Mothers and Healthy Children: Puericulture and Motherhood in Colombia, 1900–40

In twentieth-century Colombia, the construction of “ideal types” when it came to the exercise of maternal duties has been closely tied to the role women play in reproducing, raising, and creating the nation’s citizens in their caretaking roles. In the first half of the twentieth century, as the state tried to modernize the country and expand public health initiatives, official concerns with high rates of infant mortality and the desire to protect future generation, placed mothers and their role at the center of medical debates connected to the consolidation of puericulture, public health initiatives, and eugenic discourses. Government reports, public health magazines, and medical treatises often equated civilization, modernity, and progress with social practices that turned mothers, into arbiters of the nation´s morality and guarantors of their children's health and well-being. This paper explores how motherhood and child-rearing practices were politicized, giving women the mandate to morally and physically uplift their society and reproduce the nation’s future citizens on whose back national progress would be forged.