Governing Bodies. Rachel Louise Moran

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СКАЧАТЬ bureau’s Baby Week succeeded because of its combination of federal authority and quantification. Height-weight forms and measuring instructions offered an aura of scientific legitimacy to the project. They also made it simple for any laywoman to become an expert on child weight. While other height-weight materials and instruction existed at the time, the insistence that Baby Week was a project for the national good placed it in a different category. Historians have studied the power of the federal government to persuade—but not technically force—female citizens to comply with federal projects in roughly this period. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, there were programs to brutally repress and prosecute radicals, dissidents, and certain immigrants. There was also aggressive propaganda work like that of the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which made the Children’s Bureau’s requests for citizen action seem familiar and, by comparison, quite moderate.⁷⁶ CPI projects included campaigns encouraging women to do everything from monitoring their block for communists to buying war bonds. Not planting that victory garden might get a woman a sneer from her neighbor, but it was not likely to get her a police visit. Compliance was all about the responsibilities of good citizenship—and a little dose of guilt. In the end, though, huge numbers of Americans voluntarily grimaced through meatless Mondays and sent their kids out to collect scrap metal. It was both a responsibility of citizenship and a point of pride. Baby Week carried a similar mandate.

      Baby Week was a way of encouraging women’s voluntary groups around the country to put on child health conferences by suggesting one week would be set aside around the nation for such events. The bureau further encouraged women’s groups by drumming up media attention for the events, and preparing more printed materials for groups that wanted them. During Baby Week, women’s groups around the nation put on conferences using height-weight tables, and employed advisory technologies to assess children’s height (or length), age, and weight. The intersection of these measurements marked the child as underweight, overweight, or acceptable in weight. These weight ratings could then be translated into health ratings: the child was read as healthy if it met the average and unhealthy if it fell short.⁷⁷

      The introduction of the 1916 and 1917 Baby Weeks encouraged mothers to take these child health ratings to heart. Through brochures and pamphlets especially, mothers were to embrace the new scientific 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 СКАЧАТЬ