (1912), women entered the new federal Children’s Bureau. Influenced by nutrition science—but also not bound by it—women of the Children’s Bureau sought ways to optimize child health through promoting hands-on, proactive mothering.
Employees of the Children’s Bureau shared the general concerns of Atwater, Atkinson, and Richards. They all sought Progressive reforms and had overlapping networks. The Children’s Bureau emerged from the Settlement House Movement. Atwater had conducted studies on the children of Hull House, the same settlement house where Children’s Bureau Chief Julia Lathrop had started out. In this era of maternalist activism, a women’s reform network allowed middle-class women into politics so long as they centered their efforts on gender-specific reforms like those affecting children.35 Progressive Era women, acting as mothers of society, carved a niche for themselves first in voluntary work, eventually catapulting themselves into local, state, and federal government through efforts like the Children’s Bureau.
All parties worked within a Progressive Era framework of chemistry and social science, of expertise for a higher good, and of a belief in managing and controlling the country through quantification. The Children’s Bureau embraced quantification as a means for improving the body, as other Progressives had done. Nutrition science supplied a language to bring the citizen body into the realm of policy, a language that made the individual body’s weight and size manageable on a larger scale. Instead of calories, though, the Children’s Bureau would champion height and weight measurement as the path to a stronger nation.36
At its 1912 creation, the Children’s Bureau was charged with very specific tasks. It was to investigate and report on child health and welfare. Its staff was to collect statistics, perform studies, and publish their findings. The bureau would gain moderate authority in the area of child labor by the late 1910s. In the terrain of children’s health and bodies, however, it only encouraged women to undertake its health proposals. The Children’s Bureau was not supposed to involve itself in the medical aspects of health, including anything that had to do with disease or illness. That was the fiercely guarded territory of the growing American Medical Association and the U.S. Public Health Service. Barred from the world of disease, illness, and medicine, the bureau’s campaigns relied on the quantitative language of height and weight as a stand-in for health.
Julia Lathrop and the Children’s Bureau focused on the women’s space of government–advisory state work. The bureau used the voluntary labor of mothers, teachers, and nurses across the country in its health measures.37 They maintained influence with strict limits as to which aspects of human health and wellness were within the bureau’s jurisdiction. The bureau addressed this problem through the adoption of height-weight tables. In turning the ambiguous concept of health into quantified, definitive, and expert height-weight tables, the bureau both broadened the scope of what concerns it could legitimately address and made it easier for nonexperts to voluntarily do the work of the bureau.
The Children’s Bureau’s advisory health projects were pioneering state interventions into the health and bodies of Americans. The bureau built networks of volunteers and reshaped the public discourse around child health and physique. It used maternal education, the voluntary labor of women, and Atwater-esque quantification of the body for events like child health conferences, Baby Week, and Children’s Year. As Grace Abbott, Lathrop’s successor at the bureau, later explained, they “furnished the facts on which action was frequently based.”38 With advertising and some cajoling, the bureau convinced middle-class mothers to show up at bureau events. Participation in such events was, of course, not a legal obligation, but it was a gendered social obligation. As such, participating in child health conferences and events became the women’s work of government.
Julia Lathrop, the settlement house and juvenile justice reformer turned bureau chief, wanted to understand the ills facing American children. At the turn of the century, these were many. The 1910 census revealed that over 150,000 American infants died each year. Lathrop believed the census number, which left out many immigrant and poor urban citizens, was a severe undercount of the infant mortality problem. She estimated that 300,000 American infants and toddlers died every year.39 More disturbing was that half of these deaths might have been avoided with modest child hygiene measures. For reformers like Lathrop, such measures included what they viewed as proper child nutrition, breastfeeding, cleanliness, and visits to physicians. According to Lathrop, child mortality rates could be solved “with methods which are in the reach of every community.”40 The women of the Children’s Bureau, most of whom had come to government by way of reform work, focused on urban immigrants living in broken-down tenements and rural women raising children in poverty. The bureau became especially focused on the health of these children.41
The bureau’s staff presented their ideas for improving child development to mothers and teachers with the expectation that these caregivers would opt to follow through on their suggestions. The bureau relied on the efforts of existing voluntary and professional networks of women, and attempted to shape local groups’ and individual women’s child health practices. The bureau itself could not require that this research, or any of the bureau’s goals for child health and hygiene, be implemented. Instead, it succeeded in getting women’s groups, teachers, and other local groups to fund and disseminate advisory policy. Using these tools of the advisory state—child health conferences, Baby Week, and the Children’s Year—the bureau reached hundreds of thousands of American families in the 1910s and early 1920s.42
Quantification in the Advisory State
As the bureau set out to reach women, it needed otherwise untrained women to become authoritative figures on health and wellness in their local communities. It was necessary to do this quickly, and to do it convincingly. This would require a shortcut of some sort, since the bureau was in no position to send the thousands of women who would lead local community health projects to medical school. The bureau also needed a way to raise the credibility and authority of this army of (mainly) nonexpert women who would do the bureau’s work of managing child health in cities and towns around the nation. These nonexpert women might seem suspect in a country increasingly obsessed with professionalism and expertise.43 Finally, the bureau had to address health issues without upsetting territorial groups like the American Medical Association and the Public Health Service. All understood the woman-run Children’s Bureau as a gendered helping agency, not a medical one.44 Whenever the bureau crossed over the line and became too hands-on or was otherwise a threat to more established health and medical organizations, these organizations became vocal critics of the bureau.
Not unlike Atwater’s hope that calorie charts could simplify human nutrition, the Children’s Bureau came to rely on measuring children as a way of simplifying discussions of child health. Height-weight tables