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.

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