What Infant and Maternal Health Services Did Middle-Class Clubwomen Provide
for Immigrant Women and Children in New York City, 1917-1920?

Endnotes

Introduction

1. See Richard A. Meckel, Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850-1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
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2. For a telling comparison with France, see Alisa Klaus, Every Child a Lion: The Origins of Maternal and Infant Health Policy in the United States and France, 1890-1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
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3. For brief biographies of Lillian Wald and Josephine Baker, see Edward James, et al. eds., Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973). See also Lillian D. Wald, Windows on Henry Street (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934); S. Josephine Baker, Fighting for Life (New York: Macmillan, 1939); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers' Letters to the Children's Bureau, 1915-1932 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986).
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4. Anne A. Stevens, "An Experiment in Maternity Protection," (Document 5), p. 2. See also Elisabeth Isreals Perry, "Women's Political Choices After Suffrage: The Women's City Club of New York, 1915-1990," New York History (Oct. 1990), 417-34; and Mary Ritter Beard, Woman's Work in Municipalities (New York: Appleton, 1915).
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5. For an analysis of the connections between middle-class life and changing health policy, see Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
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6. "Preliminary Report to Club Members on the Maternity Centre," (Document 6), p. 5; and Anne A. Stevens, "The Work of the Maternity Center Association," 1919, (Document 11), p. 6.
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7. Stevens, "An Experiment," (Document 5), p. 2. Prior to the City Club's Maternity Center, poor pregnant women who sought services beyond those a midwife could provide could go to the Midwifery Dispensary. Founded in 1890, the dispensary merged with the New York Lying-In Hospital in 1893. In 1902 a new maternity hospital funded by J. P. Morgan opened on the Lower East Side. However, until the 1920's both poor and elite women preferred to give birth at home rather than in hospitals. See Nancy Schrom Dye, "Modern Obstetrics and Working-Class Women: The New York Midwife Dispensary, 1890-1920," Journal of Social History, 20 (Spring 1987), 549-64.
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8. Members of the Medical Board of the Association are listed in Document 11, p. 17.
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9. Bulletin, Women's City Club, (June 1920), Document 15. For more on the Sheppard-Towner Act, see Kriste Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood: The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
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