“The Infant Soldier”: The Great War and the Medical Campaign for Child Welfare

Abstract

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. The casualties of war strengthened anxieties about race suicide and national degeneration. As a result, Canadian reformers were called to rally around "the infant soldier" in the name of the future health and glory of the nation. 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 welfare campaign in Ontario from the turn of the century through the Great War, with special emphasis on the war's impact. Physicians were the foremost proponents of "modern" parenting. The influence of medical leadership in this area was a measure of their ability to make Canadian parents recognize 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.