ecially useful are the chapters g with preparation of the breasts atally and with techniques of ng during the first week.

e time of introduction of solid as suggested by Dr. Naish, is very later than it is in this country; he time for dropping out the eveneeding. The diet is less varied it is in the usual American prac-' and more heavily weighted with hydrate foods.

e book is full of practical suggeswhich should be helpful to all cians, but especially to the young r who has not had time to learn details through experience.

Katherine Bain, M. D.

CALENDAR

e 6-10-American Medical Assotion. Annual session. Atlantic ty, N. J.

e 9-11-National Probation and arole Association. National conrence in cooperation with Ohio robation and Parole Association. eveland, Ohio.

e 12-17-National Conference of ocial Work. Seventy-sixth annual eeting. Cleveland, Ohio.

ɔme other organizations meeting in ciation with the National Conferof Social Work:

merican Association of Group rkers.

merican Association of Medical SoWorkers.

merican Association of Psychiatric ial Workers (June 10-12).

merican Association Association of Social rkers.

'hild Welfare League of America. 'ommittee on Services to Unmarried ents.

lorence Crittenton Homes.

iational Association of School SoWorkers.

Tational Association of Training 100ls.

Jational Committee on Homemaker vice.

Jational Council on Social Work ucation.

National Probation and Parole Asiation (June 9-11).

National Publicity Council for alth and Welfare Services.

CHILD HEALTH DAY, 1949

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A Proclamation

WHEREAS the Congress, by joint resolution of May 18, 1928 (45 Stat. 617), has authorized and requested the President to issue annually a proclamation setting apart May 1 as Child Health Day; and

WHEREAS every citizen should do his utmost toward safeguarding and improving the health of the Nation's children: Now, THEREFORE, I, HARRY S. TRUMAN, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate May 1, 1949, as Child Health Day; and I invite all agencies, organizations, and citizens interested in the physical and mental well-being of children to consider on that day how best to promote in their own communities during the coming year definite programs of action designed to help our children to grow into healthy and responsible individuals dedicated to the principles of democracy.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States of America to be affixed. DONE at the City of Washington this sixteenth day of April in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and forty-nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and seventy-third.

Dr. Eliot Goes to WHO

When Dr. Martha M. Eliot, our Associate Chief, leaves the Children's Bureau in June to become Assistant Director General of the World Health Organization she will be taking a logical step in a career of ever-widening activity and leadership.

Dr. Eliot came from a line of pioneers in intellectual and spiritual affairs. From childhood her character was shaped toward devotion to the search for truth, compassionate understanding of her fellow men, and development of her great resources of mind and spirit.

After graduating from Radcliffe College she was for a time a medical social worker, and this experience led her to study medicine.

Three years after receiving her medical degree at Johns Hopkins she joined the pediatrics staff of Yale University School of Medicine, where she did clinical and research work as well as teaching. Soon Grace Abbott, then Chief of the Children's Bureau, persuaded her to enter the Children's Bureau, assuring her that she could continue her work at New Haven through arrangements between the Bureau and the university. For 10 years she engaged in notable studies of the growth and development of children, especially demonstrations of community programs for prevention and control of rickets. Her interests, however, began to branch

tional reputation, into application of medical knowledge through community organization and national programs.

In 1934 Dr. Eliot came to Washington to become Assistant Chief of the Children's Bureau. Her first job was to develop the basis for the maternal and child-health and crippled children's provisions of the Social Security Act. After the act was passed, in 1935, it was Dr. Eliot's resourcefulness and knowhow that translated the legislation into a working program. She was quick to see the importance of advisory committees consisting of both lay and professional members. She studied at first hand the problems of the States. And she showed great administrative ability. At the same time she was giving leadership to the Bureau's research activities in the field of maternal and child health. She gave personal attention to the Bureau's bulletins for parents.

When British civilians were bombed Dr. Eliot studied methods of protecting children in case similar danger came to the United States. She went to England in 1941 as a member of a War Department mission to study civil defense there and later was lent to the Office of Civilian Defense, to advise it on plans of evacuation of children and other aspects of civil defense. Her outstanding wartime work, however, was organization and direction of the Emergency Maternity and Infant Care Program, under which more than 1,500,

through State health departments, pai for by Federal funds supplied throug the Children's Bureau.

Since the war Dr. Eliot has worked to improve State and community health services for mothers and children and to lay the foundation for expanded research in child life.

Dr. Eliot's international activities of behalf of children began with a study of maternal and child-health activities in Europe in 1935. She has since worked with the League of Nations and with UNRRA, and was vice chairman of the U. S. delegation to the Interna tional Health Conference in 1946. She was one of the three United States delegates to the first World Health Assembly, in 1948, and is chairman of WHO's maternal and child-health com mittee.

In the World Health Organization Dr. Eliot will be responsible for opera tions in the broad field of public health.

Dr. Eliot has given a quarter of a century to working toward the goal of a fair deal and an even chance for every child in the United States. Now her concern will be the children of the world.

The Children's Bureau will continue to bear the stamp of her leadership, resourcefulness, comradeship, and de votion. The contribution that she has made to its work through the years can never be replaced.

in which field she had won an interna

Chief, Children's Bureau.

Page

Teamwork in Texas.

162

The Right Start_

166

U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1949

H

OME HELP SERVICES in Great Britain have begun to flourish under a Government that is committed to a complete program of welfare services. But the original legislation was promulgated by a conservative Government, added to by a wartime coalition, and carried into effect largely with the assistance of a voluntary organization that received every assistance from each Government in turn. The result is that no homehelp service in the world is so strongly backed by Government and local authorities. Yet we have developed a service that is anything but bureaucratic. It has the enthusiasm, ideals, and freedom characteristic of the professions that largely originated in voluntary social service.

Our beginnings were modest. Apart from isolated experiments by small voluntary societies like the Jewish Sick Room Help Society, which started one in 1895, nothing much happened until 1936, when public-health legislation,

consolidating a 1918 act, gave certain local authorities, called welfare authorities, power to pay women to do domestic work for expectant and nursing mothers. (The local authorities in Britain, by the way, are county and county-borough councils and borough or urban or rural-district councils; these consist of a local elected and unpaid council. Such councils control paid permanent officials, like small editions of Parliament with its civil service.)

Each local authority concerned was to find the money required, although it was not compelled to do anything about starting a service.

The net result of this was negligible. Nearly all local attempts failed through lack of organization and failure to re

This is the fourth of a series on homemaking service that The Child is publishing. The first of the series, printed in August 1947, discussed the principles of this type of service. Others described the work in Finland (July 1948) and Australia (November 1948). Additional articles are planned.

cruit workers. It was really nobody's business and everybody was too busy doing something else. Then the war came along and we had certain pressing matters to attend to for a few years.

Wartime, however, increased the demand for home helps. Women were needed in industry. People were becoming more tired. Hospital accommodation was overtaxed. Blitzing and a building standstill ensured that we were not going to have adequate hospital space for years to come. Home helps were more urgently needed than ever, and the Government recognized that the basis had to be broadened to cover all kinds of health cases.

A rather clumsy title, "Home and Domestic Help Schemes," was evolved in connection with fresh legislation in 1944, which indicated that help would be available under the scheme to assist in maternity cases and in cases of illness generally.

All this was very encouraging, but there just weren't any home helps to

ubsidize, except in one or two places where small local schemes got going. It is one thing to give local authorities tatutory powers; it is another to get I plan to work.

Just before the 1944 legislation was nacted, the city of Oxford Women's Voluntary Services asked the city's permission to carry out an experimental home-help scheme for, and with, the ity council.

The W. V. S., which originated as a women's organization for civil defense, nrolled over a million women during he war, extending its activities to any job that needed to be done, from running canteens to acting as the distributng agency for the wonderfully genrous American gifts of food and clothing.

Now in peacetime it continues its activities as a social-service organization, for it exists to help the state nationally and the local authorities locally, and it has a complete national coverage. That is, when it is at its peak mobilization, it has a representative in every street and village in the country. It is completely nonpolitical, like the British civil service, but because it is voluntary it can do a good many things in the way of experiment and improvisation that officials cannot do.

The Oxford City Council gave its blessing, and the great experiment in home helps began. There were several things to clarify. The first was the purpose of the scheme; the second, how it would function; the third, the status and conditions of the workers; and the

fourth, recruitment and publicity. Right away it was decided to call the workers "home helps" and the scheme simply "the Home Help Service."

A place in the health services

The purpose was clearly to form an adjunct to the health service of the community. This ruled out all forms of what has come to be termed "private" service; that is, the ordinary domestic help which anybody might require. Owing to the shortage of domestic workers generally, there is a Government-sponsored scheme to deal with this latter problem. The National Institute of Houseworkers has been formed to improve the status of such workers and to recruit and train women

JUNE 1949

who will attend, daily or hourly, any household or will even become permanent domestics to private individuals. The National Institute of Houseworkers, by the way, has managed, after much uphill work, to open nine training centers by 1949 and hopes to turn out about 700 workers this year. In 1944, however, all this was still at the paper

stage.

Home helps, then, were to concentrate on health, with maternity cases in families with children under 5 as top priority. A medical certificate (from a doctor, a district nurse, or a hospital almoner) had to be presented by every applicant for help. It was to be an emergency service; that is, it would take only short-time cases. This excluded old people and those with chronic illnesses. It is realized, however, that when enough home helps were available, something would have to be done to help these people in their difficulties. Finally, the service was intended for any health emergency, without discrimination between the rich and the poor. Those who could pay would be expected to pay; those who could not would get the service anyway, contributing according to their means.

New career for women

As it was to be a "public" health service, it was determined that the helps, when recruited, would be the paid employees of the local authority and responsible to it, not to the householder. The householder would pay the city council and not the help. It was envisaged that a home help would visit an average of two or three houses a day, and that her work would be planned so that she was not faced with a week's washing at each house and was not kept too long in unpleasant surroundings.

In recruiting, this emphasis on a public-health service was a trump card. The home helps quickly realized that they were employees of the city, like nurses, school teachers, or policemen, and that they were visiting houses as workers in the health service and not as drudges to be bossed about. We were able to appeal to an admirable type of woman. Although very little training was possible to begin with, we

soon found women who could do practically everything in the home when the mother was confined to bed. They could do housework, shopping, cooking, taking the babies out; in fact, they could take complete charge of the home. Both married and unmarried women were accepted, a small proportion on a part-time basis. The quality of the home helps resulted in an almost entire absence of complaints; on the contrary, letters of appreciation very soon became a feature.

While the administration lay in the hands of a voluntary organizer, the conditions of employment for home. helps were fixed to compare favorably with those of shop and factory workers. The city guaranteed a fixed weekly wage for a 42-hour week, with overtime for Sundays and legal holidays, and with compensatory leave in certain cases. Holidays with pay were included. The support of the Ministry of Labor (employment) was obtained and employment as a home help was given a priority equal to that of factory work. This permitted women to enter this occupation with priority. (At that time all labor was controlled.)

A brochure was produced and distributed through employment ex-. changes, entitled "A New Career for Women." That was what we were determined to make it.

As a seal on this, the Dowager Marchioness of Reading, chairman of Women's Voluntary Services, who is wellknown in the United States, offered to equip the first 40 home helps with a snappy indoor and outdoor uniform. Later schemes have adopted this excellent idea, although clothing restrictions have proved some hindrance to its universal adoption.

An office with a telephone was provided by the city. All was now set for the scheme.

The scheme was launched with a big public meeting, attended by the principal city officials, representatives of the Ministry of Health, and other distinguished visitors and speakers. At the close, one woman volunteered to enroll as a home help! Our first recruit! Anyhow, a start had been made and people began to talk. It was not long before we enrolled 10, 20, 30 women. In our first year about 90 women applied. Of these, 40 became

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