PREFACE
It was in January, 1913, that theWoman’s Home Companionsent Anna Steese Richardson to Denver, Colorado, to report a Baby Health Contest held in connection with the National Western Live Stock Exposition. There she found babies being examined for physical and mental development, and scored for points by standards of weights and measurements very much as live stock is scored at agricultural fairs.
Mrs. Richardson’s journalistic instinct told her that here was a big constructive work, at its very beginning, and that its spectacular possibilities would make attractive “copy” for a magazine. But before she left Denver for New York she had begun to think of something much bigger and more important than what the babies could do for the magazine, and that was what the magazine could do for the cause of better babies.
As a result of this trip, theWoman’s Home Companionadopted as its own special charge the work now known all over the world as the Better Babies campaign. This has quickly become a widespread movement for education in parenthood. Pride of parenthood brings fathers andmothers to the Better Babies Contests. Parental love holds them there to watch their babies examined by physicians and to learn how the condition of their children can be improved by intelligent care and feeding and sanitary environment.
The results are so far-reaching that one hesitates to put them into words, for fear they may seem overstated. After a little more than one year of hard work, the Better Babies Bureau of theWoman’s Home Companion, under the directorship of Anna Steese Richardson, has become a tremendous machine for aiding in the reduction of infant mortality, and for raising physical, mental, and moral standards among children.
Naturally, the starting-point for much of this work has been the fair—state, county, and local. These widely advertised contests have been a sort of blare of trumpets to attract attention. But above and beyond this element has been the quiet and persistent growth of the work among board-of-health officers, medical societies, club women, church organizations, physicians, nurses—in fact, among all bodies of men and women especially interested in child welfare. The fostering and furthering of this work, which has progressed beyond all expectations, has been Mrs. Richardson’s chief joy and pride during a year of almost unbelievable endeavor.
The author of this book is a keenly interestedand intelligent observer. While she has gathered into the book much that is of real scientific value, contributed by physicians, nurses, psychologists, and social workers, still the chief usefulness of the volume, it seems to me, lies in the fact that it is a message from one mother to other mothers, and is written in the language that all mothers can understand.
The woman who writes it has had not only the actual experience of bearing and rearing her own children, but she has had the rare privilege of corresponding with mothers from every point in the United States, of witnessing many of the Better Babies Contests, and of studying not only what is the matter with the sick baby, but why the well baby is well.
Gertrude B. LaneEditor, Woman’s Home Companion.
March 26th, 1914.