Governing Bodies
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Americans are generally apprehensive about what they perceive as big government—especially when it comes to measures that target their bodies. Soda taxes, trans fat bans, and calorie counts on menus have all proven deeply controversial. Such interventions, Rachel Louise Moran argues, are merely the latest in a long, albeit often quiet, history of policy motivated by economic, military, and familial concerns. In Governing Bodies , Moran traces the tension between the intimate terrain of the individual citizen's body and the public ways in which the federal government has sought to shape the American physique over the course of the twentieth century. Distinguishing her subject from more explicit and aggressive government intrusion into the areas of sexuality and reproduction, Moran offers the concept of the «advisory state»—the use of government research, publicity, and advocacy aimed at achieving citizen support and voluntary participation to realize social goals. Instituted through outside agencies and glossy pamphlets as well as legislation, the advisory state is government out of sight yet intimately present in the lives of citizens. The activities of such groups as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Children's Bureau, the President's Council on Physical Fitness, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) implement federal body projects in subtle ways that serve to mask governmental interference in personal decisions about diet and exercise. From advice-giving to height-weight standards to mandatory nutrition education, these tactics not only empower and conceal the advisory state but also maintain the illusion of public and private boundaries, even as they become blurred in practice. Weaving together histories of the body, public policy, and social welfare, Moran analyzes a series of discrete episodes to chronicle the federal government's efforts to shape the physique of its citizenry. Governing Bodies sheds light on our present anxieties over the proper boundaries of state power.
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Governing Bodies
IN MODERN AMERICA
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When the Children’s Bureau conflated height and weight ratios with health, it solved some of its child health problems and created others. By the early 1920s, for example, statistician Louis Dublin wrote that immigrant children’s bodies did not conform to the same standards as white, native-born children. When public health workers measured Italian immigrant children to assess their health, he explained, they marked many of the children as healthy when they were in fact malnourished. Along the same lines, other researchers concluded that “the fact that an individual child weighs less or more than the average is not conclusive proof that he is undernourished or overnourished.”51 In a 1924 article bluntly titled “The Use and Abuse of Age-Height-Weight Tables as Indexes of Health and Nutrition,” table cocreator Bird T. Baldwin argued that height-weight tables were “frequently inaccurate in themselves” and egregiously inaccurate in the hands of novice measurers.52 He still supported the use of his own Baldwin-Wood tables, but decried the use of other tables and what he called the “inaccurate measurements” taken by laywomen, nurses, and nutritionists alike. While Baldwin’s condemnation of female-led public health work fits into the consolidation of medical authority happening at this moment, more surprising critics of the tables also spoke out. Suspicions even emerged from the Children’s Bureau itself, an agency whose public health identity was tightly linked with its dissemination of the charts. The bureau promoted height-weight tables even though few of its employees believed that the tables identified all the health issues they were meant to identify.53 The charts were political tools that produced the idea of the healthy modern child as much as they assessed it.
Bureau promotions not only popularized weighing, but also constructed the practice as an unusually intimate advisory state activity. Weighing in and of itself did not require medical expertise, but it did take equipment. Anyone could weigh themselves or someone else with little education. In the 1910s and early 1920s, public health and medical specialists owned the proper scales, which might be borrowed for child health contests. Women’s clubs interested in weighing and measuring children often teamed up with public health officials as a way of accessing scales and charts. By the late 1920s, however, it was much easier to find both of these technologies. Retailers began marketing home scales as early as 1913, but these remained too pricy for most.54 Scales constituted a more reasonable purchase for a school, though, and school nurses weighed children a few times each year.55 Most mothers could also be taught the basic graphic literacy required to read height-weight tables and figure out if the weight they calculated was too high, too low, or about right. With this number in hand, a mother or teacher could pick up a nutrition book to fix the problem herself. Or she might go to a clinic or physician, especially if it was a young child who was not measuring up. The bureau inserted these charts into nearly every infant and child care pamphlet it published. Tables were not meant to be flawless; they were meant to draw women in.
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