Title Every child a lion : the origins of maternal and infant health policy in the United States and France, 1890-1920 / Alisa Klaus

Published Ithaca, New York : Cornell University Press, 1993

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Description 1 online resource (viii, 298 pages) Contents Introduction: Infant Mortality and Social Reform -- 1. Pronatalism, Eugenics, and Infant Mortality -- 2. Puericulteurs and Pediatricians: The Medical Supervision of Infant Health -- 3. French and American Women and Infant Health -- 4. American Women and the "Better Baby" Movement -- 5. French Public Policy and Motherhood, 1890-1914 -- 6. "Baby's Health -- Civic Wealth": The Work of the U.S. Children's Bureau -- 7. "Bread, Bullets, and Babies": Saving the Next Generation in France and the United States -- Conclusion: Comparative Issues in Maternal and Infant Health Policy Summary One of Aesop's fables tells of the fox who taunted the lion about having so few children. "Yes," the lion replies, "but every child is a lion." This dispute is particularly appropriate to Alisa Klaus's comparative account of the early history of maternal and child welfare programs in the United States and France over a thirty-year period. Klaus focuses on the efforts of legislators, physicians, and women's organizations to reduce the infant mortality rate through such measures as maternal education, the distribution of clean milk, routine medical examinations of healthy children, and maternity leaves. Her central concerns include the ways in which pronatalism in France and fears of "race suicide" in the United States shaped public and professional intervention in reproduction, and the influence of women's organizations on social policy in two different institutional and political settings. The author argues that the French population crisis, resulting from a turn-of-the-century decline in the birth rate and a national preoccupation with German militarism and its threat to France, stimulated an intense interest in maternal and child welfare that was never duplicated in the United States. She shows that because infant mortality did not have the kind of national political implications in the United States that it had in France, it provoked far less interest among U.S. politicians and doctors (excepting a small group of public health activists, pediatricians, and obstetricians). She points out that female activists' efforts to place infant care on the national political agenda in the United States resulted in the identification of these matters as "women's issues" far more than in France, with profound implications for the evolution of the welfare state in each country. Every Child a Lion will find appreciative readers among women's historians, historians interested in public health and medicine, and social and political historians of France and the United States Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on March 30, 2022) SUBJECT Universidad Sergio Arboleda gnd Subject Infant health services -- Government policy -- United States -- History Infant health services -- Government policy -- France -- History Maternal health services -- Government policy -- United States -- History Maternal health services -- Government policy -- France -- History Child Health Services -- history Health Policy -- history Maternal Health Services -- history MEDICAL -- Health Policy. Infant health services -- Government policy. Maternal health services -- Government policy. Gesundheitsvorsorge Kind Mutter Moederschapszorg. Zuigelingenzorg. SUBJECT United States France Subject France. United States. Frankreich USA. Genre/Form History. Form Electronic book ISBN 9781501738678 1501738674

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