Wed • Sep
7

Wednesday, September 7, 2022

4:00PM-5:00PM

This is a virtual event. Login information with be included in your confirmation email.

Please join the NYAM Library for a presentation by our 2022 Klemperer Fellow in the History of Medicine, Jamie Marsella, on research she conducted using the Library’s resources.

The New York Babies’ Welfare Association (BWA) was founded in 1912 by the city’s Bureau of Child Hygiene as a preventative care network for women and children comprised of hundreds of philanthropic, religious, and city-funded organizations. The BWA boasted over 120 organizational members, including orphanages, settlement houses, milk stations, benevolent societies, hospitals, and day nurseries. Together, the BWA promoted city-wide eugenic maternalist programs, including Better Babies’ Contests and Little Mothers’ Leagues. By 1920, these programs had become a citywide phenomenon.

This talk examines the role of the women involved in the BWA as reformers, women religious, benevolent women, and medical professionals. Focusing on archival evidence located at the NYAM Library, this talk will explore the ways these different organizations, with different cultural and religious understandings of health and hygiene, negotiated amongst themselves to create a network of eugenic standardization for women and children in New York City.

About the Speaker

Jamie Marsella is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science department at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the intersection between race, gender, and medicine in the development of women and children’s public health programming. Her dissertation is tentatively titled Religion, Eugenic Maternalism, and the New York Babies Welfare Association 1908-1919. It examines how Progressive Era preventative public health programs were implemented and institutionalized in localized urban settings with diverse cultural, ethnic, and religious communities.