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4. HE WANTS TO KNOW: Prenatal Education for Fathers
- The University of North Carolina Press
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4 * he WanTs To knoW Prenatal Education for Fathers Prenatal classes for pregnant women and their husbands—some developing as early as the 1930s but growing exponentially in the 1950s and 1960s—educated both parents for the experience of being together during labor. Hospitals frequently made these classes a prerequisite for the laymen to be permitted to pass through the doors from the public corridor of the fathers’ waiting rooms into the labor corridor and, later, into delivery rooms. The classes opened new spaces in which the men could share experiences and feelings with one another as well as with their wives. In the classroom the male bonding that had occurred within the waiting rooms and through the fathers’ books continued to sustain the men at the same time that the couples prepared themselves for a new level of intimacy and connection. Because most of the men who stayed with their wives in labor had gone through some prenatal education, we interrupt the labor-room narrative and turn in this chapter to the classes and how they developed. Childbirth educators and hospitals offered the classes as a way to prepare first the expectant mothers and then the fathers-to-be for their he WanTs To knoW * 121 roles during labor and delivery and also to teach tasks of infant feeding and bathing and encourage the men to be active in early childcare. Especially during the post–World War II years, the classes worked well within common cultural ideas about masculinity and men’s role as head of the household and protector of the family. Educators taught basic knowledge and some practical skills, but they rarely, when including men in the classes, asked them to move very far from traditional gender roles. The classes were meant to expand men’s domestic roles and connect them more closely to their families by engaging them actively in the birth processes and some infant care while still honoring their traditional role in the family. For the most part, prenatal educators discouraged challenges to hospital practices and did not intend to defy physician authority or confront medical hierarchies. Nonetheless, the classes empowered their men and women graduates to dispute hospital policies that excluded the men and act in ways that ultimately led to significant changes in laborand delivery routines across the country.Theycontributed, too, to a change in men’s roles within their families. In the early 1950s Vance Packard, a familiar Associated Press reporter and staff writer at American Magazine (and soon to be popular author of The Hidden Persuaders), helped to accelerate Americans’ interest in prenatal classes. In the pages of American Magazine, Packard followed one couple, Ensign and Mrs. Bang, through their birth experience. He lauded the changes that allowed “a new method of training” that could lead couples to a satisfying and rewarding shared experience. Noting his own “frustrating and painful” time in the 1940s when he knew little about labor and delivery and had been “shunted into a darkened hospital waiting room,” Packard celebrated that couples could now be prepared for the event and go through labor together: Ensign and Mrs. Bang’s secret, we now know, was that together they had been rehearsing and preparing themselves carefully for this important event over a period of several months. . . . While the mother is training for parenthood, the father can be training too. . . . Until recent years we husbands were the forgotten men of pregnancy. This . . . deprived our wives of emotional support [and] it frustrated the [3.93.173.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:18 GMT) 122 * he WanTs To knoW husband. . . . Ensign Bang went with his wife to the final sessions of her course covering the “rehearsal for childbirth.” Together they saw demonstrated for them step by step just what would happen from the moment Mrs. Bang and the other members of the class felt the first twinge of contraction. Through a series of life-sized sculptures, they saw just how the baby would make its exit. And they learned, in a free-for-all discussion[,] just what they both could do to help the process along.1 Because Bang had attended the classes, the hospital and physician permitted him to remain at his wife’s side during the whole of labor, during which, Packard noted, he “spent so many hours rubbing Mrs. Bang’s back during her labor that he had a severe arm ache the next day!”2 One vivid section of Packard’s article retold a favorite...