Modern Mothers in Progress in Illinois, 1900-1930 (review)

Illinois is an unusual state, which makes Lynne Curry's study of "the historical intersections of progressivism, maternalism, and health reform" (p. 6) in early-twentieth-century Illinois especially useful and interesting for historians of American medicine. The state's heterogeneity challenged reformers to address a single [End Page 849] sociomedical issue--the health needs of infants and mothers--in several very different contexts at once. In Chicago, for instance, reformers faced poor hygienic conditions in the city's diverse immigrant communities and growing African-American community. In the classically "Midwestern" farm regions of the state's northern and central section, native-born, relatively prosperous white families were more able and willing to "purchase" public health. The southern third of the state, meanwhile, had more in common with the impoverished South than with the rest of Illinois: its tenant farms housed very poor white and African-American families in conditions that were unhealthful at best. Curry makes this diversity of concerns and conditions her focus, taking the questions other scholars have asked about the politics and practice of child and maternal health programs at the national level and posing them at the state and local levels

Diversity (politics) · Economic growth · Immigration · Political science · Politics · Progressivism · Public health · Sociology · State (computer science) · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Medicine · Gerontology