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107 four A School for Mothers In a recent article reviewing the work of Quebec health historians, François Guérard points out that this field of research has helped to deconstruct the notion of the “backwardness” of Quebec society compared to other North American and, more broadly, Western societies. Like many other areas of historical research, says Guérard, the social history of medicine as practised since the 1970s set out to demonstrate that the Quebec health system and those participating in it had been open to change and reform, modelling itself on “what was done in the United States, Europe, and the other Canadian provinces.”1 According to this new interpretation, the Catholic Church, long held responsible for Quebec’s delay in adapting to the “modern” world, learned to share power not only with the physicians in the hospitals it controlled, but also with the state, which, long before the 1960s, had been seeking more and more to become involved in the field of health. With respect to public health in particular, some scholars have actually argued that the Quebec state put itself in the vanguard of North American societies by endowing the province with a network of health units which, immediately after World War II, were extended to the greater part of its territory.2 As Guérard notes, most historians of health who refute the notion of Quebec backwardness take into account the resistances and power struggles surrounding the adoption and application of the various health reforms, painting a nuanced and detailed portrait of the upheavals that took place in this sector. At the moment, however, the prevailing interpretation insists more on the modernizing efforts undertaken by governmental, medical, and even clerical authorities than on the inertia of the public powers who, according to an earlier version of Quebec history, were under the thumb of an all-powerful, retrograde clergy.3 For this new historiography, the health services , like other aspects of the social and collective life of Quebecers, instead underwent a development very similar to that of their Anglo-Protestant neighbours before 1960, even if the hospital infrastructure belonged mostly to religious communities. 108 babies FoR tHe nation The rejection of the idea of Quebec backwardness in the field of health introduces a necessary note of caution. In our opinion, however, in the name of a somewhat triumphalist view of the achievements of the state, it fails to cast light on the specific nature and the insufficiencies that characterized the development of the sector. This thesis also avoids examining in depth another possibility, namely that of the coexistence of “old” and “new” forms of the management and delivery of health services arising out of the varying power relations, not just between Church and state but between all the parties involved, including groups of laywomen, and by social norms imposed by the conception of gender relations in industrialized societies. The struggle against infant mortality and the medicalization of maternity that accompanied it provide a good example of this scenario since the two processes depended on a variety of services developed by both the private and public sectors, associated in the historiography with “tradition” and “modernity” respectively. The Church, the philanthropic sector, women’s associations , and even private companies actually contributed as much as the state to the development of a complex network of organizations intended to educate mothers or offer them certain types of care. Thus, in this area as in many others, government action did not put an end to private initiatives, which continued up to the 1960s and even later. In fact, certain government projects, such as the introduction of County Health Units beginning in the 1920s, initially received financial support from private groups (in this case the U.S.-based Rockefeller Foundation),4 while public authorities contributed financially to institutions created by clergy, reformers, and women’s groups, such as the francophone and anglophone Gouttes de lait and Wellbaby Clinics in Montreal, the Assistance maternelle, and the Victorian Order of Nurses (von). On each occasion that it contributed funding to private agencies, the government attempted to bring them under bureaucratic control to ensure that the sums allocated were well spent and that the services provided displayed a degree of professionalism, something that can be ascribed to “modern” state structures and the “modern” administrative mindset . But there were also cases where the philanthropic sector itself tried to make its activities more professional. Thus the Fédération des oeuvres de charité canadiennes-françaises...

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