Past Tense

Better Baby Contestant, ca. 1920

The Better Baby Contest was held at the Vancouver Exhibition (PNE) from 1913 to 1919. From there it moved to New Westminster and was a staple until the exhibition buildings there burned down in 1929.

The contests were initiated by the Local Council of Women and the babies were judged by medical doctors, who deducted points for any defects they found. So-called defects could be as trivial as moles or pug-noses, and would stigmatize children as “flawed” for the rest of their lives. Locals often became indignant when their babies were judged to be above the ideal weight for their age. Criteria were set in the east, whereas BC babies tended to be more robust because of their rugged frontier lifestyle, they argued, and therefore shouldn’t be penalized.

These were not just beauty contests, but rather were intended to educate the public. The Better Baby Contests fit into the larger eugenics movement that included such things as forced sterilization of the “feeble minded.” Naturally, only Anglo-Saxon babies were entered in the contests, since one of the main driving forces of eugenics was that miscegenation and non-British immigration would ultimately result in “race suicide” for North American whites.

For more info, see Gerald E Thomson, “‘A Baby Show Means Work in the Hardest Sense’: The Better Baby Contests of the Vancouver and New Westminster Local Councils of Women, 1913-1929,” BC Studies no. 28, Winter 2000/2001

Source: Photo by Stuart Thomson, City of Vancouver Archives #99-1297

Source: searcharchives.vancouver.ca