Women Reformers for Maternal–Child Health: Social Welfare and Eugenics in the Sheppard–Towner Act of 1921

As the campaigns for suffrage ended in 1919-1920, women’s political work began transitioning from lobbying for voting rights to focus on the continuing reform of maternal-child health. Although women’s work for public health and social improvement had long coexisted with suffrage, the founding of the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee and the League of Women Voters formed a newly powerful lobby representing a variety of contemporary social concerns including labor, social hygiene, public health, and child welfare. The intense advocacy of the LWV and WJCC would result in the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act in 1921, which funneled federal funds and matching state grants to newly established infant and maternal health programs throughout the United States. Considered to be the first social welfare law, women reformers marshaled successful support to combine formerly private charity with public policy, even amidst accusations of socialism and government overreach from other powerful lobbies like the American Medical Association. Their success was illustrative of the cohesive strategies employed by maternalist feminists to wield the power of the state to achieve their goals, their work providing a critical political bridge between the two reform periods of the Progressive Era and the New Deal. There were other consequences, however, in the aftermath of their success. They refused to include birth control in their advocacy for maternal-child health programming and their emphasis on “scientific motherhood” and eugenics further entrenched middle-class white values in federal guidance and programming. The Sheppard-Towner Act elevated expectations for motherhood and cemented racialized thinking about families, while sidelining support for legalized contraception and accelerating the overall medicalization of women’s health.