Gender, Health, and Popular Culture: Historical Perspectives

Eating for Two: Shaping Mothers’ Figures and Babies’ Futures in Modern American Culture

Eating for Two: Shaping Mothers’ Figures and Babies’ Futures in Modern American Culture Lisa Forman Cody S ince the 1980s, American parenting magazines, pregnancy guidebooks, and advertisements have admonished pregnant women to monitor their food and drink. Pregnant women of the late twentieth century may suspect that compared to the recommendations given to mothers in earlier decades of the twentieth century, they have been expected to follow a peculiarly—but necessarily—strict dietary regime.Women in the 1950s may have smoked and drank while pregnant, but now expectant mothers are expected to forgo caffeine , alcohol, sugar, and junk food, not to mention tobacco and drugs. The advice in recent years has been exacting but sometimes contradictory,suggesting that the smallest misstep could endanger a future baby’s welfare. Oysters, for example, might increase the odds of conceiving, but once pregnant, oysters can cause toxoplasmosis leading to miscarriage. Ginger soothes nausea during pregnancy, but too much can cause maternal arrhythmia.1 Although the tone in 1980s popular parenting materials about prenatal nutrition could certainly be considered anxious, if not alarmist, it would be a mistake to view the concern—and contradictions—about diet and reproduction as belonging only to the late twentieth century. This chapter explores prenatal nutritional advice given by both medical professionals and popular authors from the late nineteenth century onward. Because both popular and medical works guiding expectant mothers (and fathers) have, until very recently, depicted the typical pregnant woman to be white, middle-class, married, and Protestant, this chapter’s sources reflect a normative view in the literature of gender, class, and the culture of food. 23 The Transmission of Health Information 24 There is evidence, of course, that large groups of American women lacked access to the food and practices recommended by mainstream physicians and lay advisors.Anxious mothers in the early twentieth century wrote to the staff at the Federal Children’s Bureau, for instance, worrying about their diets and questioning the advice given by their neighbours and friends. These women’s letters hint at the variety of America’s different culinary customs and the very limited resources available to many families far into the twentieth century. Most pregnancy experts ignored the variety of American diets and the high cost of good nutrition. When they did discuss such issues, they tended to do so in order to chide the mother who rejected a middle-class diet or who foolishly thought good food was too costly.2 Authors’ dietary advice to pregnant women has been more than simply hewing to a contemporary nutritional ideal. Though they emphasized their expertise as doctors, nurses, learned mothers, or even critical feminists, authors discussing prenatal nutrition did not so much simply report and filter the latest evidence-based research on caloric requirements, specific nutrients’ roles in fetal development, substances that pass the placental barrier, or fetal exposure to alcohol, caffeine, and prescribed (or street) drugs, for instance. Experts advising expectant mothers about weight gain and diet reveal as much about recent obstetrical evidence as about broader cultural beliefs about women’s bodies. But even more than simply reflecting normative expectations about women’s bodies, experts’ admonitions about food, drink, and weight gain speak to deep, contradictory, and largely unresolved beliefs about women’s fundamental physiological (and moral) obligations to the life of an unborn child. Over the centuries, midwives and other mothers traditionally offered advice about what to eat and what to avoid in order to become and to stay pregnant. Much of their commentary was aimed at helping a mother with “morning sickness” to make her way through the pregnancy, but very little was said before the late nineteenth century about what a mother should consume for the health of her unborn child. When men entered obstetrics after the 1750s, they had relatively little to say about nutrition—most likely because food preparation was so clearly viewed as a feminine and domestic occupation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the first decades of the twentieth century, obstetrical and parenting texts began cautiously discussing prenatal nutrition as scientists discovered vitamins and were able to make empirically demonstrable claims about the chemical composition of food. By 1940, however, obstetrical authors were opining extensively about every aspect of a pregnant woman’s life, including her dress, diet, and weight Eating for Two Lisa Forman Cody 25 gain.In the 1950s and 1960s,mainstream advice books were hard on mothers...