The Legacy of Hull House and the Children's Bureau in the American Mortality Transition

The major advances in American life expectancy achieved during the twentieth century began with the remarkable decline in infant mortality between 1910 and 1930. Until the 1990s, explanations of this demographic event centered on improvements in nutrition, public health, and medical science. Recent causal reappraisals emphasize the importance of changes in household‐level health behaviors in reducing infant deaths, changes that are consistent with the maternal education campaigns engineered by Progressive Era reformers at the U.S. Children's Bureau. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses of bureau reports and Public Use Micro Sample census data, we link the reformers' philosophy and science to new evidence and conclusions about early improvements in infant survival.