Figure 1. Poster from the Children’s Year campaign, which sought to improve child health through child health conferences and the promotion of weighing and measuring children. Committee on Public Information, Division of Pictorial Publicity, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
As part of the Children’s Year, the bureau became an even more enthusiastic proponent of child measurement and standards. The mostly female volunteers at the events were instructed to draw heavily on the bureau’s Baby Week and child health conference pamphlets for guidance. It issued pages of special instructions for the Children’s Year weighing program. Children were to be weighed and measured with very specific equipment. The bureau promised that “the equipment essential for the test is simple.” This included a standard scale, a platform scale, a measuring rod, a good supply of tape measures, a 45-inch-long table covered in quilts, oilcloths, cotton sheets, paper towels, and a few other supplies.93
The instructions for actually performing the weighing and measuring were even more complicated. They required their own separate Children’s Bureau pamphlet: Wash your hands. Undress children and wrap them in a thin towel. Take off their shoes. Hold a book or small box horizontally on top of the child’s head when measuring his or her height (assuming a more scientific scale was unavailable). Lay babies down, completely relaxed with no bent joints, and measure their length with enamel bookends. There was even a science to filling in measuring cards. Examiners needed to use fractions rather than decimals, and round ages to the nearest birthday.94 The women who participated in this work would ideally be aided by local physicians or nurses who gave of their time freely. Only a physician was allowed, for instance, to mark a child as “healthy and free from serious defect” or to provide recommendations to mothers in writing.95 Most of the examiners, however, would be middle-class women active in the community. These women, the bureau advised, ought to “rehearse the procedure of weighing and measuring” before being released on the babies.96
After the actual weighing, the measurers had extensive instruction on how to record the data. The available height-weight tables represented a large number of average children, bureau pamphlets explained. Despite bureau apprehensions, local women conducting the measuring were told to treat the measurements as scientific fact. When actual children deviated from the average child weights on the tables by just two pounds, they were marked as abnormal. When the women found these divergences from the norm, even the mere two-pound ones, they were to advise parents to bring the child to a physician. In the bureau’s plans for events of meticulous measurement and careful assessment, the bureau reiterated the importance of expertise. On the one hand, giving laywomen weight tables and putting them in a position to take charge of child health—both that of their own children and of the community at large—empowered these women. On the other hand, the growing insistence on experts undermined that empowerment. As the bureau further sold the importance of expert-validated quantitative child health, mothers increasingly accepted the bureau’s message: it was their responsibility to assess and measure their child, and that was something the bureau could help them with. It was also now their responsibility to take the child for a true expert measurement and assessment. This was not something the advisory bureau could do for them.
The acceptance of the first part, the idea that women needed to take charge of their children’s health through scientific means, can be seen through their participation in the Children’s Year measuring test. As part of the bureau’s promotion of the mass quantification event, it prepared a short film called Our Children. The film was produced as part of the Children’s Year, but the Children’s Bureau hoped it would have an impact beyond the one-year affair. Our Children began with the idea that children needed to be weighed as a response to the high American child mortality rates. Club women in the film were spurred to action simply by reading a newspaper article in which the Children’s Bureau called for women to weigh their children. Clearly, the bureau believed itself to be so influential that a mere call to pay attention to a problem would lead to voluntary support. In the film, though, simply weighing children was not enough. Weighing needed to be careful, to be scientific.97
Without a home scale, the women in the film first tried to weigh a baby by sticking him on the scale attached to the back of a passing ice truck. The infant was not interested in this, however. He cried and screamed, and wriggled so much that the women were unable to get an accurate weight reading. The women then took the child to the grocery store for a produce-scale weighing. The results were not much better. Older children kept falling off the grocery scale.98 This was no scientific motherhood. Finally, a group of clubwomen decided to invite experts from the bureau itself to come and assess local children. As might be expected in this propaganda for health quantification, only this expert guidance allows the women to successfully weigh their children. The pictured bureau and their nurses were adept at handling children, even more than their mothers seemed to be. They came equipped with scales designed especially for babies and children, and were meant to produce meaningful numbers. Only a numerical assessment of the child could provide the modern measure of health that the bureau valued. In time, these would become the measures that most women valued.
All this weighing was explicitly intended to measure and improve the health of children around the nation. It also served another purpose. The conferences would allow the bureau to create its own height-weight dataset on American child health. The bureau figured that collecting the weights and measurements of about 200,000 children would allow them to create new height-weight charts that would assess a larger number of children, and a more ethnically and regionally diverse set of children. One of the bureau’s major complaints with baby contests had been the lack of consistent, accurate standards for assessing children.99 With this new 1919 dataset, the bureau would have standardized numbers for future events.100 To prepare this dataset, local conference organizers were asked to write in to the Children’s Bureau for official child scoring cards before holding a conference. The measurement cards used in any weighing situation were meant to be torn in half. One half of the card would be given to mothers to remind them of where their child fit into the average, and where he or she ought to fit. If a child was deemed underweight for his or her height, the local women who put on the event were also advised to keep a permanent record of that child’s measurement for themselves.101 Mothers also were given a more detailed physician’s assessment of their child. The other half of the simple measuring card was to be mailed to the bureau for its own records.102 Using the half-cards, bureau statisticians developed a set of height-weight charts divided by race (black and white only) and gender.
Figure 2. Still from the 1919 Children’s Bureau film Our Children. The film encouraged mothers to embrace the scientific weighing and measuring of their children’s bodies by illustrating the limitations of less-than-scientific attempts. Here, two women try to measure a baby on the scale of a passing ice