How can the history of birth weight add to our knowledge of women's living conditions in the past? In this study of newborn weight and economic growth in Boston, Dublin, Edinburgh, Montreal, and Vienna between 1850 and 1930, W. Peter Ward explores the relation between infant size, economic development, and living standards of working-class women in the industrializing West.
Drawing on clinical records from urban maternity hospitals and outpatient services, Ward compares birth weight between cities and traces changes in fetal size during a period in which some cities experienced dramatic...

Ward draws upon a rich record of events and opinion in the provincial press, manuscript collections, and successive federal enquiries and royal commissions on Asian immigration. He locates the origins of west coast racism in the frustrated vision of a white British Columbia and an unshakeable belief in the unassimilability of the Asian immigrant. Canadian attitudes were dominated by a series of interlocking, hostile stereotypes derived from western perceptions of Asia and modified by the encounter between whites and Asians on the north Pacific coast. Public pressure on local, provincial, and...