Oct 14, 2026 · 27 min · 12 segments
**Episode #46: Michelle Bezark** Welcome to our latest edition of *WonkCast: People Power Policy*. You can’t talk about modern child and family policy without referencing the Social Security Act…
What did studying the Shepard-Towner Act, what did it force you to change your mind about that you would have reflexively disagreed with when you first embarked on that project?
The first thing that comes to mind is I think I coming out of history department and thinking, you know, the way that a lot of child welfare policy literature reads or read at the time was like policy of social control, which is I think the lens that I came to this project from.
with because the Children's Bureau and well, less so as I got deeper into it, less of the Children's Bureau, but the state agents were doing all kinds of wacky stuff.
The Better Baby Contest was one of the hooks, which just absolutely came out of the eugenic movement.
And just for context, those were... contests at state fairs where mothers and babies would bring their babies and they would be judged.
You know, in the 19th century, they would be judged by local dignitaries on sort of how attractive they were.
Actually, the Children's Bureau itself was anti-baby contest to begin with, but the state level administrators realized that this was a practice that really could draw people in.
People were coming to the state fairs anyways, and it was something that people could get excited about.
And so it was actually an instance of State administrators realizing they could meet people where they were, they could make public health fun and exciting.
They could infuse public health into what had otherwise been just kind of a beauty contest because they brought in doctors and nurses to be the judges and their babies were brought and they were still the pageant component of it, but they were also given their well-baby chance.
So that's just one example of what looked at first blush like, wow, that's really the state acting in ways it shouldn't or in ways that are about controlling the population and lifting up some while diminishing others.
Really, when you take a closer look at it, they're being much more strategic than I had given credit for.
And I think part of what also really shifted the way that I was thinking about the project in terms of the states impetus to control society and order society was coming across all of these mother's letters that I opened the book with of just how desperate these women were for any kind of uniform information and help and thinking about sort of what the promise of public policy held for them in this moment, where the federal government was kind of a blank slate to people at the time.
This was the first explicit social welfare policy in the country's history, so people didn't have negative associations.
One of the mothers who wrote a letter to the Children's Bureau refer to their baby as really proudly as, hey, I'm raising my baby the government way, which rings very strange to our modern ears.
And when you read these women's accounts of what they were dealing with, when they would ask their doctors for birth control strategies, and their doctors were laughing their faces about it, you can see how the sort of desperate need for just one answer or one sort of scientific or proven answer for like, how do you raise your babies in a healthy way? And you can see that now too.
What did studying the Shepard-Towner Act, what did it force you to change your mind about that you would have reflexively disagreed with when you first embarked on that project?
The first thing that comes to mind is I think I coming out of history department and thinking, you know, the way that a lot of child welfare policy literature reads or read at the time was like policy of social control, which is I think the lens that I came to this project from.
with because the Children's Bureau and well, less so as I got deeper into it, less of the Children's Bureau, but the state agents were doing all kinds of wacky stuff.
The Better Baby Contest was one of the hooks, which just absolutely came out of the eugenic movement.
And just for context, those were... contests at state fairs where mothers and babies would bring their babies and they would be judged.
You know, in the 19th century, they would be judged by local dignitaries on sort of how attractive they were.
Actually, the Children's Bureau itself was anti-baby contest to begin with, but the state level administrators realized that this was a practice that really could draw people in.
People were coming to the state fairs anyways, and it was something that people could get excited about.
And so it was actually an instance of State administrators realizing they could meet people where they were, they could make public health fun and exciting.
They could infuse public health into what had otherwise been just kind of a beauty contest because they brought in doctors and nurses to be the judges and their babies were brought and they were still the pageant component of it, but they were also given their well-baby chance.
So that's just one example of what looked at first blush like, wow, that's really the state acting in ways it shouldn't or in ways that are about controlling the population and lifting up some while diminishing others.
Really, when you take a closer look at it, they're being much more strategic than I had given credit for.
And I think part of what also really shifted the way that I was thinking about the project in terms of the states impetus to control society and order society was coming across all of these mother's letters that I opened the book with of just how desperate these women were for any kind of uniform information and help and thinking about sort of what the promise of public policy held for them in this moment, where the federal government was kind of a blank slate to people at the time.
This was the first explicit social welfare policy in the country's history, so people didn't have negative associations.
One of the mothers who wrote a letter to the Children's Bureau refer to their baby as really proudly as, hey, I'm raising my baby the government way, which rings very strange to our modern ears.
And when you read these women's accounts of what they were dealing with, when they would ask their doctors for birth control strategies, and their doctors were laughing their faces about it, you can see how the sort of desperate need for just one answer or one sort of scientific or proven answer for like, how do you raise your babies in a healthy way? And you can see that now too.
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