Educating the Mothers

In his 1913 report as Chief Medical Officer to the Board of Education, Newman stressed the following: ‘The principal operating influence [in causing infant mortality] is the ignorance of the mother and the remedy is the education of the mother.’ ¹ Infant hygienists stressed that childrearing in modern society was not the ‘natural’ process it was for mothers in ‘primitive’ cultures. For the very reason that the modern mother was more intelligent she could not rely on instinct, but had to be instructed in scientific methods of child care. S.G. Moore, for example, felt that it was ‘monstrous that the fate of a new generation should be left to the chances of unreasoning custom, impulse and fancy — joined with the suggestions of ignorant nurses and the prejudiced counsel of grandmothers’. ² The Lancet agreed that working-class mothers especially knew nothing about the proper conditions of health for infants and were guided by ‘traditions handed down from bygone ages’. ³