Abstract
In 1923, a coalition of South African child welfare societies invited a nurse trained in Dr Truby King’s mothercraft programme to tour the country, providing a series of public lectures on childrearing. Miss Paterson was met with large audiences and approving newspaper coverage wherever she spoke. Her purpose was to communicate why and how King’s programme of scientific childrearing had contributed to the dramatic reduction in the rate of infant mortality in New Zealand, where King had originated mothercraft in 1907. As Cape Town’s Argus newspaper reported, of every 1,000 babies born in the city in 1922, 137 died, more than half of whom were black. In contrast, in New Zealand, the figure was only 41.8 deaths per thousand — then the lowest in the world. ‘How’, asked the newspaper, ‘do they manage it?’1
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Notes
John Darwin, The Empire Project: the Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 217.
Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 162.
Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop, vol. 5, no. 1 (1978), 9.
See, for example, the essays in Marian van der Klein, Rebecca Jo Plant, Nichole Sanders, and Lori R. Weintrob (eds), Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare, and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012).
Deborah Dwork, War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant Welfare Movement in England, 1898–1918 (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1987), 3–21, 208–20.
Linda Bryder, A Voice for Mothers: The Plunket Society and Infant Welfare, 1907–2000 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), 1.
Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, 11–13. On infant mortality and contaminated milk, see for example, Peter Buirski, ‘Mortality Rates in Cape Town 1895–1980: A Broad Outline’, in Christopher Saunders, Howard Phillips, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and Vivian Bickford-Smith (eds), Studies in the History of Cape Town, vol. 5 (History Department and the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1983), 138–49.
Philippa Mein Smith, Mothers and King Baby: Survival and Welfare in an Imperial World: Australia 1880–1950 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 66–67.
See Philippa Mein Smith, ‘Infant Welfare Services and Infant Mortality: A Historian’s View’, Australian Economic Review, vol. 24, no. 1 (1991), 22–34; Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, 41.
Philippa Mein Smith, ‘Blood, Birth, Babies, Bodies’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 17, no. 39 (2002), 314–16.
Linda Bryder, ‘From Breast to Bottle: A History of Modern Infant Feeding’, Endeavour, vol. 33, no. 2 (2009), 56–57; Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, 8–9; Smith, Mothers and King Baby, 99.
Linda Chisholm, ‘Class, Colour, and Gender in Child Welfare in South Africa, 1902–1918’, South African Historical Journal, vol. 23, no. 1 (1990), 100–101, 106.
There were a series of baby farming scandals around the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See M.L. Arnot, ‘Infant Death, Child Care and the State: The Baby-Farming Scandals and the First Infant Life Protection Legislation of 1872’, Continuity and Change, vol. 9, no. 2 (1994), 271–312;
Shurlee Swain, ‘Toward a Social Geography of Baby Farming’, History of the Family, vol. 10, no. 2 (2005), 151–59.
Jennifer Muirhead, ‘The children of today make the nation of tomorrow’: A Social History of Child Welfare in Twentieth Century South Africa (MA thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2012), 29.
Chisholm, ‘Class, Colour, and Gender’, 104–05. The most comprehensive history of the ACVV remains Marijke du Toit, Women, Welfare, and the Nurturing of Afrikaner Nationalism: A Social History of the Afrikaanse Christelike Vroue Vereniging, c.1870–1939 (DPhil thesis, University of Cape Town, 1996).
Debby Gaitskell, ‘“Getting close to the hearts of mothers”: Medical Missionaries among African Women and Children in Johannesburg between the Wars’, in Valerie Fildes, Lara Marks, and Hilary Marland (eds), Women and Children First: International Maternal and Infant Welfare 1870–1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 179.
Philip Bonner, ‘South African Society and Culture, 1910–48’, in Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson (eds), Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 259–70, 286–93;
H.E. Norman, ‘The State and the Child’, Child Welfare, June 1926, 7–8.
Susanne M. Klausen, Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 13–14.
Niel Roos, ‘Work Colonies and South African Historiography’, Social History, vol. 36, no. 1 (2011), 63.
Elsabe Brink, ‘Man-Made Women: Gender, Class, and the Ideology of the Volksmoeder’, in Cherryl Walker (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 (Cape Town and London: David Philip and James Currey, 1990), 282.
Rima D. Apple, ‘“Training” the Baby: Mothers’ Responses to Advice Literature in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, in Barbara Beatty, Emily D. Cahan, and Julia Grant (eds), When Science Encounters the Child: Education, Parenting, and Child Welfare in 20th-Century America (New York and London: Teachers College Press, 2006), 198–201.
Saul Dubow, ‘Scientism, Social Research, and the Limits of “South Africanism”: The Case of Ernst Gideon Malherbe’, South African Historical Journal, vol. 44, no. 1 (2001), 99–142;
Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth ofKnowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 221–34.
Brahm David Fleisch, ‘Social Scientists as Policy Makers: E.G. Malherbe and the National Bureau for Educational and Social Research, 1929–1943’, Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 21, no. 3 (1995), 349–72.
On the Save the Children Fund in an imperial context, see Emily Baughan, ‘“Every Citizen of Empire Implored to Save the Children!” Empire, Internationalism, and the Save the Children Fund in Inter-War Britain’, Historical Research, vol. 86, no. 231 (2013), 116–37.
On the international networks which sustained humanitarian and child welfare initiatives, see Rob Skinner and Alan Lester, ‘Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Special Issue on Empire and Humanitarianism, vol. 40, no. 5 (2012), 729–47.
F. Webb, ‘Bond van Afrikaanse Moeders, Pretoria’, Child Welfare, December 1924, 6;
Mrs G.S. Pullen, ‘Bond van Afrikaanse Moeders: Sy Werk en Strewe’, Child Welfare, December 1925, 5–6; Burns, ‘Reproductive Labours’, 109–10.
Susanne Klausen, ‘“For the Sake of the Race”: Eugenic Discourses of Feeblemindedness and Motherhood in the South African Medical Record, 1903–1926’, Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (1997), 46–48.
A.M. Geddes, ‘Report of the Mothercraft Training Centre’, Child Welfare, September 1926, 27–28.
H.P. Horwood, ‘Mothercraft Training Centre at Capetown’, Child Welfare, December 1925, 5.
Marion Mackenzie, ‘The Middle-Class Baby’s Handicap’, Child Welfare, September 1924, 4.
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Duff, S.E. (2016). Babies of the Empire: Science, Nation and Truby King’s Mothercraft in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa. In: Robinson, S., Sleight, S. (eds) Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-48941-8_4
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