“No Viennese child should be born on newspaper.” Thus proclaimed a 1932 poster for a public health campaign in the Austrian capital. The motto referred to the poverty of working-class families who, unable to afford cloth for diapers, instead swaddled their babies in discarded newssheets. But the poster also suggested how things were changing under the Social Democratic administration of “Red Vienna.” It portrayed two uniformed nurses holding up newborns and, placed in front of them, a package emblazoned with the image of the Magna Mater (“the great mother” or “Mother Goddess”), a figure by the Austrian sculptor Anton Hanak. This “mother” protectively embraces two youths on either side of her, while a third child grasps at the hem of her gown from the front. Beleaguered but resolute, she appears to be marching out of her setting into an indeterminate future. The contents of the package in the photograph further clarify this depiction of working-class maternal heroism: each contained diapers, clothes, and “everything a newborn needs.” Indeed, already by 1932 the Social Democratic city hall had distributed “1,272,000 diapers, 318,000 infant tunics, 318,000 infant jackets, and 53,000 infant overalls” to Viennese families.

In what would prove to be one of history’s darker ironies, at the outset of the twentieth century, it was forecast that this would be the “century of the child” (as Swedish social theorist Ellen Key put it in her 1900 book of the same name). The proverbial child of the past — neither seen nor heard — had slowly migrated to the center of political discussion. This shift was reflected both in theory and practice: from Sigmund Freud’s writings about infant sexuality, which hypothesized the existence of a set of autonomous, productive drives spanning a period from infanthood to puberty, to reforms in early childhood education, there was a new consensus growing around the conviction that children deserved social rights. Correspondingly, they were no longer predetermined to succeed or fail based on their social class — rather, their well-being was the living proof of a society’s capacity to organize itself efficiently.

The shift in thinking about children correlated to new perspectives on child and family welfare. In an effort to transcend the established form of social philanthropy built on private initiatives and charity — insufficient because it was designed to help only the “deserving poor” and shifted the burden of welfare to elites or to the Church — the Viennese socialists were among the first in Europe to create universal welfare programs designed to alleviate childhood poverty and redress inequality in a systematic way. Promising welfare and social protection “from the cradle to the grave,” these public health initiatives reveal a political project that embraced reform and experiment. That combination proved popular: indeed, the infant packages were such a success that the opposition derisively called the votes for the Social Democrats “diaper votes.” Other initiatives — including maternal centers on the grounds of social housing complexes, where women could get information about infant disease and nutrition from health professionals close to where they lived — represented bold efforts to integrate public health services into the everyday lives of workers.