Better baby contests peppered the American landscape throughout the early twentieth century. During contests, health experts evaluated infants according to new scales of pediatric fitness. Children with the highest scores, like blue-ribbon cattle at state fairs, received trophies for best expressing the “normal” characteristics for individuals of their age and race. These infants also often earned space in local—and sometimes national—news media, so contests became popular among community members who wanted to earn cultural capital and advertise the quality of their bloodlines.
Better baby contest scholarship has primarily focused on events in white, Midwestern, farming communities; however, there is ample evidence that minority groups hosted their own contests. Given the well-established connection between better baby contests and scientific racism in white communities, minority-group interest and investment in these events is surprising. The present project will explore this puzzle by analyzing 180 news items published from 1910 to 1940 in four popular black press publications from the mid-Atlantic region: the New York Amsterdam News, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Philadelphia Tribune, and the Pittsburgh Courier. This time period is significant not only because it encompasses the “height” of baby contest popularity but also because it considers transitional and tumultuous years for both African Americans and children, when mainstream beliefs about race both influenced medical diagnoses and mingled with popular myths about American citizenship, regional identity, and childhood. One goal of this analysis is simply to uncover the unique features of the better baby competitions that took place in African American communities of the mid-Atlantic region during this time. Another goal of assessing this news coverage is to understand the stories that black press journalists, who were openly-committed to community-building and civil rights advocacy, told about these contests and the historically-specific meanings they ascribed to the infant participants and their communities.
About the presenterKathryn J. Beardsley
Kathryn is a PhD student at Temple University. Her research interests include: communication and journalism history, disability studies, race and gender studies, and historical constructions of human difference in mass media.