Introduction

Twentieth-century Britain was associated with an explosion of health advice. In their important study of texts for women industrial workers, Vicky Long and Hilary Marland found reproductive biology playing second fiddle to ‘hygiene, diet, exercise, recreation, fashion and beauty’. At the same time, however, literature on pregnancy and childcare proliferated, targeting professionals, schoolgirls and parents, especially mothers. This material has been analysed in terms of the transition from physical to psychological health, but what it had to say about disability has received relatively little attention. Chapter 6 will address this gap, focusing on the advice directed towards parents with children primarily under the age of one. A lot of information was conveyed in magazines and periodicals, but these are voluminous and sometimes hard to trace. Ephemera – for example, baby product leaflets circulated by commercial companies – were also commonplace, but often undated. And there were information films, but too few to track historical trends. Consequently, we will concentrate on advice books, using their publication dates and the revisions undertaken between editions to locate shifts in the guidance on offer between 1890 and 1980. In exploring how disability was represented, three main themes will be considered: the authoritarian approach to pregnancy and childcare, which gathered momentum from the late nineteenth century; its replacement by an intuitive approach in the aftermath of the Second World War; and the influence of this evolving literature on the experiences of disabled children and their families.