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  • Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room
  • Laura E. Ettinger
Judith Walzer Leavitt. Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xi + 385 pp. Ill. $35.00 (978-0-8078-3255-4).

Judith Walzer Leavitt, the author of several books on the history of women and health, has tackled a subject that historians of women have previously ignored: fathers-to-be. Make Room for Daddy shows how a seemingly quintessentially female subject is transformed when a historian examines gender roles, not just women. Leavitt's nuanced history of men's involvement in childbirth explains why men were banned from labor and delivery rooms in the 1940s only to be expected to participate in labor and delivery by the 1980s. Leavitt's book both enhances and revises our understanding of childbirth, physician-patient relationships, race, ethnicity, class, American hospitals, the family, and masculinity.

By 1938, half of American births took place in hospitals, where women had traded the support of their family and friends for what they hoped would be safer, less painful births. Leavitt cleverly organizes her book around the changing geographic spaces that expectant fathers occupied in hospitals. Initially, men were explicitly kept out of hospital labor rooms due to concerns about infection, although that dangerous problem was being solved at that time. In addition, women who were, as were most midcentury patients, sedated during labor were not believed to need their husbands with them. In the 1940s and 1950s, men found themselves in maternity waiting rooms, sometimes called "stork clubs" or "fathers' rooms." Separated from their wives and newborns, they smoked, paced, and bonded with other men, sharing their anticipation and worries. Even in this era, some men began to voice dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. In the 1950s, two new approaches to childbirth encouraged both women and men to want men around. Caudal anesthesia allowed laboring mothers to be awake and aware during their babies' births. Even more importantly, natural childbirth required husbands' participation in both prenatal classes and labor while extolling the importance of the birthing experience for women and men in strengthening family bonds. By the 1970s, most hospitals, including public hospitals and those serving patients of color, had accepted men's presence in labor rooms. Hospitals often still kept men out of delivery rooms because of concerns about factors as varied as infection, adding to nurses' responsibilities, other patients' privacy, and men challenging physicians' authority. By the mid-1980s, many hospitals had developed new birthing rooms, which combined labor and delivery and allowed for men's presence more easily than in the past. "Pushed and pressured by their birthing women patients, by a family-oriented natural childbirth education community, by the women's movement, and equally strongly by many fathers-to-be," physicians came to accept and even expect men to be an intimate part of the childbirth process (p. 283).

Leavitt wonderfully uses a range of sources from popular culture, including TV shows such as I Love Lucy and Happy Days, medical and nursing journals and textbooks, and actual experiences of expectant parents, including those found in fathers' books in hospital waiting rooms. Sensitive to the variation in men's [End Page 538] experiences based on race, ethnicity, and class, Leavitt tells a multilayered story about parents facing different treatment in hospital settings based on their backgrounds. Especially noteworthy is Leavitt's argument that demands for fathers' increased participation in childbirth were not protests against medical authority or conventional gender roles. In fact, Leavitt shows physicians' increasing power and authority in childbirth as well as fairly rigid roles for men and women in heterosexual nuclear families over the course of the twentieth century. Thus, she demonstrates what seems like a remarkable change—men's expected involvement in childbirth by the mid-1980s—"without challenging basic cultural values and institutions" (p. 235). However, at the same time, Leavitt's story illuminates a trend that began in the 1950s: a desire by both men and women for men's increasing involvement in the domestic and child-rearing realm. Overall, Make Room for Daddy is an...

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