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“Lost Possibilities: The Rise and Fall of the United States Children's Bureau”

In the introduction to her famous anthology The Child and the State (1938), Grace Abbott, the former chief of the United States Children's Bureau, declared: "The progress of a state may be measured by the extent to which it safeguards the rights of its children." Abbott believed that some modest gains had been made in this field and called for policy makers to learn this history because it was "necessary to know the road we have traveled, the wrong turns that have been made because objectives were not clearly defined and because of fear to try a new road even when it was clear that the old one was only a cul-de-sac." Knowledge of the past, Abbott argued, could clear the way for creative governance. Now, nearly sixty years later, the historian Kriste Lindenmeyer has followed Abbott's advice by writing the first comprehensive history of Abbott's former agency from its creation in 1912 until its dismemberment in 1946. She builds upon the work of scholars, including Robyn Muncy's splendid Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935, who have explored the role of women in politics to explain the creation and rapid rise of the Children's Bureau during the Progressive Era. Although the bureau's original mission was limited to investigating and reporting upon the condition of the nation's children, within a decade its jurisdiction had dramatically expanded to include administering the first federal social welfare program, the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act of 1921. Lindenmeyer's insightful descriptions of the bureau's early investigations, especially its re-