Babies Made Us Modern
How Infants Brought America into the Twentieth Century

Reveals how babies shaped modern American life, including the rise of the medical authority, consumerism, social welfare, and popular psychology.

Janet Golden (Author)

9781108415002, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 April 2018

280 pages, 15 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.53 kg

'A fresh new look at twentieth-century America, told through the lens of society's least powerful and most vulnerable class of individuals … There is much here to interest and intrigue historians of childhood, the family, and public health. Scholars will no doubt appreciate the questions her book raises for thinking about the nature of modernity, the processes involved in the creation of the twentieth-century 'baby,' as well as the limits and possibilities in extending agency to infants. Additionally, Golden has laid an important foundation for anyone who wishes to seriously consider the ways in which even the youngest and least powerful among us have shaped and reflected our personal, cultural, and political values.' Jessica Martucci, The American Historical Review

Placing babies' lives at the center of her narrative, historian Janet Golden analyzes the dramatic transformations in the lives of American babies during the twentieth century. She examines how babies shaped American society and culture and led their families into the modern world to become more accepting of scientific medicine, active consumers, open to new theories of human psychological development, and welcoming of government advice and programs. Importantly Golden also connects the reduction in infant mortality to the increasing privatization of American lives. She also examines the influence of cultural traditions and religious practices upon the diversity of infant lives, exploring the ways class, race, region, gender, and community shaped life in the nursery and household.

1. Infant lives and deaths: incubators, demographics, photographs
2. Valuing babies: economics, social welfare, progressives
3. Helping citizen baby: the US Children's Bureau, good advice, better babies
4. Bringing up babies I: giving, spending, saving, praying
5. Bringing up babies II: health and illness, food and drink
6. Helping baby citizens: traditional healers, patent medicines, local cultures
7. The inner lives of babies: infant psychology
8. Babies' changing times: depression, war, peace
9. Baby boom babies
Coda. Kissing and dismissing babies: American exceptionalism.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]