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2. KEEPING VIGIL: Fathers in Waiting Rooms
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
2 * keePinG viGil Fathers in Waiting Rooms As the hospital came to be the preferred setting for childbirth in the mid-twentieth century, some of the men who accompanied their laboring wives returned home to await news of their child’s birth. Others may have retired to a nearby bar or restaurant to drink and eat their worries away. Still another alternative was to wait stolidly in hospital hallways, on hard benches and chairs, with few amenities. Most often, however, the men sat in “stork clubs,” “husbands’ rooms,” or “fathers’ rooms,” hospital waiting rooms located near maternity suites and newborn nurseries reserved exclusively for them. At the middle of the twentieth century, most hospitals provided these separate waiting rooms for prospective fathers, where the men would sit, pace, smoke cigarettes, listen to the radio (or, later, watch Tv), read, sleep, talk on the pay telephone, and commiserate with one another as they awaited updated information about their wives’ condition.1 These waiting rooms have been the butt of many jokes, and few scholars have previously paid serious attention to them. However, fathers’ waiting rooms provided the spaces for intense self-reflection, serious worrying, and some very significant sharing of experiences that keePinG viGil * 49 ultimately led the men to help transform the purpose and use of the rooms themselves. In 1949 new father Dale Clark published an account in the men’s magazine Esquire detailing his experience of sitting in a fathers’ waiting room during his wife’s labor and delivery. At the time, not very many other men articulated agreement with his views of resistance to hospital policies, but this point of view was on the horizon: Framed on the inner side of the corridor door, a printed notice directed the husband to the waiting lounge on the floor below. . . . Half a dozen expectant fathers were gathered there—just like in the movies, and in fiction, and the cartoons. The lounge was a comfortable place. Its tall-stemmed lamps shone down on a divan, padded armchairs, and reclining chairs that were almost beds. Here a man dozed, there one thumbed a magazine, and yonder a third chainsmoked . You never in your life have seen an unhappier set of poor devils. Each started visibly when, just as I entered, the telephone rang. The nearest man—I learned later that his wife had been in labor twenty-eight hours—snatched at the instrument. But the call was for another chap, who, after listening, exclaimed, “I only brought her in half an hour ago! That’s what I call a woman getting it over with quick!” And away he rushed, to peer through a glass pane at his newly arrived son. Just like in the movies, there was something sad and a little ridiculous about these waiting men, perspiring, suffering, and useless as they were. That, after all, was the way I myself had expected to participate in our child’s birth. I’d managed to live fortythree years without ever hearing of a husband’s doing anything else. . . . The specialized modern age seemed to have progressed to the point where an expectant father was not needed, or even allowed, beyond the waiting lounge of the urban hospital. . . . Every man in that room might have been upstairs with his wife—where, it seems to me, a man should not only be allowed to be, but where, for sound physiological and psychological reasons, he is imperatively needed. . . . It’s about time for all husbands—the whole crowd in the waiting lounge—to grab hatchets and chop through the partition.2 [18.212.242.203] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:05 GMT) 50 * keePinG viGil Only a few men actually wanted to grab hatchets and actively resist hospital policies in 1949. In the decades of the mid-twentieth century, most men worried and paced in hospital waiting rooms without many thoughts that things might be different. They spent long hours sitting in one room while their wives were laboring in a different one, sometimes only a partition away. The men did ultimately become an eager part of a movement to break through the walls and share directly in their wives’ labor experiences, a movement that included lay groups as well as other concerned parents. In hospital waiting rooms, men’s restricted movement germinated the changes that were to come. Fathers’ Waiting Rooms Beginning in the 1920s, as increasing numbers of American women went into the hospital to have their babies, general hospitals established...