Abstract
Hart mined historical archives in order to interrogate two social work and public health care programs launched between 1915 and 1930 for impoverished pregnant women and their newborns among New York City’s African Americans, British West Indians, and southern Italians. The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP), a charity and social service agency, tried to reduce rates of maternal and infant mortality in Columbus Hill (West 58th–63rd streets in Manhattan) among black migrants from the South and the Caribbean. Subsequently, the AICP focused on the same goal in the Mulberry district of Lower Manhattan with southern Italians.
Nine months into the Columbus Hill program, the AICP switched its goal from reducing tuberculosis and respiratory illnesses among black women and their infants to diminishing syphilis in the same population. All women who sought care in Columbus Hill first were required to take a syphilis test. This sudden swapping of aims reflected a prevailing white supremacist assumption that African American and African Caribbean women and men were sexually promiscuous.
The Mulberry Hill project attempted to reduce death rates among newborns and pregnant immigrant women from southern Italy while concomitantly ending their reliance on midwives. The AICP hoped to persuade the women to turn to obstetricians for their deliveries. The initiative failed since pregnant immigrant women in Mulberry Hill, long reliant on midwives in Italy, persisted in that preference.
This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of social work, health care, African American studies, gender studies, migration, and immigration. Sadly, its postmodern language and occasional lapses into polemics disqualify the book as a useful classroom text.
Missing from the book were maps of the geographic sections under study. To appreciate the context and terrain of the health projects Hart explored, one would have to be a Manhattanite to appreciate the location and juxtaposition of these neighborhoods within the overall island.
Unfortunately, the author generalized about social work and public health’s approach to maternity and infant care with black migrants and immigrants in the New York Cty between 1915 and 1930 by drawing on the writing of two prominent social workers who were directly involved in the AICP projects and on AICP records. While, of course, these sources were necessary data banks, they were insufficient for making the claims about the history of social work and health care that Hart asserts. Crucial omissions from the sources she studied were journal articles published between 1915 and 1930 from social work and public health journals regarding best practices in maternal and infant health promotion among African Americans, British West Indians, and southern European immigrants.
Another weakness of the book is its presentism, the assessment of the past through the lens of the present, a taboo for historians. One example constitutes the last sentence of the book: While the women and babies of Columbus Hill and the Mulberry District received cutting-edge health care for the time, what they received could have been much more effective if existing social inequalities had not been allowed to shape the experiments—and thus, the outcomes.