{"id":2949,"date":"2024-02-21T16:49:45","date_gmt":"2024-02-21T16:49:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh-wordpress.ramapo.edu\/discovering1920s\/?p=2949"},"modified":"2024-03-27T17:42:05","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T17:42:05","slug":"sheppard-towner-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh-wordpress.ramapo.edu\/discovering1920s\/blog\/2024\/02\/21\/sheppard-towner-act\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sheppard-Towner Act"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Overview<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The National Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, more commonly known as the Sheppard-Towner Act, could be viewed, out of context, as ahead of its time. While it came on the heels of women\u2019s suffrage and the 19th Amendment in 1919, Sheppard-Towner could seem out of place when set against the glamour, parties, and excess that is stereotypically paired with the 1920s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What people often overlook, however, is the spirit of progressivism that pervaded the early 1900s. The Progressive Era, which lasted approximately from 1890 to 1917, was a time full of social activism and political reform. While activists worked toward a variety of causes from decreasing corruption with antitrust regulation to protecting the environment through conservation efforts to creating safer working and living conditions within cities, the collective goal during the era was \u201cto make American society a better and safer place in which to live.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The women\u2019s rights movement was one of the more powerful forces during the Progressive Era. Besides fighting for women\u2019s right to vote, there were also women\u2019s organizations advocating for better conditions for infants, young children, and mothers, especially in light of the continually high mortality rates. The largest of these was the U.S. Children\u2019s Bureau, a federal agency started in 1912, which became \u201cthe first female stronghold in the federal government,\u201d according to Robyn Muncy in Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935<\/em>.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While progressivism was fading after World War I and into the 1920s, the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act proved a major success for the Children\u2019s Bureau. The Bureau had been researching the causes of infant and maternal mortality from its start, finding links between mortality rates and poverty. In 1917, the infant mortality rate in the United States was 93.8 per 1,000 births, which translates to slightly more than one in eleven infants dying before making it to one year old.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even before the official passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act, the Children\u2019s Bureau was working hard to implement reforms in child welfare, especially during World War I. Using the Woman\u2019s Committee of the Council of National Defense, which was a wartime organization created by the federal government, Chief of the Children\u2019s Bureau Julia Lathrop created a campaign called \u201cChildren\u2019s Year,\u201d which dedicated 1919 to saving \u201cthe lives of at 100,000 children under 5 years of age and to make life safer for all children.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup> The campaign included a plethora of goals that mainly dealt with healthcare access for infants and mothers, education access for children, and access to financial assistance for all families. Muncy notes that one of the reforms encompassed within Children\u2019s Year was the creation of state and local bureaucratic agencies that oversaw all of these new programs and initiatives, which shows how \u201cLathrop\u2019s professional position allowed her to keep alive and even broaden support for the female progressives\u2019 child welfare agenda.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup> Lathrop\u2019s moves during this time were strategic to use the resources available to help the movement better achieve its goals and can be seen as a precursor to the Sheppard-Towner Act.<\/p>\n\n\n

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A photograph of supporters of the Sheppard-Towner Bill, circa 1920-21 (Library of Congress).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Studies from the Children\u2019s Bureau reported that around 80% of pregnant women in the U.S. at that time received no advice or training about how to care for an infant.6<\/a><\/sup> The Sheppard-Towner Act was introduced as a solution. With the purpose of establishing funds from the federal government that would allow states to create clinics, educational programs, and literature for and about prenatal and infant care, a first-of-its-kind infant and maternity healthcare bill was introduced in Congress in 1918 by Montana Republican Representative Jeanette Rankin, with support from Lathrop. When that bill failed, Texas Democratic Senator Morris Sheppard and Iowa Republican Representative Horace M. Towner later sponsored a similar bill, reintroducing it to Congress a few times between 1919 and 1921. However, it only gained traction after women earned the right to vote and eventually passed through Congress in mid-1921. The Sheppard-Towner Act was signed into law on November 23, 1921 by President Warren G. Harding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Women\u2019s Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC), established in 1920, played a part in getting Sheppard-Towner passed. The WJCC was a collective of women\u2019s organizations that came together to organize support and lobby for a variety of women\u2019s issues, with the group representing roughly 20 million people.7<\/a><\/sup> For Sheppard-Towner, the WJCC showed its support in many ways, from sending a multitude of letters and telegrams to Congress to running articles in popular women\u2019s magazines to sending representatives to testify at hearings. \u201cMembers of Congress of years’ experience say that the lobby in favor of the Sheppard-Towner bill was the most powerful and persistent that had ever invaded Washington,\u201d wrote the Journal of the American Medical Association<\/em> about the lobby.8<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n

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A newspaper headline celebrates the Sheppard-Towner Act as a victory for women (Star Tribune).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The eventual success of the Sheppard-Towner Act makes sense within the larger context of the early 1920s. While the spirit of progressivism certainly lingered, there is another factor that may have impacted Sheppard-Towner\u2019s passage that cannot be overlooked. Many thought that newly enfranchised women would majorly shift election results by comprising a unified voting bloc that political candidates would need to consider and appeal to in order to secure wins. Lynn Dumenil mentioned in The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s<\/em> that male politicians often tried to appease the new group of female voters by giving in to their requests. She shared as an example, \u201cThe Democratic National Convention of 1920 incorporated twelve of twenty recommendations of the newly founded League of Women Voters; the Republican Party adopted five.\u201d9<\/a><\/sup> With the Sheppard-Towner Act passing only two years after women gained voting rights, its passage could be attributed to this same phenomenon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n