This presentation examines the work done by American women in health education in the 1920s and 1930s. In this era, leading health professionals agreed that future improvements in everyday Americans’ health would be achieved through teaching children to apply hygienic and nutritional knowledge in daily practice. These professionals looked to women to do the work of translating and interpreting this knowledge. Many women took up this challenge, some by working with male public health leaders to create child-friendly health teaching materials, others by teaching everyday schoolteachers how to fit the ‘new school health education’ into their classrooms. This reached its peak in the interwar public health demonstrations funded by the Commonwealth and Milbank Memorial Funds, which set out to teach communities the value of public health, in part by helping those communities’ children attain better personal health. My paper assesses how gendered expectations about women as teachers and communicators provided women working for initiatives like these with expanded career possibilities, as women’s skills in ‘interpreting’ expert knowledge were increasingly demanded by public health.