To wrap up Mother's Day, here's a group portrait of Kinston High School's Little Mothers League for Better Babies from around 1920. The photograph is part of the Fred & Susan Brock Collection at East Carolina University and is used with permission of the Joyner Library Digital Collections unit.
Little Mothers League clubs were originally formed by Sara Josephine Baker, a New York public health physician and were designed to teach young girls to help care for their younger siblings. An article about the League was published in The New York Times around 1910.
Consider the case of the mother of many children, eight, nine, or ten, with the house to keep clean and the washing to be done, and maybe a bit of money to be earned on the outside. It is only natural that a large part of the care of the little ones should fall on the shoulders of the older girls. There are some fortunate mothers who will not trust their little ones to walk abroad even with a nurse, unless they go along. There are thousands and thousands of mothers whose babies lie all day long in the care of children themselves only a few years beyond babyhood.
