Mothers and medicine. A social history of infant feeding, 1890–1950

In the end, however, Heywood's conclusions are unsurprising. He decides that child labour ended in industrial sectors such as textiles because rising real wages by the end of the nineteenth century allowed parents to dispense with childrens' earnings at precisely the same time that compulsory elementary education became more strongly enforced. These two factors were more effective than legal controls, which in any case were consciously gradualist, for fear of driving child labour underground and completely out of the reach of the state. These conclusions offer predictions for the Third World today: they suggest that there is no immediate hope of ending child labour without strong state enforcement through compulsory education, and even more importantly, without favourable economic conjunctures, which are unlikely to materialize in the immediate future. Detailed studies of the history of infant nutrition are rare for all periods and all countries; consequently every new contribution to the subject is welcome. In this important and well-documented book, Apple has explored a wide and varied range of source material: medical textbooks and journals, child-rearing manuals, women's magazines, published letters and diaries, interviews with physicians and mothers, and advertising and other information relating to the development and marketing of breast-milk substitutes. She uses this to show how, and why, American mothers, who in the nineteenth century mainly breast-fed their babies, increasingly turned to artificial feeding so that, by the mid-twentieth century, the vast majority of infants were bottle-fed. After an introductory chapter on feeding practices in the nineteenth century, the volume is divided into four sections covering the period 1890-1950. 'Infant feeding theories and infant-food products' examines medical ideas about infant feeding; how patent baby foods became established; and the interaction between the medical profession and the manufacturers of artificial infant foods. 'Infant feeding in medical practice' describes how physicians actually dealt with conflicting theories and advertising of new products; sought to find both clean milk supplies and a safe means of artificial feeding; and how, by medical education and professional pressure on food companies and mothers, bottle-feeding increasingly became the norm for American mothers. 'Scientific motherhood' deals with the ideology of motherhood and how mothers were made to feel that they were incapable of feeding their infants and therefore needed to consult a physician even when their babies were healthy. 'Mothers and infant-feeding practices' examines the mother's role: the influences and pressures placed on her by physicians, manufacturers, women's …