Janet Golden - Babies Made Us Modern: How Infants Brought America into the Twentieth Century

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Janet Golden 2018

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For Eric

When you work on a book for a very long time, you have a very long list of people to thank, and a deep fear of forgetting someone. Let me begin at the beginning. Credit for the idea for this book belongs to Lynn Weiner. We intended to write it together and wrote one article before she bowed out because she was so busy being a dean. And the writing took so long that she became a grandmother before I finished. Lynn and her research assistants provided valuable support, and Lynn read the entire manuscript and offered enormously helpful comments and a few chapter titles. Other wonderful friends read the entire manuscript and gave vital feedback. Laurie Bernstein, Arleen Tuchman, Richard Meckel, Cynthia Connolly, and Benjamin Schneider I cannot thank you enough. Others who read portions of this work and gave excellent advice include Heather Munro Prescott, Beth Linker, Ben Harris, Jonathan Sadowsky, Patricia DAntonio, and Christian Warren.

I had the opportunity to give papers based on this work to many audiences, and their questions helped me develop this work. I thank Paula Michaels and the participants in the History Department Seminar at Monash University; Warwick Anderson and the participants in the History on Monday Seminar at the University of Sydney; George Weisz and the participants in the Social Studies of Medicine Departmental Seminar at McGill University; Elizabeth Toon and the participants in the seminar at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester; Ellie Lee and the participants in the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies Conference at the University of Kent; and attendees at the Lees Seminar in History at Rutgers UniversityCamden and the Psychology Department Seminar at Rutgers UniversityCamden.

I was able to undertake the research for this book and to find the time to write it thanks to a Fellowship for College Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities, sabbatical support from Rutgers University Camden, funding from the Rutgers Research Council, a research support grant from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a Charles Donald OMalley Short Term Research Fellowship in the History and Special Collections for the Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and a Hartman Center Travel Grant from the Duke University Libraries.

A vital form of research support came to me from Emily Abel, who shared all of her detailed notes from the Community Service Society records at the Columbia University Archives and of the Field Nurses Monthly Reports from the Department of the Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs Records at the National Archives. Others who assisted me with information and sent me materials include Jacqueline Wolf, Alexandra Minna Stern, Susan Miller, Cheryl Lemus, Lynn Weiner, and Gabe Rosenberg. Joe Shapiro, Sally Griffith, and Susan Walton shared family baby books with me. I also want to thank my many hosts who kept me going on research trips: Bopper Deyton and Jeffrey Levi, Lynn Weiner and Tom Moher, Margaret Humphreys and Ted Kerin, Ruth Horowitz, Susan Porter, and Eric Luft and Diane Davis Luft.

While working on this project I often told people that I had my own private archivist: Russell Johnson. As curator for history and special collections for the sciences at the UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, he collected the baby books and related material that are at the core of my research. I would also like to thank Arlene Shaner, Historical Collections Librarian at the New York Academy of Medicine; Stephen Novak, Head of Archives and Special Collections at the Columbia Health Sciences Library; and Daniel M. May, archivist at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, who provided me with extensive help, as well as the staffs and archivists of all the other institutions that opened their doors to me. Archivists and librarians make it possible for us to be historians.

This book could not have been written without my family. My son Ben Schneider brought his editorial skills to this work, and my son Alex Schneider and his partner, Hanna Schwing, visited often and took me to many great meals when I visited Washington, DC, for research. My mother, a proud UCLA alumna, was especially pleased to see me after my long days working in the UCLA archives. My beloved husband, partner, and fellow historian, Eric Schneider, read each draft of this book far more often than anyone can imagine. He died shortly before the manuscript went to press. I dedicate this book to him.