Founded in 1912, the U.S. Children’s Bureau established programs to expand and standardize the observation of early childhood development. Photo: Measuring board for the Children’s Bureau, ca. 1920, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs.

The ACA was established in 1881 by women graduates from seven of America’s leading women's colleges and universities and has mainly been described as an “early pressure group” for women’s access to higher education. Less well known are the ACA’s initiatives to support its members in settings far from universities and research labs. Beginning in the 1890s, the ACA launched with the grassroots support of its female members extra-academic research on early childhood development. Using their own babies as the central objects of examination, women college graduates across the country expanded the very heart of motherhood and domestic life to include the concerns of cutting-edge science. Their efforts permitted early childhood development to take hold within both science and society; in the end, the women’s initiatives encouraged the American federal government to adopt many of their concerns as its own.

My goal is to introduce the actors behind this initiative and analyze the rationales that launched their work.