Too close to home – part 1

I’ve been hesitating to meditate on some of the similarities that keep coming up between the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries as I do my dissertation research. I don’t want to sound political during a presidential election, and in some ways I also just flat-out don’t want to face the similarities. But they keep coming up. So I feel a short series of blog posts coming on, just to get this off my chest so that I can keep reading.

Dr. S. Josephine Baker, the main subject of my research, was a well-known and respected public health official in New York City in the early twentieth century. She’s credited with designing and helping to implement public health strategies that saved the lives of thousands of babies. During World War I there was a part of her that questioned our motivations as a nation in saving those babies. She herself sounds incredibly irritated in her writings about the fact that many American men couldn’t join the armed forces because of physical defects. She (and she was not alone) was convinced that many of these men had been undernourished in childhood, and that this had contributed to a lifetime of suffering that could have been prevented. Many parallels are emerging between our two centuries, Baker’s and mine, as I research this public health rhetoric during the Great War.

On my mind today? In an address given at Vassar College in 1918 (1), Baker is arguing that one of the reasons why undernourishment increased in America’s school children at that time is because the wages their families earned were not keeping pace with the price of food. More specifically, she cites data from the time saying that wages increased 18% between 1907 and 1918 but food prices increased 62%. That’s a big difference, but seems somewhat predictable given the fact that the US had just entered the War. Fast forward to this century, and I see a Huffington Post article from 2014 showing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2009 and 2014, after the minimum wage was raised to $7.25 an hour, that wage stayed stagnant, and various food prices increased. Apples went up 16.8%, cheddar cheese 21.9%, eggs 30%. I’m a PhD student, so I plan to double check the numbers – both in 1916 and 2014. But good grief. Even though I’ll be finished writing by then, in 2018 I just may have to write an article comparing the public health statistics to 100 years before. Historical knowledge and perspective are so important as public health continues to move forward into a new century.

(1) S. Josephine Baker, “The Relation of the War to the Nourishment of Children,” New York Medical Journal 107.7 (1918): 289-292.

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