Senior Theses
Publication Date
5-2019
Document Type
Thesis (Open Access)
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts in History
Department
History
Faculty Advisor(s)
Sharon Bailey Glasco (Thesis Advisor)
Subject Categories
Community Health and Preventive Medicine | Diseases | Health and Physical Education | History | History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Marketing | Public History | Social History | United States History
Abstract
During the anti-tuberculosis movement of the 1930s and 1940s, children were chosen as focal points, with their roles shaped by society’s changing view of childhood, the emergence of the middle class, and the socioeconomic and political climate. Children were used by middle-class reformers as conduits through which to disseminate information and enact controls on the working class. Health education in schools had two main goals: (1) for educated children to become educated adults, and (2) for educated children to transform the behaviors of adults around them. Although researchers have studied middle-class interventions into children’s health, few have analyzed the role children themselves played in the middle class’s goal of asserting themselves as intellectually and morally superior to the working class via the education of the working-class children. Using primary source material, such as curriculum guides and educational materials designed for children’s consumption (e.g., Huber the Tuber), this paper thus examines how and why children’s health education became a hotbed of middle- and working-class conflict, particularly with regards to beliefs in science and Western medicine, during the 1930s and 1940s.
Recommended Citation
Fisher, Hannah, "Selling Childhood: How the Middle Class Used Children in the Anti-Tuberculosis Movement (1930s-1940s)" (2019). Senior Theses. 6.
https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/histstud_theses/6
Included in
Community Health and Preventive Medicine Commons, Diseases Commons, Health and Physical Education Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, Marketing Commons, Public History Commons, Social History Commons, United States History Commons
