Governing Bodies. Rachel Louise Moran

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      Height-weight tables truly came to the forefront in the mid-1910s, when women’s groups around the country had begun projects linking child weight, aesthetics, and health. Through baby health contests and other child health pageants, these groups hoped to draw attention to the importance of baby health as a step toward improving infant mortality rates.⁵⁶ Rural girls’ and women’s groups took the lead on such contests, at this moment when an increase of funding to groups like 4-H helped facilitate the growth of sex-segregated agricultural programming.⁵⁷ Mothers brought in their babies (and sometimes older children), and judges evaluated and ranked the youth. Ultimately, they named and honored the healthiest child and his or her mother.⁵⁸ In Louisiana, in 1908, the state fair included a Scientific Baby Contest.⁵⁹ In Iowa, in 1911, the Iowa Congress of Mothers put together a Better Babies Contest for their state’s fair. The women added entertainment and prizes to their event, vastly increasing its appeal. This chapter of the Congress of Mothers—taking a little inspiration from popular livestock contests already at state fairs—sought to make child pageants that had some health reform programming built in.⁶⁰ The fairs already had some of the necessary accoutrements for weighing commodities. These better baby contests channeled a romanticized idea of the ruddy, rural child to a nation increasingly grappling with urban malnutrition and child labor in factories.⁶¹ In this space, though, judges scored children from zero to a hundred points with this milk-fed and sunshine-grown health ideal in mind.⁶²

      The judges declared the children with the most points to be the healthiest, a term that blended racial, moral, and physical factors. Those children won ribbons. The American Medical Association’s public health section cosponsored some child health contests, lending an air of professional legitimacy to events otherwise surrounded by prize pigs and pies.⁶³ In some cases, the contests included measures to more broadly improve child health, such as presentations and displays from public health nurses and clubwomen. Even when the contests did not have a specific health improvement section, they still had pedagogical intentions. Ranking infants and children in an ostensibly objective fashion required score cards. Score cards varied from event to event, but most employed similar conventions. Cards asked for the age, height (or length, for infants), and weight of the child. This was nonnegotiable. Other categories, ranging from plumpness to symmetry, might be included depending on the interests of the local groups running the contests.

      Eugenicists shaped some of the first contests.⁶⁴ Like the Children’s Bureau, positive eugenicists—those who encouraged the reproduction of the supposedly fit—often relied on educational measures mixed with strong social pressure to share their message. The eugenics movement was not unified in its methods. While some eugenicists did not believe educational methods would ever truly weed out the unfit, instead pursuing legislation and force, others relied on these measures.⁶⁵ Most of the better baby contests, intertwined with eugenic aims, were racially segregated.⁶⁶ Still, black middle-class women’s concern about high rates of black infant mortality kept many of them engaged in the better baby contests.⁶⁷ The Children’s Bureau was not especially eugenic, but it sought to translate the energy around these projects to their own ends.

      There was plenty of energy to work with. Following the Iowa fair, clubwomen and public health workers in Colorado, Louisiana, Oregon, Washington, and New York developed their own competitions. In the years that followed, the competitions expanded still more, “sweeping the whole country,” in the words of one reporter.⁶⁸ Some groups offered cash prizes, others only ribbons, local media attention, and, of course, maternal bragging rights. More important from the point of view of the reformers involved, the contests also included instructions on proper baby feeding and nutrition, an assessment of the child for obvious signs of illness or malnutrition, and lessons in what the clubwomen deemed proper hygiene. Discussions of what the contests accomplished slipped easily between eugenic and noneugenic language. The Illinois Medical Association justified the contests as a response to the “deterioration of the American stock.”⁶⁹ While many eugenics groups focused on reproduction and the elimination of the unfit through genetic means, baby contests were centered on improvement of the unfit. As the decade went on, contest organizers embraced the language of health over the explicitly eugenic language of stock. This is a critical distinction. After eugenics fell out of national favor, the language of improved health allowed subtle projects around fitness to carry on with little controversy.

      The Children’s Bureau and the voluntary groups organizing baby and child contests shared the goal of assessing child health through physique, but the contests themselves frustrated the bureau leadership.⁷⁰ Julia Lathrop thought the contests were sometimes disorganized or loud and dirty, and lacked standardization.⁷¹ She also did not approve of the prizes distributed at these contests. Commodifying child health with cash prizes seemed crass and unprofessional. It made the contests carnivalesque, and detracted from the serious health purposes Lathrop envisioned for the events. Even more to the point, an emphasis on rankings and prizes created an environment that encouraged a large attendance of mothers with already healthy children. Why would a mother bring her thin, sickly child to the contest when she knew the child did not have a shot at the $100 pot? Instead, the bureau wanted mothers of the thinnest, sickliest children to show up at child health events.⁷² Based on the early work of figures like Ellen Swallow Richards, the Children’s Bureau insisted their goals were backed by “euthenics” rather than “eugenics.” Lathrop and the bureau were not alone in their insistence. Some medical professionals completely disavowed the contests, like the editor of the American Journal of Diseases of Children who said “lining up these human infants as if they were pigs or calves is exceedingly repulsive.”⁷³

      Lathrop could not afford to dismiss voluntary energy around child health, though, so she set out to reform the contests. The middle-class bureau attributed thin children to well-meaning but ignorant mothering. Ignorant mothering could presumably be fixed by introducing these women to scientific motherhood. The bureau needed to create audiences of mothers interested in its child hygiene advice. The baby and child contest model had two things going for it that the bureau needed. First, the contest model attracted publicity and excitement. More importantly, the contests were run by a decentralized set of (mainly) voluntary agencies across the country. These were urban as well as rural women’s clubs, public health groups, and teachers. They received some support from a variety of national organizations, including the American Medical Association’s public health section, local and state government agencies, and the magazine Woman’s Home Companion. The contests had created an informal infrastructure around child health and aesthetics, a way of reaching millions of women across the nation and influencing their ideas on child hygiene without spending much money or expending other resources.

      Assessment and Advice

      In 1916 the bureau tried to mobilize its informal network of female labor. These women, they imagined, would accept the bureau’s child health conferences as the scientific alternative to baby contests. To this end, the bureau instituted a national Baby Week. The event consisted of nurses and volunteers examining hundreds if not thousands of babies in one busy week. The labor was dispersed. Local women examined local babies. The campaign included events in New York City, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, as well as in small towns and cities across the country. The number of children weighed, measured, recorded, and assessed was more than anyone had set out to assess before. One New York City reporter insisted that “Baby Week has done to New York’s attitude toward babies what a large, active firecracker placed under the chair of a dozing grandfather might be expected to do.”⁷⁴ Attaching the stamp of federal approval to these local events helped publicize them, and granted them political authority. Baby Week did not include the prizes and awards that Lathrop had deemed crass, which reduced the entertainment value of the events, but actually increased their credibility as scientific events. Baby Week events were held in around 4,700 communities.⁷⁵

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