Modern Motherhood: An American History

Conclusion

280 Q Reflecting the focus of current historical research, this book has necessarily been preoccupied with mothers’ relationships to the experts, political ideologies, social policies, and the labor force. Seen through this lens, the modernization of motherhood has been about control, rationality, science, psychology, an expanded role for the state, and a social policy structure that leaves much to be desired for caregivers. This plethora of public forces deeply impacted what the culture defined as a private role. Meanwhile, government has been willing to take on new regulatory roles in educational, health, and family law, and even to provide some small subsidies for poor mothers. Gradually, American law has reduced the patriarchal rights of fathers, sometimes assisting mothers and children in the process. This development , too, has been a piece of the modernization of both motherhood and family life as a whole. As men lost some legal prerogatives within the home, however, they maintained a near monopoly on public power,from politics to the professions.Meanwhile,women gradually gained some rights, particularly in the public sphere as voters and workers and increasingly literate and educated members of society. All this has been part of the backdrop for Americans’ many expressions of anxiety about maternal power. Since the mid-nineteenth century, with challenges to the old idea of quickening as the beginning of life and increased anxiety about breastfeeding, disquiet about the maternal body has been one important expression of this anxiety.As allopathic modern medicine consolidated, medical practices and values became deeply enmeshed with ideas about appropriate maternal bodies and appropriately maternal women. Since about the beginning of the twentieth century, the state has also demonstrated an increased willingness either to provide incentives or to establish control mechanisms related to pregnancy, prenatal care, infant feeding, protective labor legislation, and medical interventions for women and infants. These measures have ranged from coerced sterilization to state-required immunizations for babies. Conclusion Conclusion 281 Indeed, the most apparently progressive governmental interventions have been linked in bizarre ways with the most coercive or problematic. In the early twentieth century, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes justified the involuntary sterilization of the “unfit” with a reference to government’s mandate to immunize infants for public health. He argued that “the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.” In that same era, Justice David M. Brewer linked the provision of protective labor legislation, such as maximum hours just for women, with government’s interest in regulating mothers’ bodies. “As healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical wellbeing of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race.” This argument justified placing the woman worker in“a class by herself.”1 And in 1999, when her Cesarean-section delivery was mandated, Ms. Pemeberton in Florida had her rights to medical decision making and reproductive freedom in choice of birthing situations abrogated through legal arguments based on Roe v. Wade. Discomfort with women’s sexuality has also informed modern motherhood and reproductive debates, especially in the twentieth century. Particularly for poor women and women of color, charges of sexual promiscuity made women vulnerable to involuntary sterilization procedures. In the mid-twentieth century and early twenty-first century, middle-class mothers were especially targeted with accusations of channeling frustrated psychosexual desires into their child-rearing practices . In the later twentieth-century, as the debate over abortion and a renewed opposition to contraception roiled their ways through American culture and politics , the sexual freedoms that had gradually expanded for women became pitted against their motherhood. Male-dominated governmental bodies and medical traditions shaped by men’s authority have not been uniformly harsh toward women. Indeed, there have always been dissenters and feminists. An all-male Supreme Court upheld Roe v. Wade, and brave male physicians risked censure to provide a range of reproductive health care to women, to name just two examples. Still, the problem of defining reproductive justice and economic empowerment, or any other form of maternal liberation, remains complicated by women’s underrepresentation in public decision making. Women’s political voices on issues of reproductive justice were certainly heard in the reelection of Barack Obama in 2012, at a time of intense attacks on women’s reproductive rights, but a long-standing ambivalence about trusting women with pregnancy and even infant care continues nonetheless. Similar problems complicate the creation of a broad safety net for the work of caregiving. American...