Graduate Students

Comacchio, Cynthia - Ph.D

"Nations Are Built of Babies": Child and Maternal Welfare in Ontario, 1920-1940 - Dr. Terry Crowley, advisor        

         Interest in infant mortality originally stirred within Canadian social reform circles at the turn of the century. The emergent child welfare movement gathered strength with the impact of the Great War, broadened its aims to include maternal welfare, and flourished during the interwar period. The solution proposed by these reformers took the form of parent education, based on scientific principles, in a conscious attempt to modernize Canadian childhood by means of closely-supervised and regulated childrearing methods. Canadian parents--especially mothers since the childrearing task fell largely to them--were believed to be handicapped in their parenting duties by an ignorance which could be remedied only through expert tutoring. The new experts, and leaders of the campaign, were predominantly members of the medical profession. The purpose of this study is to examine the child and maternal welfare campaign in Ontario during the interwar period from the perspective of its medical leadership. Physicians were the foremost proponents of 'modern' parenting. The impact of medical leadership in this area was a measure of their ability to make Canadian parents cognizant of their own inadequacy in raising their children without the help of modern scientific instruction. In order to attain the aims of their movement and to justify their increasing influence and social status, the medical experts needed parents who wanted to be informed. They participated in the creation of a need and then strove to become the predominant source of its attenuation. In doing so, they played a major role in transforming the parent-child relationship while the nation itself was undergoing transformation.