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5. PEACEFUL AND CONFIDENT: Mothers and Fathers in Labor Rooms
- The University of North Carolina Press
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5 * PeaCefUl and ConfidenT Mothers and Fathers in Labor Rooms With more and more fathers present in hospital labor rooms during the middle years of the twentieth century, couples spent more time alone together during labor than ever before. During the period of home births, men had traditionally waited outside the birthing room. Increasing medicalization of childbirth in the hospital also separated birthing women from their husbands, as it did when men waited in fathers’ rooms. But by the 1960s and 1970s large numbers of men, initially most of them white upper and middle class, found ways to get into labor rooms to be with their wives, especiallyafter taking prenatal classes together. Because husbands were usually the only ones allowed into their wives’ hospital labor rooms, these rooms became spaces for a new togetherness and intimate sharing. This chapter explores men’s continuing struggles from the late 1950s through the 1970s to find their place in hospital labor rooms and looks more closely at what the women and men did once they were able to be together. Expanding their roles of masculine domesticity, men found that sharing their wives’ labor involved them more closely in family PeaCefUl and ConfidenT * 157 life.1 Their positive experiences in the labor room led them to want to increase even further their participation in childbirth. Despite the growing acceptance of men in hospital labor rooms, their presence in maternity corridors remained not only controversial but sometimes physically impossible in many hospitals in the late 1950s, the 1960s, and even into the 1970s. Many hospitals could not accommodate the men without intruding on other parents; this was especially true in multibed labor wards and even in semiprivate labor rooms. The practice of men spending time with their laboring wives was easiest for all concerned if the family could afford the extra expense of a private labor room. Thus, togetherness in labor revealed significant class differences throughout these decades. Owing to the segregation policies of many hospitals during this period, however, it revealed race differences as well, and at first shared labor was the privilege only of middle- or upper-class white families. Most hospitals in the South and many elsewhere admitted African American birthing women, if they admitted them at all, to separate, and often inferiorly equipped, wards until federal law and the threat of funds withdrawal required them to integrate. The 1946 Hill-Burton Act, which funded most midcentury hospital building and expansions, required that hospitals applying for the funds not discriminate on the basis of race, but it included an exception clause if separate but equal accommodations were provided. Between 1946 and 1963, federal grants totaling almost $37 million were made to racially segregated medical facilities.2 Only in the decade following the 1964 Civil Rights Act did hospitals desegregate, some of them only after a fight in the courts. One hospital in Columbia , South Carolina, did not integrate its maternity wards until 1969, and then, says historian E. H. Beardsley, “largely because declining births made having two wards redundant. Before putting white women in once all-black quarters, however, the black section was remodeled and refurbished .” In 1966, when Medicare threatened to withhold funds to Rex Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, the hospital admitted its first black maternity patient.3 In the North, too, many hospitals remained segregated in the midcentury period. In Detroit, for example, where fewer [3.85.63.190] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:29 GMT) 158 * PeaCefUl and ConfidenT than 1 percent of births took place out of hospitals in 1954, forty-two hospitals reported births. Of these only twenty-eight reported more than two per year to African American mothers. Ten hospitals in the city did not admit African American patients at all.4 Gradually, through increasing use of private rooms paid for by birthing couples, hospitals began to accommodate those who wanted to be together during labor. In Milwaukee, the parent group that organized to bring the Dick-Read method into labor practices in local hospitals (and which hired private duty nurses to help a woman when her husband was not allowed in the maternity suite) succeeded in bringing changes to two hospitals in the city before 1960. “Slowly the hospitals are making changes to incorporate the practice of the natural childbirth theory. . . . Physical changes in the hospital itself [are beginning to occur]—for example providing private labor rooms so . . . [a woman’s] husband could be with her at a time when she needs emotional...