Cultivating Health

Price: $45.95  

Subtitle: Los Angeles Women and Public Health Reform
Author: Jennifer Lisa Koslow
Subject: Medicine, Public Health, Women's Studies, History
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4528-8
Pages: 232 pages
Publication Date: July 2009
Series: Critical Issues in Health and Medicine

Praise for Cultivating Health

"Jennifer Koslow expands our understanding of Progressive-era urban health reform in a careful and insightful narrative of female-led campaigns in Los Angeles, a multicultural city not always included in our narratives of the period. This is a story of state-making on the local level that is consistently interesting and well-written as well as a fresh model of public health reform in one city that should spur historians to look into these issues in other cities."
—Ruth Crocker, professor of history and director of the Women's Studies Program, Auburn University

"This complex study is one of the very best we have of Progressive Era
public health.  With genuine sensitivity, Jennifer Koslow helps us
understand the deeply human motivations and consequences of the reform
impulse."
—Robert D. Johnston, author of The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon

"A fine book that will add to our understanding of the development of health care in this country and the role of women at this critical time in history."
—Bulletin of the History of Medicine

"An original and fine-grained study of the far-reaching activities and impact of an early generation of white affluent female reformers in a rapidly growing multicultural West Coast metropolis. This book adds rich detail and depth to our understanding of the history of Progressive-era Los Angeles, urban reform, public health, and women's volunteerism."
—American Historical Review

At the dawn of the Progressive Era, when America was experiencing an industrial boom, many working families often ate contaminated food, lived in decaying urban tenements, and had little access to medical care. In a city that demanded change, Los Angeles women, rather than city officials, championed the call to action.

Cultivating Health, an interdisciplinary chronicle, details women’s impact on remaking health policy, despite the absence of government support. Combining primary source and municipal archival research with comfortable prose, Jennifer Lisa Koslow explores community nursing, housing reform, milk sanitation, childbirth, and the campaign against venereal disease in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Los Angeles. She demonstrates how women implemented health care reform and civic programs while laying the groundwork for a successful transition of responsibility back to government.

Koslow highlights women’s home health care and urban policy-changing accomplishments and pays tribute to what would become the model for similar service-based systems in other American centers.