Book Description
The author argues that the French population crisis, resulting from a turn-of-the-century decline in the birth rate and a national preoccupation with German militarism and its threat to France, stimulated an intense interest in maternal and child welfare that was never duplicated in the United States. She shows that because infant mortality did not have the kind of national political implications in the United States that it had in France, it provoked far less interest among U.S. politicians and doctors (excepting a small group of public health activists, pediatricians, and obstetricians). She points out that female activists' efforts to place infant care on the national political agenda in the United States resulted in the identification of these matters as "women's issues" far more than in France, with profound implications for the evolution of the welfare state in each country.