Beyond Better Babies: Religion and Eugenic Maternalism in Progressive Era Child Welfare Reform

Abstract

This dissertation explores the role of eugenic environmental reform in urban child and maternal welfare from 1900-1935. It centers on the New York City Babies Welfare Association (BWA), a federation of over one hundred private philanthropic and religious organizations, including settlement houses, education extension societies, clinical dispensaries, and educational clubs for children. Though its members reported to the hub, they remained relatively autonomous, and, as a result, much of the day-to-day work of public health programming was done not by public health officials alone but also by Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish women with religious missions. I identify a vast network of reformers across these movements who collectively promoted and perpetuated the integration of public health and child welfare practices. I refer to these reformers as eugenic maternalists to demonstrate how eugenic ideas about heredity and the environment permeated discourses about religion, immigration, maternity, and child welfare in the first half of the twentieth century. This sprawling network of philanthropic, religious, and municipal organizations comprised a wide range of scientific, theological, and political views, offering a way of visualizing how eugenic maternalists created a unifying conception of American citizenship built around health and hygiene behavior and defined by perceived moral, mental, and physical fitness.