Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room

Preface

PrefaCe Until fairly recently, historians have treated childbirth as if it were a story only about midwives, physicians, changing technology, and medical advances . Then it became clear that labor and delivery could not be understood without the birthing woman’s perspective and experience. Afterall, she was the main actor, the one doing the hard physical work, of course with the help of birth attendants and medical knowledge. For the most part the history of childbirth has entirely neglected the fathers-to-be.1 I am one of the historians of childbirth who previously ignored the fathers; in earlier work my emphasis has been on birthing women and their experiences.2 So it is natural to ask why a women’s historian would want to write a book about men and childbirth. The answer is that the more I studied the history of medicalized childbirth, the more I realized that it is impossible to understand women’s experience without also addressing all the participants involved in the birth of a child—including the men—and without analyzing the place in which most births of the period occurred, the hospital. Because it is both a biological and a cultural event, childbirth illuminates evolving power relationships, the x * PrefaCe importance of place, and the disparities of both race- and class-based privilege. In order to understand women’s childbirth experiences in the five decades from 1935 to 1985, it is essential to consider the men and the hospital context. Even though I had not written about fathers and childbirth before launching this project, I have been attuned to the subject for a long time. When I was growing up, my mother often told a story about her labor before the birth of my brother in the mid-1930s in a New York City hospital. During labor in a semiprivate room, the woman in the next bed would scream out with every contraction—and here my mother would raise her arm in the air and shout, mimicking the woman: “God damn you, Seymour !!” Over and over again the suffering woman repeated this phrase at the top of her lungs, blaming her husband for her pains: “God damn you, Seymour!!” Imprinting itself on my mother’s birth experience, the phrase has resonated with me, too, over theyears. Had Seymourdone any more than the obvious to warrant such abuse? The next morning, after both women had delivered healthy babies, Seymour himself appeared, with flowers for his wife, who welcomed him warmly without any of the previous day’s vitriol. My mother’s story about Seymour, with emphasis on the woman’s screams during labor blaming her husband and with some hilarity about Seymour himself, whom my mother portrayed as looking rather henpecked and meek, stayed with me. As a historian, however, I did not see its significance in my previous writing about childbirth, which occurred during the height of the women’s movement when my focus primarily was the birthing woman herself.The births of my own two children in the 1970s, during which my husband accompanied and helped me throughout labor and delivery, proved the point of men’s importance ever more strongly. Now moving my research focus into the mid- to late twentieth century, I have come to understand how in that period men played vital roles in hospitalized childbirth as supporters of birthing women, and even as decision makers, and that their roles evolved over time.3 The men who form the major focus of this book were starting their families in a period dominated by the aftermath of World War II, the Korean conflict, and the Vietnam War and by fears of the atomic bomb PrefaCe * xi and the Cold War. Television situation comedies, like Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver, portrayed the 1950s as a decade of happy nuclear families with a breadwinning father, a stay-at-home mother, and happy children living in suburban bliss.Yet family historians have identified this period as one filled with significant changes that are relevant for understanding changing roles for new fathers and new birth options. The celebration of Father’s Day is a good indicator of changes within the family and within society that are reflected in the changing practices of childbirth between the postwar period and the mid-1980s.The holiday was first recognized by a joint resolution of Congress in 1956, and then in 1972 President Richard...