Governing Bodies. Rachel Louise Moran
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nutrition daily, not just during the designated week. The bureau’s printed materials reiterated the ideas of Baby Week, especially the idea that mothers did not innately know best.78 They needed to learn, and they needed to embrace the new science of child health. The health of the nation, they understood, depended on it.
The Children’s Bureau’s 1914 Infant Care and 1915 Prenatal Care were designed specifically for mothers, social workers, and teachers. Infant Care would become one of the agency’s most popular publications. The booklet advised women on such topics as ventilating the nursery, registering their infant’s birth, and, of course, provided extensive details on weighing and measuring infants. Various iterations of the popular booklet remained in print for decades.79 American mothers and women’s groups hungrily consumed the federal pamphlets. According to Lathrop, the agency sent out over 100,000 copies of both Infant Care and Prenatal Care in their first year of publication. Most of the bureau pamphlets were sent in response to individual letters directly requesting either a pamphlet or advice related to pamphlet topics.80 Many of the pamphlets and height-weight tables were available for free, or for just a few cents. Advice literature was exploding in popularity at the time, and women were open to experts.81 For women with minimal resources and a genuine concern about how to keep their children healthy, this might be the best advice available. Pamphlets were often given to women directly, such as when they were leaving a Children’s Bureau–approved baby conference (or even one of the more legitimately educational children’s health contests of the period). Other women heard about the pamphlets from friends, neighbors, or public health workers, and then wrote to the bureau requesting copies.
Lathrop described the tone of Infant Care as “addressed to the average mother of this country.”82 Its voice, according to one reviewer, was “simple enough to be understood by uneducated women and yet not so simple as to seem condescending to the educated.” The maternal voice was in part meant to comfort any mother reading the pamphlet, but that was not its only aim. The maternal voice also allowed the bureau to claim it was not going beyond the bounds of what it was allowed to do. Although Lathrop was proud that the booklet was based on health literature and discussions with nurses and doctors, she also noted explicitly that with Infant Care “there is no purpose to invade the field of the medical or nursing professions.”83 The booklet would by nature be advisory—all advice literature is. The bureau added an extra caveat to its booklet, though, with the explicit insistence that it was not a threat to other health organizations.
Baby Week was an ideal venue for disseminating publications like Infant Care. Baby conference score cards had begun the process of arming non-experts with tools of scientific assessment. Mothers, teachers, and nurses (in practice experts, but grouped with nonexperts since their skills were rarely taken seriously) could read a scale or ruler and fill in the blanks on a score card. The charts allowed supposed nonexperts to authoritatively do the work of experts in a simple, standardized, fashion. Lathrop thought that this quantification—the use of child contest methods alongside the more scientific-seeming advice a` la Infant Care—was an efficient way of reaching as many mothers and teachers as possible.84
Still, Julia Lathrop struggled with getting her child health agenda in the hands of everyday women. She wrote about how “even many of the best educated fathers and mothers … have never read a statistical table, and never will.”85 Getting these parents to take statistical tables home and integrate them into their regular child health routine was critical to the maintenance of a height-weight program. Lathrop also wrote that, while she filled the Baby Week pamphlets with “facts about the dangers which beset American babies,” she knew that parents would “successfully evade” them. Great success required a larger campaign, Lathrop knew, and that campaign would also need more active advising by the bureau.
The Great War and the Children’s Year
During the first U.S. Baby Week, Europe became engulfed in a war both enormous and—for most Americans—distant. By the second Baby Week, in June of 1917, the Great War was no longer so distant.86 Although the scheduled work of the Children’s Bureau, including Baby Week, went forward, the U.S. entrance into the European war changed the bureau’s aims. While funds for domestic programs were scarce, American state building increased. It also intensified the discourse around women’s voluntary sacrifices and contributions. The new emphasis on women planting victory gardens, preparing wheatless and meatless meals, and rationing their shopping elevated the idea of voluntary action. It fit well with Children’s Bureau politics. Here was an unusual moment, in which the rapidly expanding federal government kept pushing into private spaces, including the intimate space of the family meal. As propagandists like the Committee on Public Information pushed these voluntary actions as responsibilities of patriotic motherhood, though, such requests fit well with middle-class American women’s existing relationship to the state. This seemingly paradoxical obligatory-volunteerism enlisted women’s labor and allegiance without apparent federal overreach. It also helped construct a narrative of individual responsibility around food choices being beneficial to the civic whole.87
The need for so-called responsible food choices was not only the result of limited butter and sugar. As the Great War progressed, so grew an American anxiety over men too malnourished to fight. The medical statistics collected during men’s draft examinations suggested a great deal of physical unfitness. In World War II, many more extensive height-weight and physical examination guidelines made for detailed health concerns, concerns that began even before Selective Service examinations did. In World War I, though, these examinations were more holistic than the specific quantified health data to come.88
The Children’s Bureau then promoted an even louder call to improve child health. This was not simply to be for the sake of individual children (as baby contests often portrayed themselves) but for the good of the entire nation. It was a compelling opportunity for middle-and working-class women to demonstrate their patriotism in a gender appropriate manner.
Julia Lathrop declared that 1919 would be the Children’s Year. This was a year-long campaign to promote child health. To create such a large and sustained campaign, the bureau enlisted the voluntary labor of swaths of Americans in order to promote child welfare and hygiene. The bureau’s Children’s Year campaign explicitly targeted “not only mothers and fathers, teachers, physicians, infant-welfare nurses, and other social workers who have to do with children, but men and women experienced in organization,and young people with leisure and good will.”89 All could be used in improving child health. Lathrop explained that the goal of the Children’s Year was to save the lives of 100,000 children under the age of five, children who might otherwise die of preventable causes. Lathrop won support for this campaign based on the public claim that nearly 30 percent of World War I rejections owed to the long-term effects of childhood diseases or neglect.90 With this incentive, an impressive list of local-level public health and hygiene measures came out of the bureau’s Children’s Year. In California, local participation sparked action to create seventeen permanent county health centers and positions for dozens of public health nurses and dental hygienists. Additionally, the state established a division of child hygiene with a $20,000 budget under the state’s Department of Health.91 The bureau argued that there was a similar outcome in every state, although this was an exaggeration. Still, following the Children’s Year, twenty-one states created child hygiene divisions (nine states had already had such divisions). The bureau’s voluntary, minimally funded, and decentralized program had more or less succeeded. Where the bureau had no power to build clinics or install teams of dental hygienists, it still managed to accomplish some of its goals during the Children’s Year.
The bureau framed the project from the start as a project that would rely on voluntary agencies and women’s cooperation. The bureau had no financial resources to offer to local events, but promised local communities that the events would be inexpensive and worthwhile. Free instruction from the bureau would be implemented through generous workers and volunteers. The Children’s Year was a more ambitious campaign than either the 1916 or 1917 Baby Week, and over the course of the year it won greater participation, enthusiasm, and support than had previously been received. The first major event was a “nationwide Weighing and Measuring