Governing Bodies. Rachel Louise Moran
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Governing Bodies - Rachel Louise Moran страница 10
Название: Governing Bodies
Автор: Rachel Louise Moran
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
Серия: Politics and Culture in Modern America
isbn: 9780812295061
isbn:
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 Test of young children.” According to the bureau’s publications, the support would come from a number of sources. In larger cities, the bureau would lean on city officials, city health departments and their child hygiene or child welfare divisions, women’s organizations, school boards and teaching staff, and churches. They went so far as to optimistically anticipate that the mayors of some municipalities would get involved. Civic organizations were also enlisted. From infant welfare societies to the remaining settlement houses to the Camp Fire Girls and the Boy Scouts, charities could be of great use. While the actual workers involved with rounding up and measuring children were expected to be female, the bureau believed that men’s organizations might get involved with promotions and financial backing. The bureau asked fraternal orders, labor unions, and chambers of commerce all to stand behind the weighing campaign. Many provided publicity and financial support. Once support for Children’s Year was established in each locality, the bureau also provided instruction on how the groups should organize themselves. The bureau suggested local conferences be divided into publicity, finance, and enrollment committees. Another committee would focus exclusively on procuring the scientific equipment needed for measuring.92 The bureau managed the Children’s Year with a vision of truly shaping each event according to bureau expectations.
Figure 1. Poster from the Children’s Year campaign, which sought to improve child health through child health conferences and the promotion of weighing and measuring children. Committee on Public Information, Division of Pictorial Publicity, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
As part of the Children’s Year, the bureau became an even more enthusiastic proponent of child measurement and standards. The mostly female volunteers at the events were instructed to draw heavily on the bureau’s Baby Week and child health conference pamphlets for guidance. It issued pages of special instructions for the Children’s Year weighing program. Children were to be weighed and measured with very specific equipment. The bureau promised that “the equipment essential for the test is simple.” This included a standard scale, a platform scale, a measuring rod, a good supply of tape measures, a 45-inch-long table covered in quilts, oilcloths, cotton sheets, paper towels, and a few other supplies.93
The instructions for actually performing the weighing and measuring were even more complicated. They required their own separate Children’s Bureau pamphlet: Wash your hands. Undress children and wrap them in a thin towel. Take off their shoes. Hold a book or small box horizontally on top of the child’s head when measuring his or her height (assuming a more scientific scale was unavailable). Lay babies down, completely relaxed with no bent joints, and measure their length with enamel bookends. There was even a science to filling in measuring cards. Examiners needed to use fractions rather than decimals, and round ages to the nearest birthday.94 The women who participated in this work would ideally be aided by local physicians or nurses who gave of their time freely. Only a physician was allowed, for instance, to mark a child as “healthy and free from serious defect” or to provide recommendations to mothers in writing.95 Most of the examiners, however, would be middle-class women active in the community. These women, the bureau advised, ought to “rehearse the procedure of weighing and measuring” before being released on the babies.96
After the actual weighing, the measurers had extensive instruction on how to record the data. The available height-weight tables represented a large number of average children, bureau pamphlets explained. Despite bureau apprehensions, local women conducting the measuring were told to treat the measurements as scientific fact. When actual children deviated from the average child weights on the tables by just two pounds, they were marked as abnormal. When the women found these divergences from the norm, even the mere two-pound ones, they were to advise parents to bring the child to a physician. In the bureau’s plans for events of meticulous measurement and careful assessment, the bureau reiterated the importance of expertise. On the one hand, giving laywomen weight tables and putting them in a position to take charge of child health—both that of their own children and of the community at large—empowered these women. On the other hand, the growing insistence on experts undermined that empowerment. As the bureau further sold the importance of expert-validated quantitative child health, mothers increasingly accepted the bureau’s message: it was their responsibility to assess and measure their child, and that was something the bureau could help them with. It was also now their responsibility to take the child for a true expert measurement and assessment. This was not something the advisory bureau could do for them.
The acceptance of the first part, the idea that women needed to take charge of their children’s health through scientific means, can be seen through their participation in the Children’s Year measuring test. As part of the bureau’s promotion of the mass quantification event, it prepared a short film called Our Children. The film was produced as part of the Children’s Year, but the Children’s Bureau hoped it would have an impact beyond the one-year affair. Our Children began with the idea that children needed to be weighed as a response to the high American child mortality rates. Club women in the film were spurred to action simply by reading a newspaper article in which the Children’s Bureau called for women to weigh their children. Clearly, the bureau believed itself to be so influential that a mere call to pay attention to a problem would lead to voluntary support. In the film, though, simply weighing children was not enough. Weighing needed to be careful, to be scientific.97
Without a home scale, the women in the film first tried to weigh a baby by sticking him on the scale attached to the back of a passing ice truck. The infant was not interested in this, however. He cried and screamed, and wriggled so much that the women СКАЧАТЬ