Tamara Kamatovic, a Vienna-based scholar of this period, writes, “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.” Many of the new apartment buildings had basic services built into them, including maternal health centers, Kamatovic explains, so that “women could get information about infant disease and nutrition from health professionals close to where they lived—[which] represented bold efforts to integrate public health services into the everyday lives of workers.”
