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3. THE BEST BACKRUBBER: Fathers Move into Labor Rooms
- The University of North Carolina Press
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3 * The BesT BaCkrUBBer Fathers Move into Labor Rooms Even as most men were confined in fathers’ rooms in the 1940s and 1950s, some hospitals allowed a number of them to venture out of the waiting rooms for short visits to their wives during labor, and a few hospitals even let them stay through the long hours of labor, excluding them only when the woman went into the delivery room. The changes that allowed men to enter labor rooms came slowly and unevenly and demonstrate the heterogeneity of the hospital birth experience in the United States. The opportunity for men to be with their wives came first to those who could afford private labor rooms; it was related directly to socioeconomic class and privilege and also to race in this period of segregated hospitals. New medications that allowed women to be awake and pain-free during labor and the natural childbirth movement, which grew in the 1950s, joined to create social pressures pushing hospitals to let couples be togetherduring labor.1 The movement to bring fathers into labor rooms gained particular strength in the decade of the 1950s because it fit the period’s pronatalist nuclear family emphasis: men’s participation in labor could foster their involvement in the lives of their children.2 The BesT BaCkrUBBer * 87 Dale Clark, who wrote in Esquire the vivid account of a fathers’ waiting room quoted in the previous chapter, wanted all husbands to “grab hatchets” to break their way into their wives’ labor rooms. He accomplished that goal for himself by ignoring the sign directing fathers to their own waiting room; instead he boldly accompanied his wife into the labor room, which he also described in memorable language: Now, at three o’clock in the morning, a single bulb glowed dimly in the labor room. Thousands of you who read this—fathers included— have never seen a labor room. This one was one of a series of small, narrow, utilitarian cells along a corridor to the delivery room. There was space in it for two narrow beds along the opposing walls, two low cabinets containing bedpans, a folding screen, and a single, small, straight-backed chair. One door opened from a toilet, shared with the adjoining cubicle. Above and outside the corridor door, a light would flash when Ruth pressed the push-button device attached to the head of her bed. It was a perfectly efficient and matter-offact —and terribly lonely—little cell. . . . A nurse came in with a tray of examining equipment. During each examination I was asked—for hygienic reasons, I suppose—to step into the corridor. . . . A man doesn’t need to be a miracle worker to play his role to perfection. He merely needs to be there. Period. Instead of wearing out the carpet of the lounge on the floor below, he is simply required to pull up a chair to his wife’s bedside.3 Clark’s article was a public endorsement meant to encourage other men to do what he did and ignore the rules in order to be with their wives through the labor ordeal. It was probably a combination of good fortune that another woman did not occupy the second bed in his wife’s labor room and his own brash assurance (or did he reveal that he would write up this experience in a popular magazine?) that let him get away with what most other men could not yet accomplish. During the 1950s, however , encouraged by their wives and the growing movement that Clark’s essay represented, more and more men tried to do what he did and join their wives in labor. [35.168.113.41] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:19 GMT) 88 * The BesT BaCkrUBBer Hospital Policies of Exclusion In the face of emerging sentiment for men and women to share the labor experience, hospital policy changed slowly starting in the 1950s. Wesley Memorial Hospital, along with other Chicago hospitals, permitted fathers briefly to visit their wives in labor if they were in private rooms or serially if they were in semiprivate rooms. Men whose wives were in larger wards—those less privileged economically—did not see their wives at all: the cramped spaces and considerations for the privacy of other women precluded their presence.4 Some hospitals allowed men brief visits to their wives’ labor rooms during the day but not at night.5 Other hospitals “send the father home when his wife is in labor and...