Abstract
Mothers and babies are important and it is in the national interest to care for them. This was the message of the infant welfare movement which raised awareness about the value of infant life, health and standards of motherhood in Europe and Europe overseas in the first half of the twentieth century. This international movement promoted babies and breastfeeding with the appeal that ‘Population means power. The nation that has the babies has the future.’ In the British Empire, promoting natural increase among the native-born of British stock was elevated to ‘a matter of Imperial importance’.1 From the Atlantic to the Pacific, ‘Long Live King Baby!’ was the cry. This rhetoric of reproduction appealed to nationalists as well as imperialists, republicans as well as colonials, from France to the United States, to New Zealand and Australia. The saving of infant life was ‘the means of building up a healthier race to people this great country’, Mrs Edith Simpson, a voluntary worker for mothers and babies, persuaded her local Town Clerk in 1922. In Australia with its early move to labour politics, Sydney’s infant health leaders asked, what could be better than an ‘Australian-made baby’?2
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Notes
Advertisement for New South Wales’ first baby week, ‘Long Live King Baby?’, Sunday News, Sydney, 24 March 1920. Cf. Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop, issue 5, Spring 1978, p. 14, also p. 10, on population was power.
See also Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900–1939, London, 1980;
Deborah Dwork, War is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England 1898–1918, London and New York, 1987;
R. Meckel, Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850–1929, Baltimore and London, 1990;
Alisa Klaus, Every Child a Lion: The Origins of Maternal and Infant Health Policy in the United States and France, 1890–1920, Ithaca and London, 1993;
C.R. Comacchio, ‘Nations are Built of Babies’: Saving Ontario’s Mothers and Children 1900–1940, Montreal, 1993;
V. Fildes, L. Marks and H. Marland (eds), Women and Children First: International Maternal and Infant Welfare, 1870–1945, London and New York, 1992.
P. Grimshaw, M. Lake, A. McGrath and M. Quartly, Creating a Nation, Melbourne, 1994, p. 2.
On this way of writing history generally, see Marilyn Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context’, HS, vol. 22, no. 86, April 1986 pp. 116–31.
Frontispiece to F. Truby King, The Expectant Mother, and Baby’s First Month, Wellington, 1925.
On ‘fit’, see Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, Cambridge, Mass., 1992, p. 54.
See, for example, F.B. Smith, The People’s Health 1830–1910, Canberra and London, 1979, and
‘Health’, in John Benson (ed.), The Working Class in England 1875–1914, London, 1985, pp. 36–62;
A.E. Imhof, ‘From the Old Mortality Pattern to the New: Implications of a Radical Change from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 59, 1985, pp. 1–29
F.G. Castles, The Working Class and Welfare: Reflections on the Political Development of the Welfare State in Australia and New Zealand, 1890–1980, Wellington, 1985.
Stuart Macintyre, The Labour Experiment, Melbourne, 1989;
Erik Olssen, Building the New World: Work, Politics and Society in Caversham 1880s–1920s, Auckland, 1995.
Jill Roe, in Cora V. Baldock and Bettina Cass (eds), Women, Social Welfare and the State in Australia, Sydney, 1983, p. 7.
On the Maternity Allowance Act and maternal citizenship, see Marilyn Lake and Katie Holmes (eds), Freedom Bound II: Documents on Women in Modem Australia, Sydney, 1995, pp. 1–5;
Molly Ladd-Taylor (ed.), Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers’ Letters to the Children’s Bureau, 1915–1932, New Brunswick, 1986;
Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (eds), Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, New York and London, 1993.
This is consistent with Jane Lewis’s reply to Koven and Michel, in Lewis, ‘Gender, the Family and Women’s Agency in the Building of ‘Welfare States’: the British Case’, Social History, vol. 19, no. 1, January 1994, pp. 37–55, and
‘Women’s Agency, Maternalism and Welfare’, Gender and History, vol. 6, no. 1, April 1994, pp. 117–23.
Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (eds), Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880s–1950s, London and New York, 1991, p. 4.
Dorothy Porter has summarised the historiography of public health in these terms, in D. Porter (ed.), The History of Public Health and the Modern State, Amsterdam, 1994, Introduction.
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© 1997 Philippa Mein Smith
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Smith, P.M. (1997). Introduction. In: Mothers and King Baby. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14304-7_1
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