Women's choices appear to emphasize child welfare more than those of men. This paper presents new evidence on how suffrage rights for American women helped children to benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution. Consistent with standard models of electoral competition, suffrage laws were followed by immediate shifts in legislative behavior and large, sudden increases in local public health spending. This growth in public health spending fueled large-scale door-to-door hygiene campaigns, and child mortality declined by 8-15% (or 20,000 annual child deaths nationwide) as cause-specific reductions occurred exclusively among infectious childhood killers sensitive to hygienic conditions.

Recent studies demonstrate procyclical mortality in wealthy countries, but there are reasons to expect a countercyclical relationship in developing nations. We investigate how child survival in Colombia responds to fluctuations in world Arabica coffee prices - and document starkly procyclical child deaths. In studying this result's behavioral underpinnings, we highlight that: (1) The leading determinants of child health are inexpensive but require considerable time, and (2) As the value of time declines with falling coffee prices, so does the relative price of health. We find a variety of direct evidence consistent with the primacy of time in child health production.