At the dawn of the Progressive Era, when America was experiencing an industrial boom, many working families often ate contaminated food, lived in decaying urban tenements, and had little access to medical care. In a city that demanded change, Los Angeles women, rather than city officials, championed the call to action.

Cultivating Health, an interdisciplinary chronicle, details women's impact on remaking health policy, despite the absence of government support. Combining primary source and municipal archival research with comfortable prose, Jennifer Lisa Koslow explores community nursing, housing reform, milk sanitation, childbirth, and the campaign against venereal disease in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Los Angeles. She demonstrates how women implemented health care reform and civic programs while laying the groundwork for a successful transition of responsibility back to government.

Koslow highlights women's home health care and urban policy-changing accomplishments and pays tribute to what would become the model for similar service-based systems in other American centers.

Jennifer Lisa Koslow is an assistant professor of history and director of the Historical Administration and Public History Program at Florida State University.

"A fine book that will add to our understanding of the development of health care in this country and the role of women at this critical time in history."

"This book is well researched and well written. It provides valuable insight into how health care in the U.S. came to be widely regarded as a public responsibility."

"This complex study is one of the very best we have of Progressive-erapublic health. With genuine sensitivity, Jennifer Koslow helps usunderstand the deeply human motivations and consequences of the reformimpulse."

"An original and fine-grained study of the far-reaching activities and impact of an early generation of white affluent female reformers in a rapidly growing multicultural West Coast metropolis. This book adds rich detail and depth to our understanding of the history of Progressive-era Los Angeles, urban reform, public health, and women's volunteerism."

"Jennifer Koslow expands our understanding of Progressive-era urban health reform in a careful and insightful narrative of female-led campaigns in Los Angeles, a multicultural city not always included in our narratives of the period. This is a story of state-making on the local level that is consistently interesting and well-written as well as a fresh model of public health reform in one city that should spur historians to look into these issues in other cities."