Eds. Whitney Wood, Heather Love, Jerika Sanderson, and Karen Weingarten
From the early 1800s through the twenty-first century, pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal experiences have been constructed as “modern”—or alternatively positioned as traditional, antiquated, or somewhere in between—at multiple sites and across multiple forms of media, including expert advice, advertisements, popular magazines and newspapers, fiction, television, and film. Introducing their forthcoming special issue of Medical Humanities, Whitney Wood, Heather Love, Jerika Sanderson, and Karen Weingarten touch on how scholars writing from diverse disciplinary perspectives have approached the “making” of “modern maternity” across a range of time periods and geographic contexts. In so doing, the editors and authors who have contributed to this special issue underscore the political significance of reproduction, pregnancy, and maternity, in both the past and the present.
Whitney Wood (she/her) is Canada Research Chair in the Historical Dimensions of Women’s Health at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Her research, which has appeared in Medical Humanities, Social History of Medicine, and The Canadian Historical Review, focuses on histories of obstetrics, gynecology, gender, and pain in nineteenth and twentieth century Canada. Her current projects include the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada-funded study, Changing Childbirth in Postwar Canada, 1945-2000, and work as director and principal investigator of the collaborative, multidisciplinary Pelvic Health and Public Health in Twentieth-Century Canada project, supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Project Grant.
Heather A. Love (she/her) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada), where her research and teaching focus on topics related to early twentieth-century literature and culture, technology and health, and STEM communication. She is author of Cybernetic Aesthetics: Modernist Networks of Information and Data (2023, Cambridge University Press), and PI for a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada-funded project titled “Techno-Mediated Maternity.” Her work has appeared in Modernism/modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, Feminist Modernist Studies, New Literary History, and the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.
Jerika Sanderson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Waterloo. Her research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and investigates 21st-century biotechnologies across the media, literature, and popular culture. She has worked on several interdisciplinary projects, including as a research assistant for a project investigating how 20th-century obstetric developments were communicated in magazines and medical texts.
Karen Weingarten (she/her) is Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Her book Pregnancy Test was published with Bloomsbury Press’s Object Lessons series (March 2023). Her first book Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940 (Rutgers UP, 2014) presents a genealogy of abortion rhetoric in American literature, film, and popular culture.
TRANSCRIPT
SCHILLACE: Hello and welcome back to the Medical Humanities Podcast. This is Brandy Schillace. I’m Editor-in-Chief, and today we have a really special set of guests. We’ve got Whitney Wood, Heather Love, Karen Weingarten, and they’re going to be talking to us about their upcoming special issue, which is all about reproduction and maternity. I’m gonna start by asking them to say a bit about themselves, and to tell us more about this special issue, how it came to be, and what they hope to achieve.
WOOD: Thanks so much, Brandy, for having us today. My name is Whitney Wood, and I am Canada Research Chair in the Historical Dimensions of Women’s Health at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia. My work looks at histories of obstetrics and gynecology, gender and pain in 19th and 20th-century Canada. I’m interested, I’ve been interested in the history of labor pain and how the gendered, racialized, and class-based construction of the pain of giving birth affects the different levels of pain that pregnant people, or the different levels of care that pregnant people have received across time and place. And I’m interested in histories of so-called, quote-unquote “natural childbirth” movements in the 20th century. And really excited to be here.
SCHILLACE: That’s great. Thank you. And with you today, I know we have Karen.
WEINGARTEN: Hi, I’m Karen Weingarten. I’m a professor of English at Queens College, which is part of the City University of New York, and I work on cultural histories of reproduction. My last book was on the pregnancy test, both the history of it and its representations in popular culture and literature. My first book was about the representations of abortion in late 19th and early 20th-century American literature, and I’m returning to that work in a forthcoming collection about representations, a collection that’s going to be representations of abortion in literature, poetry, essays, and memoir.
SCHILLACE: Awesome. Thank you. And Heather.
LOVE: Hi. Yeah, thanks very much. It’s really exciting to be here. My name is Heather Love. I am an assistant professor of English at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. And I’m a little bit newer to sort of research focused on maternity and obstetrics than Whitney or Karen, but I got to meet the two of them as part of a new project I was doing about early 20th-century representations in literature, media, and medical texts that have to do with new technologies that were coming into play, like the medicalization of childbirth, the arrival of twilight sleep on the scene, and that kind of thing. So I got to meet up with Whitney and Karen as part of a conference, which is sort of where the idea for this special issue came into being, while we were sitting around the lunch table, I think it was before or after—I can’t remember—our panel and talking about, what can we do with this? This is exciting. It would be fun to take it to kind of a broader step.
SCHILLACE: Yeah. No, this is fantastic. And of course, you’ve decided to title it Making Modern Maternity, and it has become, well, it’s been a real draw, hasn’t it? I think you told me you had something like, how many submissions originally?
WEINGARTEN: Sixty, 60 submissions. Yeah
SCHILLACE: Sixty! Sixty submissions.
WEINGARTEN: We all have hard choices to make.
SCHILLACE: [laughs] Yes. Now, for those of you who are new to us, the way we do topics collections—we used to call them special issues; now we call them topics collections—at Medical Humanities is every June and every December, we give that over to a theme, basically, a thematic issue. And what’s exciting about this one is you sometimes worry you won’t have a big response, [laughs] and then other times, you’re spoiled for choice. So we have a really robust, it’s gonna be a really, really robust issue. I would say, you know, a couple, quite a lot of papers to read, and they’re over a lot of different topics. So, I wondered if you wanted to say a little bit about partly this title is really interesting: Making Modern Maternity. What does that mean for you?
WOOD: Mm. I think that’s such a good question, Brandy. And I’m hoping that when folks turn to the special issue that eventually comes out, they’re going to find that this process of making modern maternity looks very different across different times and different spaces. But for me, when we talk about, you know, that sense of making the modern, there are a few things that stand out. The idea that there have been some upheavals associated with quote-unquote “modern life”—industrialization, urbanization, technological change—and that those upheavals have mandated, in various contexts and in different ways, a need for increased surveillance, standardization, management of pregnancy, childbirth, and the maternal body. So what I’m hoping this special issue really shows is how that looks different depending on the context we’re looking at, how that has played out differently for different folks because of intersecting factors like gender, class, race, age, ability, location, and also, what are some of the sites of pushback or resistance to that surveillance and that medicalization? And how does that, how do these histories, for me as a historian, shape current struggles to access quote-unquote “choice in childbirth” and current gaps and inequities in care?
SCHILLACE: That’s really important to us at Medical Humanities. We are very much focused on social justice issues, and particularly issues of access, where the vulnerable populations are frequently asked to kind of build their own bridges, as opposed to having those provided for them, which is, I think, really interesting. That’s really, I like that a lot. But I also know that you had a really quite broad response in the sense that not, I mean, the papers you have been talking about, possibly looking at them thematically, but they’re very different. Do you wanna take us through some of the things that have come in?
WEINGARTEN: Yeah, I think that…. So, to add, I think, to answer your question and to add to what Whitney said, I think we were excited because the papers interpreted maternity so broadly. And that was exactly our point, is that we wanted to show how the definitions of maternity are always mediated, and they’re mediated through how maternity might be represented in a particular moment through different mediums, whether that’s print cultures or technological cultures. And so, for example, we’re interested in how different labor practices might change how we understand maternity. So, we’re hoping to have a paper about the birthing pool, for example, and how the rise of the birthing pool as a labor practice has changed how maternity has often been defined historically. So that’s just one example.
SCHILLACE: Right. You know, I’m a historian, too, and one of the things that I did quite a lot of work on was 18th-century, men taking over midwifery practice in the 18th century. And they actually described the man midwife as the body in labor, that he was the laborer.
SCHILLACE and WEINGARTEN: [chuckle]
SCHILLACE: You’re just lying there, you know. This was, I remember being quite shocked by that, [laughs] speaking of defining labor practices. But maybe you wanna tell us a little bit about some of the papers that have come in.
LOVE: Yeah. So, I think also, one of the things I’m excited about here is the historical range.
SCHILLACE: Mm. Mmhmm.
LOVE: So we have some papers that look at late 19th-century practices, and here, some of the different kind of print cultures that give us access to what is going on at that point of time. So, that’s sort of the earliest historical moment that we have for this particular collection. But then all the way up to several 21st-century contexts that are looking at more kind of internet-mediated discourses about pregnancy, childbirth, where you get the interplay between sort of visual culture and social media sites, and what are the ways that we’re thinking about, you know, representations of baby bumps?
SCHILLACE: Mm!
LOVE: And what kind of conversations happen on TikTok about—
SCHILLACE: Mommy blogs.
LOVE: —bouncing back after you have your baby? Yeah, the sort of the mommy blog and these different spaces and everything in between. There’s quite a few papers clustered around the early 20th century thinking about some of the ways in which eugenics discourse and mass media and the advent of kind of hospital births becoming really, really prominent, and then some in the mid-to-late 20th century as well. And then geographically, I think there’s a nice range that spans not only North America and Europe but looking to China and New Zealand and Sri Lanka and different kind of cultures around the world, which we’re hoping will give a nice, broad perspective on the differences, but then also the commonalities that you can kind of trace between different contexts.
SCHILLACE: Well, I love that. And, you know, it’s, this is a, we’ve been attempting to increase that diversity in all of our papers. And it can be really difficult, partly for the same access/social justice reasons that we just described, not to mention English as a second language. And that was something I was just curious. And of course, this is not necessarily specific to the special issue, but specific to the questions about maternity itself, is how, in what ways access has really changed over time. So, for instance, what if you’re a pregnant woman who doesn’t speak English, and you’re in a context where that is expected? Or how does, how do these issues of access alter what maternity means? Especially because I think part of what is modern about maternity is that people movement is, we’ve changed. You might not be giving birth in the same place that your mother and grandmother did. And so, I was just curious to know how those issues of access, have they been coming up in the papers? Is it something that you yourselves are quite interested in?
WOOD: Hmm. I think that’s such a good question, and I’m sure Heather and Karen will have their own responses. But something that is immediately coming to mind for me is just the different ways in which pregnant folks access information and create information about maternity and pregnancy and childbirth and motherhood. So if we think historically, the traditional sources of medical authority and expertise come essentially from the mouth of the physician in many contexts. But what we see in some of these papers are pregnant people, what Heather mentioned earlier, like going to TikTok and defining, okay, what is a good postpartum period in a new way and a new context.
SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.
WOOD: Of course, not in a vacuum without these influences of medical authority, but just the ways in which we see maternity being constructed at different sites that perhaps have been left out of the historical record for a lot of the period we’re focusing on.
SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.
LOVE: Yeah, and a few things that come to mind from the different topics in the papers that’ve been coming in is that you also get sort of different levels or different types of care. So, doulas who are doing a particular type of care work surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, or field nurses that are working with indigenous populations. Or this isn’t experts, but pop culture television shows versus radio dramas versus medical pamphlets and that there’s an effort to kind of increase access to information that happens in new ways as you move into the quote-unquote “modern world” where the circulation of ideas and knowledge happens through different channels but in different, at different rates or with different levels of uptake. And there’s even some papers that are about sort of rejecting motherhood, and what does that do? Or why might someone want to or choose to do that, depending on the socioeconomic or racialized or geographic area where they’re located?
SCHILLACE: And what’s the backlash for that? I say as a childless person.
SCHILLACE and LOVE: [chuckle]
WEINGARTEN: And I would add to what Heather was saying, there’s one paper about Chinese soap operas under communism and the kind of motherhood narratives that they produce in the service of the state.
SCHILLACE: Mm.
WEINGARTEN: And how there’s, how women in China have both adopted some of those narratives but resisted them as well, and how the soap operas themselves are not, even as they’re written to produce a particular kind of narrative, they can also be read as resisting that narrative in some ways as well. And I think one of the things that you, as another through line that might be also about access is, how we access different kinds of medias, and the kind of media itself has changed, right?
SCHILLACE: Right.
WEINGARTEN: So, in the early 20th century, it was mostly print. People got information about maternity through print cultures, and whether those were pamphlets printed for expectant mothers or leaflets circulating, and how it required a certain amount of literacy, to the 21st century, where you see a lot of people finding information through the internet or through television and how, in some ways it’s more accessible, but in other ways, the information you’re getting is not necessarily, you know, it’s more diffuse. And so, you’re constantly having to navigate the source and thinking about, well, who is producing this? What is the message behind this production, and how does it impact the way we see each other, we see ourselves as mothers or not, right? And I think that “not” is important there too.
SCHILLACE: [laughs]
LOVE: And what you said there, Karen, made me think, too, about if we think of present-day conversations about misinformation and disinformation and health issues on social media, what I think will be really interesting in this special issue is how some of those things track back to earlier in the 20th century and into the 19th century, when obstetrics as a field is becoming this defined specialization, and sort of late in the medical specialization. So doctors are trying to kind of carve out a place of being “authority figures” when they don’t necessarily have a lot of expertise coming into the actual practice of medicine. So that question of authority within this domain is very fraught even at that point in time. So, some of those lines, I think, of historical continuity will be really neat to track as people are able to look through the full roster of papers.
WEINGARTEN: Yeah, for sure. Just because it comes from an authoritative source doesn’t always mean that it’s correct. And it often has an agenda as well.
SCHILLACE: Mm, mmhmm. Yeah, it’s sort of like having a PhD. I remember one of my sisters always saying, “Well, everyone who has a PhD is smart.” And I was like, “Oh, you’ve not met enough.”
ALL: [laugh]
SCHILLACE: I mean, smartness is a, you know, there’s a whole lot that goes into whether or not something is gonna be useful and educational, and it’s not just, or authoritative for that matter. And it is interesting to me to see how clickbait has changed what we conceive of as a, I keep using words like “conceive, seminal.” [laughs] It’s impossible to get away from it when you start talking about reproduction. But I think that all of these things are really interesting, that there’s so many changes happening.
LOVE: Yeah.
WEINGARTEN: Yeah. I think that you said it wasn’t a special issue; it was a topics cluster?
SCHILLACE: Topics collection. It is. It’s, you’re still special.
WEINGARTEN: Yes. A topics collection, I think, will, you know, we hope will, because there’s such a wide range of articles in it, I hope that it won’t offer any kind of, it won’t do chronological work.
SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.
WEINGARTEN: But I think because the articles themselves are so varied, it will be kind of touch points of various ways in which making modern maternity has happened in various kinds of ways. And we hope it might even be a way to jumpstart more discussion, more publication. And because there will certainly be holes.
SCHILLACE: Right.
WEINGARTEN: Because we couldn’t accept everything, and obviously, we’re dependent on who submits to the journal as well.
SCHILLACE: In time.
WEINGARTEN: Yeah.
SCHILLACE: [laughs] But I say, I would say, too, this happens frequently. When we do a topics collection, we will also often see a kind of rash of papers that follow the theme following after that, which is really exciting for us. We’re still, post our several years ago South African issue, getting papers from South Africa because of that. And I think that that’s really important.
So my last question for you then is gonna be maybe a tricky one, but we’re using this word “modern.”
WOOD: Mm.
SCHILLACE: And so, what’s counter-modern? Like, what isn’t modern? How do we define, you know, can we define our idea about modern by thinking about what we mean, what we aren’t meaning?
WEINGARTEN: Well, we can go all academic on you and say that, you know, [laughs] everything is modern.
SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.
WEINGARTEN: I think we had a conversation about this amongst ourselves, and at the end we decided to accept papers—and I think in our call for papers, we asked for papers—no earlier than the 19th century and going to our present moment, right?
SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.
WEINGARTEN: So, we saw ourselves as being in the modern now, and then we had a conversation about why the 19th century. And it’s not that that is necessarily where we thought of modernity as beginning, but we saw a lot of the technologies that shaped maternity and that we still use today and that we still rely on today. Like, labor practices, even the medicalization of labor and motherhood, the technologies around prenatal care, a lot of those emerged in the 19th century. And even as they’ve changed, they’ve, in many ways, sometimes shocking ways, they’ve remained the same.
SCHILLACE: Yeah, they really have. No, that’s true. I used to work in a museum, and we had a very, very early 20th-century doctor’s office setup. I forget exactly the year, but I thought, I’ve seen that, you know! Like, it has, there are things there. Forceps haven’t really, I mean, while we don’t use forceps as much anymore, I was delivered with forceps, and they looked exactly like the ones that were on the wall of the museum, you know? So I think that that’s true. I guess what I was wondering, though, is are there any current practices that might want to be counter-modern, is kind of what I was thinking?
WOOD: Oh, absolutely. And I think we see that in one of the papers focusing on the birthing pool, how so much of modernity, which of course, looks different across different times and different places. And just to pick up on Karen’s earlier thoughts, what’s so exciting about this focused topic and the papers we’ve received is we really leave it to authors to make the case of how maternity and birth is made modern in their particular contexts, in different ways.
SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.
WOOD: But so much of modernity has this element of resistance, the call to return to the anti-modern or the quote-unquote “traditional”—
SCHILLACE: Right, right.
WOOD: —that way of giving birth. So, I think modernity always contains that tension of, okay, is this something that is truly beneficial for both pregnant people and children, or is this something to be pushed back against?
SCHILLACE: Sure.
WOOD: And who has access and ability to push back in effective ways?
SCHILLACE: Right, right. Another word you can, it’s just like when people say, “Well, what does natural childbirth really mean?”
WOOD: Right.
SCHILLACE: You know? [laughs] It’s like, well, if it’s happening to you, it’s probably kind of natural. [laughs]
LOVE: Yeah, and I was just gonna add in, too, that I think what will be interesting, and what I hope something like this special issue can do, is someone might come to it because they’re interested in a particular article if they study present-day culture or if they study early 20th century. And they may think of that as a zone in which the word “modern” works; that stamp fits. But then seeing that piece side by side with the rest of the collection, maybe they’ll go read something that they never would’ve thought of looking into before, like celebrity moms in India. Oh, how is that modern?
SCHILLACE: [laughs]
LOVE: And so then, as you read around in the issue, the pushback on what is, what isn’t modern will become apparent, as you can see.
SCHILLACE: Yeah, that’s so interesting. And to me, that’s what makes this, I think, a unique and also flexible collection, but also a collection that’s particularly well suited for the Medical Humanities because we operate at the intersection of fields, and we also operate at the intersection of health and the human. And I’m, you know, I feel that maternity is one of those places which is definitely in that gap.
So, I really appreciate all of you being here today, and if you’re tuning in, thank you for being part of the conversation. You can check out this special issue in June, and on our blog, we will also carry little introductions to the essays themselves. So we hope you will check it out and not miss it. Thanks again from the Medical Humanities.