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Suburbia and infant death in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Adelaide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Philippa Mein Smith  and
Lionel Frost
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Extract

Altogether, as a place of education Adelaide falls far short of the mark; as a place of amusement it is hopeless; and as a village — well, it is tolerably clean, and comparatively healthy.

Thistle Anderson (1905)

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , October 1994 , pp. 251 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this paper were presented to various conferences in Australia and New Zealand during 1992 and 1993, and we are grateful to the participants for their comments and suggestions. We also wish to thank those colleagues who gave such excellent research assistance and to acknowledge the help of the various institutions who provided research funding and access to material.

References

1 Anderson, T., Arcadian Adelaide (Adelaide, 1905), 36.Google Scholar

2 Quoted by Olsen, D.J., The Growth of Victorian London (Harmondsworth, 1976), 25.Google Scholar There are many excellent accounts of the development of suburbia. See, for example, Fishman, R., Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987).Google Scholar

3 On the recent questioning of separate spheres as an organizing framework for womens' history, see Vickery, A., ‘Historiographical review: golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English womens' history’, Historical Journal, 36:2 (1993), 383–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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5 According to these ideals, men were portrayed as ‘defenders’ of the home and women as ‘keepers’. Grimshaw, P., Lake, M., McGrath, A. and Quartly, M., Creating a Nation, 1788–1990 (Melbourne, 1994), esp. ch. 5. This offers an Australian interpretation of women's contribution and place.Google Scholar

6 Mayne, A., The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–1914 (Leicester, 1993), 127Google Scholar. In his analysis of slums as products of discourse, Mayne goes so far as to proclaim that ‘Slums are myths’, ibid., 1.

7 Ward, D., Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840–1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto (Cambridge, 1989), introduction.Google Scholar

8 See Harris, R., ‘American suburbs: a sketch of a new interpretation’, Journal of Urban History, 15 (1988), 98–103;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Statham, P. (ed.), The Origins of Australia's Capital Cities (Cambridge and Melbourne, 1989).Google Scholar

9 Hill, L.E., ‘Infant mortality and garden cities’, The Child, 9 (1918–1919), 487.Google Scholar

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12 Woods, R.I., Watterson, P.A. and Woodward, J.H., ‘The causes of rapid infant mortality decline in England and Wales, 1861–1921. Part I’, Population Studies, 42 (1988), 343–66CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, discusses the ‘urban effect’, while explanations for infant mortality decline are offered in ‘Part II’, Population Studies, 43 (1989), 113–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Regional comparisons are given in Lee, C.H., ‘Regional inequalities in infant mortality in Britain, 1861–1971: patterns and hypotheses’, Population Studies, 45 (1991), 55–65.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

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14 Pollard, S., A History of Labour in Sheffield (Liverpool, 1959), 99.Google Scholar See also Williams, N., ‘Death in its season: class, environment and the mortality of infants in nineteenth-century Sheffield’, Social History of Medicine, 5 (1992), 80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

15 Smith, F.B., The People's Health 1830–1910 (London, 1979), 69.Google Scholar Useful Scottish and Irish comparisons are given in Smith, , ‘Health’, in Benson, J. (ed.), The Working Class in England 1875–1914 (London, 1985), 36–62.Google Scholar

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17 Board of Trade, ‘Working-class rents, housing and retail prices’, 815.

18 See Smith, , People's Health, ch. 2.Google Scholar

19 See Frost, L., The New Urban Frontier: Urbanisation and City-Building in Australasia and the American West (Sydney, 1991).Google Scholar

20 For a more extended general account of the development of Adelaide, see Frost, L., ‘Nineteenth-century Adelaide in a global context’, Australian Economic History Review, 31 (1991), 28–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Ibid., 36.

22 South Australian Census, 1871–1911.

23 Tregenza, J., ‘Charles Reade, 1880–1933: town planning missionary’, Journal of Historical Society of South Australia, 9 (1981), 61, 65.Google Scholar

24 Adelaide, Advertiser, 12 09 1892.Google Scholar

25 South Australian Census, 1881.

26 Frost, , The New Urban Frontier, 12–14, 16. The peak density in London averaged 365 per acre in 1891; in Chicago the figure was 273 in 1900.Google Scholar

27 Mein Smith, P., ‘Infant welfare services and infant mortality: a historian's view’, Australian Economic Review (1991), 24.Google Scholar

28 Stevenson, T., ‘Miasmas, morbidity and milieu: mortality in Victorian South Australia’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, 81 (1980–1981), 42Google Scholar; Clark, W., ‘Report on the drainage of the City of Adelaide’, South Australian Parliamentary Paper, 63 (1878).Google Scholar

29 See Woods, Watterson and Woodward, ‘The causes of rapid infant mortality decline’, 359. P.A. Watterson has found, for England and Wales, that income and social class were not of critical importance for the rate and timing of the infant mortality decline, but that they were important in explaining differences in levels of infant mortality, in ‘Infant mortality by father's occupation from the 1911 census of England and Wales’, Demography, 25:2 (1988), 289–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 South Australia, ‘Public works reports’, South Australian Parliamentary Papers, (1878–1927).

31 The infant mortality rates in 1898 were 199 in Port Adelaide and 192 in Hindmarsh. Calculated from data in Statistical Registers.

32 Preston, S.H. and Haines, M.R., Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-century America (Princeton, 1991), ch. 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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34 Mein Smith, Flinders University Infant Survival Project.

35 We are indebted to Graeme Hugo and Ralph Shlomowitz for making available 1911 registration data. The births cohort of more than 11,000 infants has since been completed, the data have been checked and corrected and 2,300 births selected for this paper.

36 The population count includes the corporate towns of Adelaide, Brighton, Glenelg, Hindmarsh, Kensington and Norwood, Port Adelaide, St Peters, Thebarton and Unley, Statistical Register of South Australia, 1911, 9.Google Scholar

37 Maughan, J.M. and Praite, R., Whistler's Unley: Then and Now (Unley, 1988), 108–9.Google Scholar

38 Yelling, J., ‘The metropolitan slum: London 1918–51’, in Gaskell, S.M. (ed.), Slums (Leicester, 1990), 188.Google Scholar

39 The portrayal of slum housing was consistent through time in Reade, C.C., The Revelation of Britain: A Book for Colonials (Auckland, 1909)Google Scholar; idem., ‘Planning and development of towns and cities in South Australia, report by the Government Town Planner’, South Australian Parliamentary Paper, 63 (1919)Google Scholar; and ‘Second progress report of the Building Act Inquiry Committee, Sub-standard Housing Conditions in the Metropolitan Area (Municipalities of Adelaide, Hindmarsh and Port Adelaide)’, South Australian Parliamentary Paper, 32 (1940).Google Scholar

40 Birth and Death Registers. The Fullarton Catholic Refuge, for example, had an infant mortality rate of 286.

41 See Jackson, R.V., ‘Owner-occupation of houses in Sydney, 1871 to 1891’, Australian Economic History Review, 10 (1970), 138–54;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Dingle, A.E. and Merrett, D.T., ‘Home owners and tenants in Melbourne 1891–1911’, Australian Economic History Review, 12 (1972), 21–35;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Mein Smith, P. and Frost, L., ‘Home ownership in Adelaide, 1881–1911’, forthcoming in Australian Economic History Review.Google Scholar

42 The City of Adelaide ratebooks are held at Adelaide City Archives, City Treasurer's Department (C5) Assessment Books, 4th Series (S34); the Port Adelaide ratebooks at State Records of South Australia, GRS 539/1/P; and the Unley ratebooks at the City of Unley Offices and Unley Museum.

43 Based on a sample of advertisements in the Adelaide Advertiser, 1911.

44 The record linkage was by the mother's as well as the father's name so as not to render invisible women and children living with extended families.

45 Calculated from Adelaide City Archives, City Treasurer's Department (C5) Assessment Books.

46 Our findings are in accord with those for United States cities in 1900, relative to England and Wales in 1911, that ‘larger occupational differences in mortality in England may be partly explained by a higher degree of residential segregation by occupation’. Preston, and Haines, , Fatal Years, xx.Google Scholar

47 Calculated from Death Registers, 1881. We have not collected birth certificates for 1881.

48 Young, C.M. and Ruzicka, L.T., ‘Mortality’, in UN ESCAP, Population of Australia (New York, 1982), 164.Google Scholar

49 Calculated from Death Registers.

50 This supports the findings that babies who died from diarrhoea were deprived and that mothering varied in its effectiveness by class, in Mein Smith, P., ‘Mothers, babies, and the mothers and babies movement’, Social History of Medicine, 6:1 (1993), 60–3, 82.Google Scholar

51 The best source on Britain remains Lewis, J., The Politics of Motherhood (London, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Fildes, V., Marks, L. and Marland, H. (eds), Women and Children First: International Maternal and Infant Welfare, 1870–1945 (London, 1992)Google Scholar; on Australia, Mein Smith, P., ‘Reformers, mothers and babies: aspects of infant survival, Australia 1890–1945’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University, 1990)Google Scholar; Lewis, M. and Macleod, R., ‘A workingman's paradise? Reflections on urban mortality in colonial Australia 1860–1900’, Medical History, 31:4 (1987), 397;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed cf. on the United States, Meckel, R.A., Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850–1929 (Baltimore, 1990)Google Scholar, and Ewbank, D.C. and Preston, S.H., ‘Personal health behaviour and the decline in infant and child mortality: the United States, 1900–1930’, in Caldwell, J. et al. (eds), What We Know About Health Transition (Canberra, 1990), Health Transition Series no. 2, vol. 1, ch. 7.Google Scholar

52 Mein, Smith, ‘Mothers, babies, and the mothers and babies movement’.Google Scholar

53 Map of Fullarton Estate, 1881. Held by Unley Museum.Google Scholar

54 For a fuller discussion, see Frost, , The New Urban Frontier, esp. 16–17, 26, 145–6.Google Scholar

55 See, for example, Fitzgerald, S., Rising Damp: Sydney 1870–90 (Melbourne, 1987).Google Scholar

56 The experience of Indian New Towns supports this conclusion. Building a new city did not contain the spread of mortality differences; see Crook, N. and Malaker, C.R., ‘Child mortality in new industrial localities and opportunities for change: a survey in an Indian steel town’, Health Transition Review, 2:2 (1992), 165–76.Google Scholar