Educating mothers: The Wisconsin Bureau of Maternal and Child Health

Health-care providers, social reformers, educators, and politicians were joined in a concerted effort to improve maternal and child health in the USA in the inter-war period. Identifying the critical role of mothers in this endeavor, their campaigns were designed to educate women in 'modern,' appropriate childcare practices predicated on middle-class standards for urban families with the financial and medical resources to carry out such health-care prescriptions. Mothers who could not afford a private physician were urged to visit clinics emerging in American cities. Few historians have examined in any great depth the day-to-day issues faced by mothers or the role of public health nurses in these extensive campaigns. Most particularly, the experiences of rural mothers are only now receiving much attention. This article analyzes the work of public health nurses employed by the Department of Maternal and Child Health in the state of Wisconsin, who endeavored to bring modern science and medicine to mothers. Yet, at the same time they were forced to cope with local and national politics and with the strictures of the US medical system, namely, the separation of 'public health' and 'private medicine' in which medical treatment remained in the hands of private physicians and the activities of public health nurses were limited to health education. Their writings show nurses struggling both with the problems of rural poverty and with the constraints of public health within contemporary gender relations.