Motherhood training: an infant-care class, 1937

A teacher in a white apron demonstrates on a baby doll, step by step, the morning care of an infant: the cot is made up, the doll swaddled, rubbed with lotion from a brown bottle, dressed and sat on a glass potty. The pupils, girls barely out of school and women old enough to be grandmothers, lean in close, then take their turn at lifting the doll from the cot and sew a layette at a long table.

The regime wanted more children and fewer infant deaths, and it made hygiene a matter of national policy. The child-care manual of the day, Johanna Haarer's bestseller of 1934, taught mothers a strict timetable and a firm hand; the courses carried its lessons into hundreds of towns.