1 ene 1921 año - Sheppard-Towner Federal Maternity and Infancy Act

Descripción:

The first federally funded health-care legislation that provided federal funds for medical clinics, prenatal education programs, and visiting nurses.

At the dawn of the 1920s, public life in the United States had grown immeasurably more diverse. Women could now vote. More than 14 million immigrants — hailing primarily from Europe but also from Latin America and East Asia — called the country home. They spoke different languages, practiced a variety of religions, and followed unique cultural traditions (see “Comparing Interpretations”). The first phase of the Great Migration brought more than 1 million African Americans from all over the South into northern metropolises. Cities grew at the expense of rural areas. These dramatic changes led to conflict over what defined America — and Americans.

At the start of the 1920s, many progressives hoped that women would exercise their newfound political clout on social welfare issues — and many politicians feared the power of a female voting bloc. One prominent contingent of women, veterans of the Settlement House and other Progressive-Era reform movements, did take up social welfare. They created organizations like the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, a Washington-based advocacy group whose primary accomplishment was the first federally funded health-care legislation, the Sheppard-Towner Federal Maternity and Infancy Act (1921). Sheppard-Towner provided federal funds for medical clinics, prenatal education programs, and visiting nurses, leading to improved health care for the poor and significantly lower infant mortality rates. It also marked the first time that Congress designated federal funds for the states to encourage them to administer a social-welfare program. But other reforms stalled, and the decade proved not to be a watershed of welfare legislation.

Another contingent of activist women focused on securing legal equality with men. In 1923, Alice Paul, founder of the National Woman’s Party, persuaded congressional allies to consider an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. The proposed amendment stated simply that “men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States.” Advocates were hopeful; Wisconsin had passed a similar law two years earlier, which had helped women fight gender discrimination. But opponents pointed out that a national ERA would undermine recent labor laws that protected women from workplace abuses. Such laws recognized women’s vulnerability in a heavily sex-segregated labor market. Would a theoretical statement of “equality” help poor and working women more than existing protections? This question divided women’s rights advocates, and Paul’s effort fizzled. The ERA would be introduced repeatedly in Congress over the next five decades, leading to eventual passage and a bitter ratification struggle in the 1970s (see “The Women’s Movement and Gay Rights” in Chapter 28).

Women pushed for rights in another realm in the post–World War I years as well: reproduction. In 1921, Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which established birth control clinics and promoted women’s sexual health (it was renamed Planned Parenthood in 1942). Earlier such attempts had landed birth control advocates in jail, because contraceptive devices were illegal in most states and banned from the federal mail. But Sanger had achieved a legal victory in 1918 that permitted her to operate clinics as long as physicians prescribed contraception for medical reasons. She became an internationally recognized leader of the birth control movement in the 1920s, but women’s rights activists in later decades denounced Sanger because she advocated policies based on eugenics — a theory positing the genetic superiority of white over darker races and the genetic inferiority of groups of people such as prostitutes and criminals.

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