'All we parents want is that our children's health and lives should be regarded': Child Health and Parental Concern in England, c. 1860-1910

Abstract

The policies of the early twentieth-century maternalist state have been studied extensively. This article argues that in order to understand Edwardian welfare provision, the relationships between class, place and gender in the previous century must be explored. This is studied through the interaction between child-rearing literature and the experiences of fathers and mothers in three contrasting localities in England from about 1860 to 1910. Mid-nineteenth-century advice manuals and parents expressed very similar understandings of child health. Only from about the 1890s were middle-class attitudes influenced by new medical ideas, which constructed working-class child-rearing as uniquely ignorant. Local government and philanthropic initiatives largely emphasised the importance of domestic care, which ignored parents' anxieties about dangers outside the home and left non-elite medical services structured to exclude children. However, diverse cultures of parental responsibility, of understandings of illness, and of public attitudes to childhood made class, place and gender central to the shifting ways in which health care was provided for children.