Конкурсите за най-добре гледано бебе в работата на здравно-съвещателните станции през 30-те години на ХХ век
The “Better Baby” Contests in the Activities of the Health Stations in the 1930s

Summary/Abstract: The “Better Baby Contests” started in the USA at the beginning of the 20th century. The first one was organized in Iowa in 1911. These competitions were initiated as one of the many biopolitical inventions in the modern struggle against infant mortality. In the 1920s such “Better Baby Contests” started also in the Balkan states. The struggle for hygiene, health, cleanness, mother’s enlightenment and modern children care became stronger in the 1930s. The “Better Baby Contests” is an expression of this struggle in the context of other biopolitical measures and media discourses. For its agents: public health nurses, mothers, educators, politicians, journalists this competitions had different general meanings. In the children health centers, where the public health nurses were the main agents of this struggle, they aimed to propagate the activities of the centers as new form of communication between health administration and families, to attract the poor families and to improve the conditions for child rearing in the visited homes. Drawing the line between “dirty” and “clean” in their documentation about home visits they aimed to stimulate the poor parents for a better child care including them in the competition as well as in different forms of social support. The important message of those social reform attempts was that not the babies from the wealthy families background were targeted, but first of all the babies, whose mothers were cooperative, ready to know and practice the modern norms of child care and are ready to fulfil the advises of the health stations.

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