Sara Josephine Baker

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Sara Josephine Baker (1873 – 1945) was the first woman to receive a federal government position.

Early life

Josephine Baker was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1873 to a middle class Unitarian or Quaker family. When she was sixteen, her father and brother died from typhoid, which left her family with no means of support.

Career

She enrolled in Women's Medical College, founded by sisters Elizabeth Blackwell and Emily Blackwell, and graduated in 1899. In 1901 Josephine Baker passed the civil service exam and qualified to be a medical inspector at the Department of Health, working as a school inspector. Upon working in these schools, she was offered the opportunity to lower the death rate in Hell's Kitchen. Hell's Kitchen was considered the worst slum in New York at the turn of the century with as many as 4500 people dying every week. Baker decided to focus on the infant mortality rate, as babies accounted for about 1500 deaths every seven days.

"I climbed stair after stair, knocked on door after door, met drunk after drunk, filthy mother after filthy mother and dying baby after dying baby."

Baker and a group of nurses started to train mothers in how to care for their babies. How to clothe infants to keep them from getting too hot, how to feed them a good diet, how to keep them from suffocating, and how to keep them clean. She set up a milk stand where clean, pasteurized milk was handed out to the indigent families in Hell's Kitchen. Baker also invented an infant formula made out of water, calcium carbonate, lactose, and cow milk. This enabled mothers to go to work so they could support their families. In 1910, to further help working mothers, Baker started the 'Little Mothers League' to train older sisters to care for their young siblings. She also aided in the prevention of blindness due to gonorrhea: To prevent blindness, babies were given drops of silver nitrate in their eyes, but often the bottles in which the silver nitrate were kept would become unsanitary or too highly concentrated, causing blindness anyway. Baker started using small containers made out of beeswax that held enough silver nitrate for one eye. This way the silver nitrate would stay at a safe level and wouldn't get dirty. Through Josephine Baker's efforts, infants were much safer then they had been the previous year (blindness decreased from 300 babies/year to 3/year within 2 years), but there was still one area where it was dangerous: Birthing babies. Babies were all too often delivered by midwives with no guarantee of expertise. Baker convinced New York City to license midwives in order to ensure a degree of quality and expertise.

While Baker was campaigning to license midwives, treat blindness and educate mothers, older children were still getting sick and malnourished. Baker worked to change this, too. Each school was given its own doctor and nurse, and the children were routinely checked for diseases like lice and trachoma. This system worked so well that diseases once rampant in schools become almost obsolete.

Early in her career, she had helped to catch Typhoid Mary twice, the first known healthy carrier of typhoid who infected countless people through her job as a cook. Josephine Baker was becoming famous, so much so that New York University Medical School asked her to lecture there on children’s health. Baker said she would if she could enroll in the School. The School had to give in because there was no one else who could give the lecture. So in 1917 Baker graduated with a doctorate in public health. After the United States entered World War I, Baker became even better known. Most of this publicity was generated from her comment to a New York Times reporter. She told him that it was safer to be on the front lines than to be born in the United States because the soldiers died at a rate of 4%, whereas babies died at a rate of 12%. She was able to start a lunch program for school children due to the publicity this comment brought.

Josephine Baker was now known across the world. She was offered a job in London as health director of public schools, a job in France taking care of war refugees, and a job in the United States as Assistant Surgeon General. Baker became the first woman to hold a federal government position when she accepted the position as Assistant Surgeon General of the United States. In 1923 she retired, but she didn't stop working.

Josephine Baker became the first woman to be a professional representative to the League of Nations when she represented the United States in the Health Committee. Many government positions, departments, and committees were created because of her work including the Federal Children's Bureau and Public Health Services (now the Department of Health and Human Services) and child hygiene departments in every state. She was also active in many groups and societies including over twenty-five medical societies and the New York State Department of Health. She also became the President of the American Medical Women's Association and wrote 250 articles (both professional and for the popular press), 4 books, and her autobiography before her death in 1945.

Personal life

Josephine Baker (her preferred name) wrote very little about her personal life, however her partner for much of the later part of her life was Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, a novelist and essayist from Australia [1], and self-identified as a 'woman-oriented woman'. I.A.R. Wylie is best know for the novel "The Daughter of Brahma" and "Life with George", an autobiography. When Baker retired in 1923, she started to run their household while writing her autobiography. In 1935, Baker and Wylie decided to move to Princeton, NJ, together with their friend Lousie Pearce, M.D.. Pearce was a biological researcher at the Rockefeller Institute (animal models for trypanosoma and syphilis, and the testing of treatments), and later became the President of the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia. While Baker and Pearce left little documentation of their personal lives, Wylie was open about her orientation. But she did not identify either Baker or Pearce in her writings. Wylie's papers, including some personal letters, were donated to the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia (now the Medical College of Philadelphia), where they are now available in the college's archives.

Sources

Baker, Josephine S. Fighting For Life. New York: Arno Press, 1974.
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/baker.html
http://www.omsi.edu/visit/tech/peopleInTechnology.cfm?featureIndex=2
Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_19.html
http://www.the-aps.org/education/outreach/outreach/acts-labs/sarahb.htm Scholer, A.M. (1997) Louise Pearce, (1885-1959) In, Women in the biolgical sciences: a bibliographic sourcebook. Grinstein, L.S., C. A. Biermann, & R. K. Rose. Greenwood Press.