In historical anthropometry attention has been paid to the negative impact of urbanisation on the disease environment. By adopting children's growth, rather than final height, as an anthropometric measure and taking into consideration the negative effects of both women's workload and urban penalty on their growth, this article makes extensive use of data collected by Yamanashi prefecture for the physical status of school children between 1902 and 1906. It is revealed that at the youngest school age children were shorter in the countryside, reflecting an adverse cumulative effect of working mothers' nutritional status. However, their height caught up the urban children's during the growth period, while the Body Mass Index, which measures their current nutritional status, tended to be greater in the countryside throughout the school ages, both of which confirm the urban penalty hypothesis.
