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Julia Clifford Lathrop (June 29, 1858 – April 15, 1932) was an American social worker in the area of education, social policy, and children's welfare. As director of the United States Children's Bureau from 1912 to 1922, she was the first woman ever to head a United States federal bureau.

Biography
Julia Clifford Lathrop was born in Rockford, Illinois. Julia's father, a lawyer and personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, helped establish the Republican Party and served in the state legislature (1856–57) and Congress (1877–79). Her mother was a suffragist active in women's rights activities in Rockford and a graduate of the first class of Rockford Female Seminary.

Lathrop attended Rockford Female Seminary where she met Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. After one year, she transferred to Vassar College, developing her own multidisciplinary studies in statistics, institutional history, sociology, and community organization and graduated in 1880. Afterwards, she worked in her father's law office first as a secretary and then studying the law for herself.

Work in Chicago
In 1890, Lathrop moved to Chicago where she joined Jane Addams, Ellen Gates Starr, Alzina Stevens, Edith Abbott, Grace Abbott, Florence Kelley, Mary McDowell, Alice Hamilton, Sophonisba Breckinridge and other social reformers at Hull House. Lathrop ran a discussion group called the Plato Club in the early days of the House. The women at Hull House actively campaigned to persuade Congress to pass legislation to protect children. During the depression years of the early '90s Lathrop served as a volunteer investigator of relief applicants, visiting homes to document the needs of the families.

In 1893, Lathrop was appointed as the first ever woman member of the Illinois State Board of Charities, beginning her lifelong work in civil service reform: advocating for the training of professional social workers and standardizing employment procedures. This would lead to opening the labor market for educated women as well as improving social services in Progressive Era cities and towns. Over the next few years she helped introduce reforms such as the appointment of female doctors in state hospitals and the removal of the insane from the state workhouses.

Director of United States Children's Bureau
Reacting to pressure from Progressive women reformers for the appointment of a woman for the newly created Children's Bureau, in 1912, President William Taft appointed Lathrop as the first bureau chief. Over the next nine years Lathrop directed research into child labor, infant mortality, maternal mortality, juvenile delinquency, mothers' pensions and illegitimacy.

The Children's Bureau under Lathrop (1912–21) (known as "America's First Official Mother") and her successors became an administrative unit that not only created child welfare policy but also led its implementation. For many conservative women, the Bureau's focus on maternal and child welfare gave them a role in politics for the first time—something that the suffrage or women's rights movements had not offered them. The Bureau expanded its budget and personnel to focus on a scientific approach to motherhood in order to reduce infant and maternal mortality, improve child health and advocate for trained care for children with disabilities. Lathrop modeled the Children's Bureau investigations from the work she did while at Hull-House. The Bureau also lobbied to abolish child labor. Scientific language became critical to the reform efforts such as the baby-saving campaigns in towns with large working class and immigrant populations where the middle class maternalists battled contemporary beliefs in the inevitability of high infant mortality rates. "Mother-work in the community" meant that women educated in the latest scientific theories about children's health and safety would lead the movement for child welfare reform.

In her first annual report for the agency, Lathrop described the plans for expansion: promotion of birth registration, infant mortality field studies, production of instructional pamphlets and reports, expand the study of child labor laws, explore issues regarding mothers' pensions, and study the status of "dependent, defective, and delinquent children." Lathrop wrote in 1914: "Work for infant welfare is coming to be regarded as more than a philanthropy or an expression of good will. It is a profoundly important public concern which tests the public spirit and the democracy of a community."

Unlike the National Congress of Mothers, Lathrop's leadership of the Children's Bureau relied on her belief in the New Woman's right to freedom for individual development and opportunities, including a college degree of equal merit to men's and a decent job. However, Lathrop was careful to insist that motherhood was "the most important calling in the world" and to deny that women should have career ambitions. This way Lathrop could avoid controversy even while she built public support for the new agency.