1 The New York Milk Committee, Greater New York Baby Week June 20–26, 1914 (New York: New York Milk Committee, 1914), 11.

2 Rennert, Elizabeth, “Little Mothers’ Leagues of New York State,” The American Journal of Nursing 16 (Jan. 1916): 306–10Google Scholar.

3 Rennert, “Little Mothers’ Leagues of New York State,” 307.

4 See Tomes, Nancy, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Apple, Rima D., Mothers and Medicine: A Social History of Infant Feeding, 1890–1950 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

5 See Cooke, Kathy J., “The Limits of Heredity: Nature and Nurture in American Eugenics Before 1915,” Journal of the History of Biology 31 (June 1998): 263–78CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Rosenberg, Charles E., “The Bitter Fruit: Heredity, Disease, and Social Thought in Nineteenth Century America,” Perspectives in American History 8 (1974): 189–235 Google ScholarPubMed.

6 Gordon, Linda, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 55 Google Scholar.

7 Lovett, Laura, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 4–10 Google Scholar.

8 Kevles, Daniel J., In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 85–90Google Scholar.

9 Sonya Michel and Robyn Rosen, “The Paradox of Maternalism: Elizabeth Lowell Putnam and the American Welfare State,” Gender & History 4 (Sept. 1992): 364–86.

10 Though I am not the first person to use the term “eugenic maternalism,” it has been primarily referenced in broader conversations of eugenic feminism and has not yet been explored as an ideological movement worth unique consideration. This study is the first to contextualize eugenic maternalism within the context of the broader Progressive Era children’s welfare movement. See, for example, Weinbaum, Alys Eve, “Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Racial Nationalism, and the Reproduction of Maternalist Feminism,” Feminist Studies 27 (Summer 2001): 271–302 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Wile, Ira S., “Domestic Science Teachers in the Campaign Against Tuberculosis,” The Journal of Home Economics 1 (Apr. 1909): 117–124 Google Scholar.

12 Weigley, Emma Seifrit, “It Might Have Been Euthenics: The Lake Placid Conferences and the Home Economics Movement,” American Quarterly 26 (Mar. 1974): 79–96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Tomes, Nancy, “Spreading the Germ Theory: Sanitary Science and Home Economics, 1880–1930,” in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, ed. Stage, Sarah and Vincenti, Virginia B. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 34–54 Google Scholar.

14 Schuller, Kyla, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 21.Google Scholar

15 Questions surrounding ethnicity, race, and class not only influenced the approaches of maternalist reformers but also deeply shaped the political and social context of the Progressive Era. There is a vast body of scholarship on the ways increased immigration led to social reform work intending to encourage cultural assimilation among immigrant communities. This article is indebted to this scholarship. However, in order to center the role of domestic science as a vehicle for social reform, it has limited its engagement with broader histories of immigration. For more on the relationship between social reform, baby-saving campaigns, and immigration, see: Meckel, Richard A., “Save the Babies”: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Bender, Daniel E., American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).

16 John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children (New York: Macmillan, 1906).

17 Along with many eugenic maternalists, Baker was instrumental in organizing prenatal hygiene programs throughout New York City. The budding science claimed that the prenatal environment–understood as a combination of heredity and parental choices and behaviors–had a profound influence on the fetus during the intrauterine period and throughout the lifespan after birth. While the Leagues worked with young girls, the hygienic rituals they instilled would shape their future ability to care for themselves and their children before, during, and after pregnancy. Richardson, Sarah S., The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 60–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 New York Times, July 10, 1910.

19 Chicago Tribune, Sept. 27, 1908.

20 See Evening World, Dec. 18, 1901; New York Times, Dec. 23, 1900; New York Tribune, Dec. 23, 1905; New York Times, Mar. 4, 1900; and Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 2, 1903.

21 See Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 75 Google Scholar; and Gordon, Linda, “Putting Children First: Women, Maternalism and Welfare in the Early Twentieth Century,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Kerber, Linda K. and Kessler-Harris, Alice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 63–87 Google Scholar.

22 Michel, Sonya, “The Limits of Maternalism: Policies Towards American Wage-Earning Mothers During the Progressive Era,” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare State, ed. Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya (London: Routledge, 1993), 292.Google Scholar

23 Josephine Baker, “Standards of Child Welfare: Day Nursery Standards, with Discussion,” in Standards of Child Welfare: A Report of the Children’s Bureau Conferences (Washington, DC: United States Children’s Bureau, June 1919): 219–33.

24 New York Centre of Day Nursery Associations and Day Nurseries, Conference of the New York Centre of Day Nursery Associations and Day Nurseries, Friday, November 21^st, 1919 (New York, 1919), The Rare Book Room and Manuscript Collection at the New York Academy of Medicine, New York, NY.

25 Nasaw, David, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (New York: Anchor Books, 2012), 143.Google Scholar

26 Both Abbott and Breckinridge were pioneers in social work as an academic discipline, trained at the University of Chicago. This report, The Delinquent Child and the Home was commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation, a philanthropic organization in close communication with the New York City Bureau of Child Hygiene. The original publication also featured an introduction from Julia Lathrop of the Federal Children’s Bureau.

27 This phenomenon has been well documented by historians of childhood, including Mintz, Steven, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 200–12Google Scholar; Gallagher, Claire, “‘I Was So Glad to Be in School Here’: Religious Organizations and the School on Ellis Island in the Early 1900s,” in Children and Youth During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, ed. Marten, James and Fass, Paula S. (New York: New York University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; and Klapper, Melissa R., Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880–1925 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007)Google Scholar.

28 Lunbeck, Elizabeth, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 185–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 New York Times, May 16, 1909.

30 Babies Welfare Organization, Report of the Babies’ Welfare Association of New York City, 1912–1915 (New York: Department of Child Helping of the Russell Sage Foundation, 1915).

31 See especially, Kraut, Alan M., Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 104–35Google Scholar ; and Leavitt, Judith Walzer, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).Google Scholar

32 See Cooke, “Limits of Heredity”; and Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling.

33 Brandt, Allan, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)Google Scholar.

34 The New York City Bureau of Child Hygiene was founded in 1908, four years before the Federal Children’s Bureau. Though Baker is rarely featured as a key player in the development of the child hygiene movement, her work as a public health professional and a social reformer placed her in the social and professional networks of women like Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, and Lillian Wald. The work of the NYC Children’s Bureau and the BWA should be understood as both an influence on and influenced by the work of the Federal Children’s Bureau. Little Mothers’ Leagues would be adopted by the Federal Children’s Bureau as early as 1913. They ultimately were implemented nationwide. See Lindenmeyer, Kriste, “A Right to Childhood”: The U.S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare 1912–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 50, 97.Google Scholar

35 Evening World, June 25, 1914.

36 Lovett, Conceiving the Future; Leslie Hahner, “Practical Patriotism: Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts, and Americanization,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5 (June 2008): 113–34.

37 Baker, Josephine, Fighting for Life (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), 134.Google Scholar

38 Catharine Brody, “A New York Childhood,” The American Mercury 14 (May 1928): 57.

39 Baker, Fighting for Life, 137.

40 Rennert, “Little Mothers’ Leagues of New York State,” 307.

41 Babies Welfare Association of New York, Weekly Bulletin of the Babies’ Welfare Association (New York: Babies Welfare Association of New York, 1914), The Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at the New York Academy of Medicine, New York, NY.

42 Mink, Gwendolyn, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 7.Google Scholar

43 See Kraut, Silent Travelers; and Jacobsen, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

44 Rennert, “Little Mothers’ Leagues of New York State,” 307.

45 Lovett, Laura, “The Popeye Principle: Selling Child Health in the First Nutrition Crisis,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 30 (Oct. 2005): 805 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

46 Baker, Fighting for Life, 134.

47 Evening World, Aug. 15, 1913.

48 Baker, Josephine, Child Hygiene (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925), 233 Google Scholar.

49 New York Tribune, Nov. 12, 1916.

50 See Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 288; and Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race, Gender, Science and Citizenship,” Gender & History 10 (Dec. 1998): 26–52.

51 Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work, 75.

52 Eastman, P. R., “The Relation of Parental Nativity to the Infant Mortality of New York State,” American Journal of Diseases of Children 17 (Mar. 1919): 195–211 Google Scholar.

53 The BWA was not consistent in its engagement with African American neighborhoods, and it is not clear whether the Leagues allowed the participation of Black children or if any Leagues were developed specifically for Black children during these years. However, the BWA was certainly not the only organization that promoted eugenic public health programs within those communities. Historians such as Michelle Mitchell, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Ayah Nuriddin, and Vanessa Northington Gamble have demonstrated the ways African American women created their own autonomous charitable organizations to promote public health, eugenic reform, and sexual morality movements. See Mitchell, Michele, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Nuriddin, Ayah, “Engineering Uplift: Black Eugenics as Black Liberation.” In Nature Remade: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds, ed. Campos, Luis A., Deitrich, Michael R., Saraiva, Tiago, and Young, Christian C. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 186–286 Google Scholar; and Gamble, Vanessa Northington, “’There Wasn’t a Lot of Comforts in Those Days’: African Americans, Public Health, and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic,” Public Health Reports 125 (Apr. 2010): 114–22CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

54 Apple, Rima D., “Constructing Mothers: Scientific Motherhood in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Social History of Medicine 8 (Aug. 1995): 161–78CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

55 Apple, Mothers and Medicine, 114–16.

56 The rise of elite professions for women in public health and other sanitary sciences fostered collective social anxieties over gender roles and responsibilities and connected them to ongoing anxieties surrounding immigration, urbanization, philanthropy, and physical fitness. Historians of home economics have demonstrated the centrality of domestic science to early twentieth-century social reform and public health campaigns, many of which encouraged participants to adhere to traditional gender roles. See Elias, Megan J., Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, ed. Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); and Goldstein, Carolyn M., Creating Consumers: Home Economics in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Good Housekeeping Magazine, Sept. 1912, 300.

58 Little Mothers’ Aid Association, Yearbook of the Little Mothers’ Aid Association 1909–1910 (New York: Little Mothers’ Aid Association, 1910), The Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at the New York Academy of Medicine, New York, NY.

59 New York Times, July 10, 1910.

60 New York Tribune, Nov. 12, 1916.

61 Baker, Josephine, Healthy Babies: A Volume Devoted to the Health of the Expectant Mothers (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1923)Google Scholar, The Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at the New York Academy of Medicine, New York, NY.

62 New York Times, July 10, 1910.

63 Josephine Baker. “Talks with Mothers: Don’t Ask Your Neighbor’s Advice,” Buffalo Enquirer, Aug. 20, 1913, 5.

64 In this regard, the Little Mothers’ Leagues operated like other children’s educational programming. Leslie Hahner, “Practical Patriotism,” 118.

65 Buffalo Courier, Mar. 8, 1914.