Sexual, cultural, and civic self-representation among African American, British West Indian, and southern Italian women in New York City, 1900--1930

How can one discern how people formulate new post-migration identities or self-representations? How did African American, British West Indian, and Southern Italian women develop new identities as "modernized" women after migrating to New York City from 1900-1930? An analysis of their agency in the face of infant and maternal health programs created for them reveals contestations between their shifting ideas of motherhood and that of public health workers and physicians.; After the New York City Department of Health conducted its first citywide mortality survey in 1915, they elicited the New York City Association for the Condition of the Poor (AICP) to create and conduct a health program aimed at decreasing infant and maternal deaths among African Americans and British West Indians in Columbus Hill, an impoverished midtown Manhattan neighborhood. The AICP targeted syphilis among black women and congenital syphilis among their young as the culprits. One year later, after declaring their program successful, they then selected Lower Manhattan's "Little Italy," the Mulberry District, as the next place for their expanded health work. The New York City Department of Health and the AICP focused on tuberculosis-related deaths among childbearing Southern Italian women, and pneumonia and enteritis deaths among their infants. The AICP published its results in 1924, taking credit for its successes, and blaming its female clientele for any failures. But what was the source of these "failures," and what does this say about the efficacy of these health programs?; Columbus Hill's and the Mulberry District's parturient women developed stances of accommodation and resistance to health care providers by using, changing, or eliminating older cultural traditions for new techniques. They manipulated health care systems for their benefit in an era when the meaning of "woman" and resistance both began in the womb. During this process, one can glimpse how they became modernizing women living in one of the largest urban areas on earth.