Governing Bodies. Rachel Louise Moran

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      Figure 3. The Children’s Bureau included this sample of a child’s health record in a series of pamphlets designed to prepare clubwomen to hold child health conferences as a part of Children’s Year. This was an attempt to standardize the conference experience and the definitions of child health, as well as allow the Children’s Bureau to collect data. Children’s Year Pamphlet No. 2, Part 3, Bureau Publication No. 38 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), 7.

      The newly created bureau height-weight tables replaced most of their predecessors, becoming the gold standard for child measuring, which in turn was the gold standard for child health. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Americans moved most child health concerns from the community to the physician’s office. The bureau could not stop this, nor did it want to.¹⁰³ It kept a toehold in child health, though, by setting the terms on which experts would discuss child health in the immediate future.

      During the Children’s Year, which ran April 1918–April 1919, the Great War ended. The Children’s bureau encouraged the local women responsible for the weighing and measuring to pursue other child health measures. Once events like the Children’s Year had brought women into the world of public health work and scientific mothering, the bureau advised localities to keep women in that world through continuous events. The bureau recommended that its pamphlets on topics like prenatal care and milk safety be spread around communities. It also suggested that local women’s clubs hold lectures and meetings on the care and feeding of children. Local groups might also introduce the next generation of mothers to weight and health standards through Little Mothers’ Leagues or school programming. Above all other measures, the clubwomen who had participated in Baby Weeks and Children’s Year were encouraged to fundraise and campaign to get at least one public health nurse in their community. The nurse must focus on prenatal and young children’s health concerns, and could be supported through private fundraising or by convincing the local government to allocate funds.¹⁰⁴ In any case, the bureau made clear that women were not to lose interest in the project of scientific mothering and health. Children needed to be weighed, the bureau told them, and they needed to be weighed in a very specific manner. The continuation of that work, though, was up to local women.

      The Children’s Bureau employed a variety of advisory state techniques in the 1910s and early 1920s. The primary strategy of the agency was a reliance on voluntary networks, especially those run by women sympathetic to the bureau’s cause and accustomed to being called upon to do the family labor of government. Middle-class clubwomen read child health conference brochures, organized baby weeks in 1916 and 1917, and rose to the challenge of running a series of Children’s Year events. Through quantification and standardization, through little score cards and straightforward scales, these women likely internalized the values of scientific motherhood. In the process of accepting these values, they accepted that a careful measurement of height and weight could be a stand-in for child health. Height and weight measurements that fell within the normal range were evidence that a mother was living up to the expectations of scientific motherhood. If a child was above or below the normal range, perhaps there was something wrong with that child. More to the point, perhaps there was something wrong with that mother. At that point, it might become a public issue. It might also become a professional medical issue, an issue for the growing field of pediatrics.¹⁰⁵

      Projects like the 1919 Children’s Year helped the bureau gain support for its child health/child weight efforts. Soon after the bureau published the results of its Children’s Year, the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act passed Congress.¹⁰⁶ With it, communities found help getting the public health nurse the bureau told them to get, running the health lectures they had been asked to run, and making child weighing and measuring a regular affair. While the Sheppard-Towner Act suggested a new direction in child health matters, and a more involved and directive Children’s Bureau, the short-lived program might be better understood as an anomaly in the primarily advisory work of the bureau. Pamphlets, quantification, and, above all, women’s voluntary labor made the work of the Children’s Bureau possible.

      At the same moment the Children’s Bureau was popularizing height-weight charts as a way of accessing information about children’s health, they were also putting the charts in the hands of mothers and teachers. Height-weight charts then became popular ways for those women to measure themselves. Versions of such tables, claiming to offer medical insight, circulated in the life insurance business. They circulated in popular women’s magazines. By the early 1930s, such tables would increasingly be used to assess adult men when they came in contact with the state. In the interwar years, the majority of which did not have an active draft, the men who ended up in intimate contact with the state were commonly low-income men. As the Great Depression expanded men’s participation in social welfare programs, the physique of these men was analyzed according to the quantitative norms popularized in the 1910s and 1920s. The quantification that made these height-weight tests possible would now allow for the measurement of masses of young American men. Advisory techniques continued to guide the approach of state entities toward physique, but the specific demographics of those participating in this social welfare program also recast the boundaries of the advisory.

      CHAPTER 2

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