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A Note on Sources
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
a noTe on soUrCes This project began when I visited the archives of Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital to start research on a new project, a history of childbirth in the twentieth century.The archivist, Susan Sacharski, showed me a huge set of “Fathers’ Books,” once empty, thick journals that the hospital had kept in its mid-twentieth-century “Stork Club,” or fathers’ waiting room. In this stack of books that spanned the 1940s through the 1960s, men had written their thoughts and feelings as their wives labored and delivered elsewhere in the hospital and responded to other men who had earlier occupied the room. These books turned out to be a research windfall. From them I learned about men’s powerful emotions as they waited, and I saw that men started to get more involved in the birth process from this perch outside hospital labor and delivery rooms. They were not just smoking and pacing; they were already part of the action of birth. From that beginning, I narrowed my project’s goal from childbirth during the whole century to a focus on the laymen in the midcentury period when their present-day roles were formulated.The fathers’ books had revealed quite a bit about hospital policies and activities, but I needed a fuller context for the laymen’s actions. The perspectives of the mostly middle-class men who had written in the books needed to be augmented to include a broader cross section of the population. I needed to be able to check the men’s observations against as many other sources as possible in order to understand how fathers-to-be may have affected birth practices in twentieth-century hospitals. I looked 298 * a noTe on soUrCes first at hospital publications and policies and realized immediately that the men’s jottings added significant dimension and detail to official hospital sources. Reading the literature by historians of medicine, the family, and social history in general confirmed my thinking that I was onto a subject that not only would be interesting but could also reveal some of the inequality of twentieth-century medicine and supplement what we know about hospitals, families, and childbirth. Then I had to expand my searches considerably to try to get as full a story as possible. As the endnotes reveal, I searched medical and obstetrics texts and journals, nursing texts and journals, popular health and family magazines, handbooks, social science literature , newspapers, films, and television shows. Most important, I looked for men’s own voices in all my research venues. I worked in collections and archives at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the National Library of Medicine, the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, and the Library of Congress. I used the wonderful collections in the University of Wisconsin Library System , including the Ebling Health Sciences Libraryand theWisconsin Historical Society. I utilized extant oral histories and conducted a few interviews of my own. I sent out an author’s query to my university’s alumni magazine and various newspapers. I made use of a previous query I had placed with the New York Times Sunday Book Review section, when I was looking for women’s birth stories, to see what the women had said about the men’s roles. I searched for other hospital waiting-room fathers’ books by writing to hospitals around the country. Many responded that they remembered having such books, but most could not locate them, although I was able to use one other set. In order to uncover men’s experiences and emotions, I was comprehensive in my research and looked for birth descriptions from every vantage point, ultimately yielding multiple and sometimes complicated perspectives on men’s historical childbirth experiences. ...