• The Cost of Labor:Lillian Wald, Maternal Health, and the Politics of Birth Control
• Hannah Greene (bio)

In late February 1929, a letter from Margaret Sanger reached Lillian Wald's desk at 265 Henry Street in lower Manhattan. Wald, the founder of public health nursing in the United States, had previously employed Sanger as a visiting obstetrical nurse. Sanger's decision to write to Wald stemmed from her first-hand experience of Wald's clientele and philosophy of public health nursing, which had also provided a significant catalyst for Sanger's establishment of the organization that would eventually become Planned Parenthood. Her brief note asked Wald for her name as a patron of a dinner to benefit the Birth Control and Research Clinic. Carefully adding the caveat that "[t]he use of [Wald's] name [did] not entail any further obligation,"¹ she tempered her request but sought to capitalize upon Wald's considerable sociopolitical cache. Though Wald graciously complied, she expressed her distinct preference that Sanger "please have that as a personal matter—not as a Henry Street Settlement one."²

Wald personally supported Sanger's campaign for women's access to contraception, but carefully dissociated her settlement house and public nursing service from officially affiliating with the fight for birth control. She approached this thorny issue differently from women like the lapsed Catholic Sanger and the Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman, who came from working-class families and represented competing voices within the movement's radical wing during its incipient stages. Instead, Wald drew from the maternalist model of social reform that she learned from her mother and aunts throughout her formative years in a middle-class acculturated Jewish home in Rochester, New York. Maternalism, premised on an essentialist conception of women as intrinsically predisposed to [End Page 515] nurture and care, inspired the trajectory of her career in public health.³ She did not sanction birth control as women's right to free themselves from their reproductive organs, and thus attain full equality with men. Rather, Wald advocated behind the scenes for married women's access to birth control in order to facilitate their own, their families', and especially their children's health, as a facet of her programmatic public health endeavors. In line with the maternalist ideals that precipitated her public health work, Wald focused upon ensuring that married women had the requisite information both to protect their reproductive health, and to control their family sizes for the sake of their families' welfare.

Wald's attraction to maternalism, a popular "collective belief in gender differences based on motherhood as foundation for reform,"⁴ mirrored that of many other white middle-class American women of the time. Both American Jewish women reformers and their non-Jewish counterparts found in maternalism a resonant justification for their increased entry into the public realm. For American Jewish women, however, it held additional significance. Maternalist visions of women's rightful positions as members of the social body enabled them to forge a respectable path not only into the public realm, but into the milieu of white, middle-class, non-Jewish women pursuing similar work. It simultaneously enabled these women to engage in newfound public-facing activities outside of the home and offered them a means to garner increased respectability and acceptance among non-Jewish white women of the same socioeconomic stratum. Reshaping the ideology of maternalism in a Jewish framework, they adapted it to suit evolving American Jewish conceptions of womanhood that privileged motherhood and spiritual guardianship of the family and community. Maternalism enhanced their moral authority and legitimacy both within and beyond their Jewish communities and charted a gendered road into the public sphere that simultaneously invoked their Jewishness and exemplified their Americanness.⁵ These women's gendered expressions of Americanness and Jewishness mutually strengthened one another.

As Wald came of age, middle-class American Jewish women and their Christian counterparts built upon the previous generation's model of maternalism to guide their social and political action. Premised upon the idea that they had a mission "to nurture mothers in their maternal vocation in order to ensure that children would be nurtured to worthy [End Page 516] citizenship,"⁶ Progressive maternalists...

• 劳动成本：莉莲·沃尔德（Lillian Wald），孕产妇保健和节育政策
• 汉娜·格林（生物）

1929年2月下旬，玛格丽特·桑格（Margaret Sanger）的一封信到达了曼哈顿下城亨利街265号的莉莲·沃尔德（Lillian Wald）的办公桌。沃尔德（Wald）是美国公共卫生护理的创始人，此前曾雇用桑格（Sanger）担任客座产科护士。Sanger决定写信给Wald的原因是她对Wald客户的第一手经验和公共卫生护理的哲学，这也为Sanger建立该组织（最终成为计划生育）提供了重要催化剂。她的简短笔记要求Wald作为晚餐的赞助人而得名，以使节育和研究诊所受益。仔细添加警告，“使用[Wald]的名字[没有]不再承担任何其他义务，” ¹她缓和了自己的要求，但试图利用Wald相当可观的社会政治底蕴。尽管Wald慷慨地答应了，但她还是表达了自己的明显偏爱，即Sanger“请把这作为个人事务，而不是作为Henry Street Settlement的事务”。^2个

沃尔德亲自支持桑格（Sanger）争取妇女获得避孕的运动，但仔细地使她的住所和公共护理服务脱离正式参与争取节育的斗争。她处理这个棘手的问题的方式与已故的天主教桑格人和犹太无政府主义者艾玛·戈德曼（Emma Goldman）等女性不同，她们来自工人阶级家庭，并在运动初期处于运动激进派内代表着相互竞争的声音。瓦尔德取而代之的是，沃尔德借鉴了母爱主义的社会改革模式，在整个成长过程中，她从母亲和姑妈那里学到了东西，她是在纽约罗切斯特的一座中产阶级，受过犹太教养的犹太家中。产妇主义以妇女的本质主义观念为前提，后者固有地倾向于[End Page 515]养育和护理激发了她在公共卫生领域的职业发展轨迹。³她没有将节育作为妇女从其生殖器官中解放出来并因此获得与男子完全平等的权利。相反，沃尔德在幕后倡导已婚妇女能够获得节育措施，以促进自身，家人，尤其是子女的健康，这是其计划性公共卫生事业的一个方面。与推动公共卫生工作的母权主义理想一致，Wald致力于确保已婚妇女拥有必要的信息，既可以保护自己的生殖健康，又可以为了家庭福祉而控制家庭规模。

沃尔德（Wald）对母爱制的吸引力，这是一种流行的“集体观念，即以孕产为基础的性别差异的集体信仰”，[ ^4]反映了当时许多其他美国中产阶级白人妇女的情况。美国犹太妇女改革者和非犹太妇女改革者在母婴制中都发现她们增加进入公共领域的理由是共鸣的。但是，对于美国犹太妇女而言，它具有另外的意义。母权主义对妇女作为社会团体成员应有的地位的看法使她们不仅在公共领域，而且在白人妇女中从事类似工作的中产阶级，非犹太妇女的环境中，开辟了一条值得尊重的道路。同时，这使这些妇女能够在家庭之外从事新的面向公众的活动，并为她们提供了一种手段，使他们在社会经济阶层相同的非犹太白人妇女中获得更多的尊重和接受。在犹太框架内重塑母爱主义思想，他们对其进行了修改，以适应不断发展的美国犹太女性观念，这种观念赋予了母亲以母性特权以及对家庭和社区的精神监护权。母爱主义在犹太人社区内外都增强了他们的道德权威和合法性，并绘制了一条进入公共领域的性别之路，同时唤起了他们的犹太性并体现了他们的美国性。⁵这些女性对美国和犹太人的性别表达相互促进。

随着Wald的年龄增长，中产阶级的美国犹太妇女及其基督徒同僚建立在上一代的母爱主义模式基础上，以指导她们的社会和政治行动。前提是他们的使命是“在母亲的职业中养育母亲，以确保将儿童培养成应有的[End Page 516]公民身份，” ⁶进步的母亲主义者...