{"id":3852,"date":"2024-05-08T10:00:59","date_gmt":"2024-05-08T09:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/?p=3852"},"modified":"2024-06-14T09:53:45","modified_gmt":"2024-06-14T08:53:45","slug":"making-modern-maternity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2024\/05\/08\/making-modern-maternity\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Modern Maternity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Eds. Whitney Wood, Heather Love, Jerika Sanderson, and Karen Weingarten<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>From the early 1800s through the twenty-first century, pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal experiences have been constructed as \u201cmodern\u201d\u2014or alternatively positioned as traditional, antiquated, or somewhere in between\u2014at 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 <em>Medical Humanities<\/em>, Whitney Wood, Heather Love, Jerika Sanderson, and Karen Weingarten touch on how scholars writing from diverse disciplinary perspectives have approached the \u201cmaking\u201d of \u201cmodern maternity\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<style type=\"text\/css\">\r\n       .errordiv { padding:10px; margin:10px; border: 1px solid #555555;color: #000000;background-color: #f8f8f8; width:500px; }#advanced_iframe {visibility:visible;opacity:1;}#ai-layer-div-advanced_iframe p {height:100%;margin:0;padding:0}<\/style><script type=\"text\/javascript\">  var ai_iframe_width_advanced_iframe = 0;  var ai_iframe_height_advanced_iframe = 0;var aiIsIe8=false;var aiOnloadScrollTop=\"true\";\r\nif (typeof aiReadyCallbacks === 'undefined') {\r\n    var aiReadyCallbacks = [];  \r\n} else if (!(aiReadyCallbacks instanceof Array)) {\r\n    var aiReadyCallbacks = [];\r\n}    function aiShowIframeId(id_iframe) { jQuery(\"#\"+id_iframe).css(\"visibility\", \"visible\");    }    function aiResizeIframeHeight(height) { aiResizeIframeHeight(height,advanced_iframe); }    function aiResizeIframeHeightId(height,width,id) {aiResizeIframeHeightById(id,height);}<\/script><iframe loading=\"lazy\" id=\"advanced_iframe\"  name=\"advanced_iframe\"  src=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/player-v2\/?i=tqe92-15f7f9e-pb&amp;from=pb6admin&amp;pbad=0&amp;share=1&amp;download=1&amp;rtl=0&amp;fonts=Arial&amp;skin=1&amp;font-color=&amp;logo_link=episode_page&amp;btn-skin=f58847\"  width=\"560\"  height=\"315\"  frameborder=\"0\"  border=\"0\"  allowtransparency=\"true\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\"  style=\";width:560;height:315;\" ><\/iframe><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var ifrm_advanced_iframe = document.getElementById(\"advanced_iframe\");var hiddenTabsDoneadvanced_iframe = false;\r\nfunction resizeCallbackadvanced_iframe() {}function aiChangeUrl(loc) {}<\/script>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-3853\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Wood-Headshot-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Portrait of Whitney Wood\" width=\"225\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Wood-Headshot-300x300.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Wood-Headshot-150x150.jpeg 150w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Wood-Headshot-640x640.jpeg 640w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Wood-Headshot-250x250.jpeg 250w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Wood-Headshot.jpeg 649w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Whitney Wood <\/strong>(she\/her) is Canada Research Chair in the Historical Dimensions of Women\u2019s Health at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Her research, which has appeared in <\/em>Medical Humanities<em>, <\/em>Social History of Medicine<em>, and <\/em>The Canadian Historical Review<em>, 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, <\/em>Changing Childbirth in Postwar Canada, 1945-2000<em>, and work as director and principal investigator of the collaborative, multidisciplinary <\/em>Pelvic Health and Public Health in Twentieth-Century Canada <em>project, supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Project Grant.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-3854\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Love-Headshot-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Portrait of Heather Love\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Love-Headshot-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Love-Headshot-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Love-Headshot-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Love-Headshot-1536x2048.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Love-Headshot-640x853.jpg 640w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Love-Headshot-scaled.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Heather A. Love <\/strong>(she\/her) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada),\u00a0where 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\u00a0<\/em>Cybernetic Aesthetics: Modernist Networks of Information and Data<em>\u00a0(2023, Cambridge University Press), and PI for a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada-funded project titled \u201cTechno-Mediated Maternity.\u201d Her work\u00a0has appeared in\u00a0<\/em>Modernism\/modernity<em>, the\u00a0<\/em>Journal of Modern Literature<em>,\u00a0<\/em>Feminist Modernist Studies<em>,\u00a0<\/em>New Literary History<em>, and the\u00a0<\/em>IEEE Technology and Society Magazine<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-3855\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Sanderson-Headshot-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Portrait of Jerika Sanderson\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Sanderson-Headshot-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Sanderson-Headshot-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Sanderson-Headshot-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Sanderson-Headshot-1536x2048.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Sanderson-Headshot-640x853.jpg 640w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Sanderson-Headshot-scaled.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Jerika Sanderson<\/strong> (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 21<sup>st<\/sup>-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 20<sup>th<\/sup>-century obstetric developments were communicated in magazines and medical texts.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-3856 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Weingarten-Headshot-222x300.png\" alt=\"Portrait of Karen Weingarten\" width=\"222\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Weingarten-Headshot-222x300.png 222w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2024\/03\/Wood-Whitney-Making-Modern-Maternity-Weingarten-Headshot.png 480w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 222px) 100vw, 222px\" \/><\/strong><strong>Karen Weingarten<\/strong>\u00a0(she\/her) is Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Her book\u00a0<\/em>Pregnancy Test<em>\u00a0was published with Bloomsbury Press\u2019s Object Lessons series (March 2023). Her first book\u00a0<\/em>Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940<em>\u00a0(Rutgers UP, 2014) presents a genealogy of abortion rhetoric in American literature, film, and popular culture.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3><strong>TRANSCRIPT<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Hello and welcome back to the <i>Medical Humanities Podcast<\/i>. This is Brandy Schillace. I\u2019m Editor-in-Chief, and today we have a really special set of guests. We\u2019ve got Whitney Wood, Heather Love, Karen Weingarten, and they\u2019re going to be talking to us about their upcoming special issue, which is all about reproduction and maternity. I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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\u2019m interested, I\u2019ve 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\u2019m interested in histories of so-called, quote-unquote \u201cnatural childbirth\u201d movements in the 20th century. And really excited to be here.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: That\u2019s great. Thank you. And with you today, I know we have Karen.<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: Hi, I\u2019m Karen Weingarten. I\u2019m 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\u2019m returning to that work in a forthcoming collection about representations, a collection that\u2019s going to be representations of abortion in literature, poetry, essays, and memoir.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Awesome. Thank you. And Heather.<\/p>\n<p>LOVE: Hi. Yeah, thanks very much. It\u2019s 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\u2019m 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\u2014I can\u2019t remember\u2014our 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.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Yeah. No, this is fantastic. And of course, you\u2019ve decided to title it <i>Making Modern Maternity<\/i>, and it has become, well, it\u2019s been a real draw, hasn\u2019t it? I think you told me you had something like, how many submissions originally?<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: Sixty, 60 submissions. Yeah<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Sixty! Sixty submissions.<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: We all have hard choices to make.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: [laughs] Yes. Now, for those of you who are new to us, the way we do topics collections\u2014we used to call them special issues; now we call them topics collections\u2014at <i>Medical Humanities<\/i> is every June and every December, we give that over to a theme, basically, a thematic issue. And what\u2019s exciting about this one is you sometimes worry you won\u2019t have a big response, [laughs] and then other times, you\u2019re spoiled for choice. So we have a really robust, it\u2019s gonna be a really, really robust issue. I would say, you know, a couple, quite a lot of papers to read, and they\u2019re over a lot of different topics. So, I wondered if you wanted to say a little bit about partly this title is really interesting: <i>Making Modern Maternity<\/i>. What does that mean for you?<\/p>\n<p>WOOD: Mm. I think that\u2019s such a good question, Brandy. And I\u2019m hoping that when folks turn to the special issue that eventually comes out, they\u2019re 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 \u201cmodern life\u201d\u2014industrialization, urbanization, technological change\u2014and 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\u2019m hoping this special issue really shows is how that looks different depending on the context we\u2019re 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 \u201cchoice in childbirth\u201d and current gaps and inequities in care?<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: That\u2019s really important to us at <i>Medical Humanities<\/i>. 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\u2019s 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\u2019re very different. Do you wanna take us through some of the things that have come in?<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: Yeah, I think that&#8230;. 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\u2019re mediated through how maternity might be represented in a particular moment through different mediums, whether that\u2019s print cultures or technological cultures. And so, for example, we\u2019re interested in how different labor practices might change how we understand maternity. So, we\u2019re 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\u2019s just one example.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Right. You know, I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE and WEINGARTEN: [chuckle]<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: You\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n<p>LOVE: Yeah. So, I think also, one of the things I\u2019m excited about here is the historical range.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Mm. Mmhmm.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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\u2019re thinking about, you know, representations of baby bumps?<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Mm!<\/p>\n<p>LOVE: And what kind of conversations happen on TikTok about\u2014<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Mommy blogs.<\/p>\n<p>LOVE: \u2014bouncing back after you have your baby? Yeah, the sort of the mommy blog and these different spaces and everything in between. There\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019re hoping will give a nice, broad perspective on the differences, but then also the commonalities that you can kind of trace between different contexts.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Well, I love that. And, you know, it\u2019s, this is a, we\u2019ve 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\u2019re a pregnant woman who doesn\u2019t speak English, and you\u2019re 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\u2019ve 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?<\/p>\n<p>WOOD: Hmm. I think that\u2019s such a good question, and I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019re focusing on.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.<\/p>\n<p>LOVE: Yeah, and a few things that come to mind from the different topics in the papers that\u2019ve 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\u2019t experts, but pop culture television shows versus radio dramas versus medical pamphlets and that there\u2019s an effort to kind of increase access to information that happens in new ways as you move into the quote-unquote \u201cmodern world\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019re located?<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: And what\u2019s the backlash for that? I say as a childless person.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE and LOVE: [chuckle]<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: And I would add to what Heather was saying, there\u2019s one paper about Chinese soap operas under communism and the kind of motherhood narratives that they produce in the service of the state.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Mm.<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: And how there\u2019s, 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\u2019re 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?<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Right.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s more accessible, but in other ways, the information you\u2019re getting is not necessarily, you know, it\u2019s more diffuse. And so, you\u2019re 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 \u201cnot\u201d is important there too.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: [laughs]<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201cauthority figures\u201d when they don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: Yeah, for sure. Just because it comes from an authoritative source doesn\u2019t always mean that it\u2019s correct. And it often has an agenda as well.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Mm, mmhmm. Yeah, it\u2019s sort of like having a PhD. I remember one of my sisters always saying, \u201cWell, everyone who has a PhD is smart.\u201d And I was like, \u201cOh, you\u2019ve not met enough.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>ALL: [laugh]<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: I mean, smartness is a, you know, there\u2019s a whole lot that goes into whether or not something is gonna be useful and educational, and it\u2019s 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 \u201cconceive, seminal.\u201d [laughs] It\u2019s 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\u2019s so many changes happening.<\/p>\n<p>LOVE: Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: Yeah. I think that you said it wasn\u2019t a special issue; it was a topics cluster?<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Topics collection. It is. It\u2019s, you\u2019re still special.<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: Yes. A topics collection, I think, will, you know, we hope will, because there\u2019s such a wide range of articles in it, I hope that it won\u2019t offer any kind of, it won\u2019t do chronological work.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Right.<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: Because we couldn\u2019t accept everything, and obviously, we\u2019re dependent on who submits to the journal as well.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: In time.<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019re still, post our several years ago South African issue, getting papers from South Africa because of that. And I think that that\u2019s really important.<\/p>\n<p>So my last question for you then is gonna be maybe a tricky one, but we\u2019re using this word \u201cmodern.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>WOOD: Mm.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: And so, what\u2019s counter-modern? Like, what isn\u2019t modern? How do we define, you know, can we define our idea about modern by thinking about what we mean, what we aren\u2019t meaning?<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: Well, we can go all academic on you and say that, you know, [laughs] everything is modern.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: I think we had a conversation about this amongst ourselves, and at the end we decided to accept papers\u2014and I think in our call for papers, we asked for papers\u2014no earlier than the 19th century and going to our present moment, right?<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.<\/p>\n<p>WEINGARTEN: So, we saw ourselves as being in the modern now, and then we had a conversation about why the 19th century. And it\u2019s 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\u2019ve changed, they\u2019ve, in many ways, sometimes shocking ways, they\u2019ve remained the same.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Yeah, they really have. No, that\u2019s true. I used to work in a museum, and we had a very, very early 20th-century doctor\u2019s office setup. I forget exactly the year, but I thought, I\u2019ve seen that, you know! Like, it has, there are things there. Forceps haven\u2019t really, I mean, while we don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s earlier thoughts, what\u2019s so exciting about this focused topic and the papers we\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.<\/p>\n<p>WOOD: But so much of modernity has this element of resistance, the call to return to the anti-modern or the quote-unquote \u201ctraditional\u201d\u2014<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Right, right.<\/p>\n<p>WOOD: \u2014that 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?<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Sure.<\/p>\n<p>WOOD: And who has access and ability to push back in effective ways?<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Right, right. Another word you can, it\u2019s just like when people say, \u201cWell, what does natural childbirth really mean?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>WOOD: Right.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: You know? [laughs] It\u2019s like, well, if it\u2019s happening to you, it\u2019s probably kind of natural. [laughs]<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019re 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 \u201cmodern\u201d works; that stamp fits. But then seeing that piece side by side with the rest of the collection, maybe they\u2019ll go read something that they never would\u2019ve thought of looking into before, like celebrity moms in India. Oh, how is that modern?<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: [laughs]<\/p>\n<p>LOVE: And so then, as you read around in the issue, the pushback on what is, what isn\u2019t modern will become apparent, as you can see.<\/p>\n<p>SCHILLACE: Yeah, that\u2019s so interesting. And to me, that\u2019s what makes this, I think, a unique and also flexible collection, but also a collection that\u2019s particularly well suited for the <i>Medical Humanities<\/i> because we operate at the intersection of fields, and we also operate at the intersection of health and the human. And I\u2019m, you know, I feel that maternity is one of those places which is definitely in that gap.<\/p>\n<p>So, I really appreciate all of you being here today, and if you\u2019re 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 <i>Medical Humanities<\/i>.<!--TrendMD v2.4.8--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 \u201cmodern\u201d\u2014or alternatively positioned as traditional, antiquated, or somewhere in between\u2014at multiple sites and across multiple forms of media, including expert advice, advertisements, popular magazines and newspapers, fiction, television, [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2024\/05\/08\/making-modern-maternity\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":345,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15029],"tags":[15058],"class_list":["post-3852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-podcasts","tag-podcasts"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - 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