Mrs. Weston thus explains the woman’s point of view about this work: “Someone has said that infant mortality is the most sensitive index we possess of social welfare. It may be that in our fair climate we need never reach the appalling records of our eastern cities, but we who know the true state of things in Los Angeles believe that if there is not more care of our newly-born, that, while the death list may not compare with the East, we shall produce a sickly, ailing set of children who will be unable, at maturity, to cope with disease. We are accused of standing for a sort of social service which has to do with the effects only and not with the causes which create them.... We approach however our problems in a modern and scientific manner and we always seek for causes.”
The Women’s Municipal League of Boston has made a thorough study of public nursing and has adopted a scheme whereby the nurse and houseworker are combined. This system is called Household Nursing and its aim is to be self-supporting. The nurses are called “attendants” and the problem of their training has had to be worked out by patient experimentation.
Significant of the times, too, is the awakening of the women of the negro race as well as of the white. The negro woman is especially adapted through her past experiences for the profession of nursing and now, with the addition of scientific training, a means of skilled employment, coupled with an opportunity to render public service, in addition to her age-long domestic service, is open to her.
Women are developing largely for themselves the whole science of training for public nursing. The National Organization for Public Health Nursing has a broad social point of view, realizing that upon the district nurse rests the responsibility of applying in a very practical way among the people the results of scientific thought and research.
In this social battle to arrest and prevent disease, the campaign against infant mortality assumes an ever larger proportion, and as we should naturally expect, women are also in the front ranks here. More or less quietly for a long period women have studied and worked on the problem of infant mortality. In addition to their private efforts to reduce its amount, they have served in official capacities. In 1908, for example, a division of Child Hygiene was created in the New York City Health Department, after careful study of the organization of such an enterprise; and a competent woman physician, Dr. S. Josephine Baker, was placed at the head of it. It is believed to be the pioneer—the first bureau established under municipal control to deal exclusively with children’s health. There had previously been diverse or scattered activities in that direction but under the new plan all these were coördinated.