Papers invited for a session at the Deutsche Historikertag, September 2014.

‘War is Good for Babies and Other Young Children’, or at least so said Deborah Dwork (1987) in her book on the infant and child welfare movement in England between 1898 and 1918. The heavy burdens of infant mortality and non-fatal childhood disease were recognised for the first time by social reformers in industrialising countries during the generation before 1914, and programmes of public health intervention were launched in many countries. Dwork’s argument, in relation to England, was that enthusiasm for these programmes was more easily aroused and maintained in belligerent than in peaceful times. Arguments of ‘national efficiency’ – that child mortality and debility wasted the national stock of future workers and soldiers – acquired new force in countries grappling with ‘total war’ and its unprecedented demands for manpower.

The problem of child health was in principle amenable to various solutions: popular options included the provision of free or subsidised supplies of healthy milk, as in France’s influential ‘gouttes de lait’, or of food for older children; education of mothers to address real or imagined deficiencies in their childrearing practices; and the provision of specialised health services for infants and children. What were the similarities and differences in the ways these national child welfare programmes or campaigns responded to the outbreak of war in 1914? How far were these national responses conditioned by pre-war paths of development? Did war simply strengthen the hand of child welfare advocates, or divert programmes into new and more instrumental ways of treating children? Were wartime developments shaped entirely by state policy or did mothers play their own role in the development of child welfare? Who were the real winners and losers in these wartime changes?

References:
Dwork, D. (1987), War is good for babies and other young children: a history of the infant and child welfare movement in England, 1898 – 1918 (London: Tavistock)
Stöcker, S. (1996) Säuglingsfürsorge zwischen Sozialer Hygiene und Eugenik (Berlin)