The American Campaign to Protect "Mothers of the Race" after World War I

• In Event: Historical Causes and Consequences of Women’s Political Inclusion and Exclusion

Abstract

Historians and social scientists have long shown that the political pressure to protect mothers and infants increased dramatically with World War I and women’s suffrage of 1920, which led to the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act in 1921. However, the existing literature doesn’t explain why only infants, but not their mothers, benefited from the post-World War I campaign. In the interwar period, the United States made good progress in reducing the infant mortality rate but made little progress in reducing the maternal mortality rate. The unequal treatment of mothers and infants was even more puzzling when considering that the post-World War I legislative efforts were more motivated by reducing the maternal mortality rate than by reducing the infant mortality rate. In this paper, I show how the competition between female social worker reformers and public health bureaucrats made it difficult to work out a maternity protection plan acceptable to fiscally conservative legislators. I illustrate this argument by analyzing the failed Massachusetts maternity benefits legislation and the federal legislation that led to the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act focusing on infants but not women.

Author

• Nuannuan Xiang, Columbia University