Before Head Start

Between the 1920s and the 1950s, the child welfare movement that had originated as a moral reform effort in the Progressive era evolved into the science of child development. In Before Head Start , Hamilton Cravens chronicles this transformation, both on the national level and from the perspective of the field’s best-known research center, the University of Iowa’s Child Welfare Research Station. Addressing the changing role played by women and the importance of Rockefeller philanthropy, he shows