Baby Steps: Reassessing the Historical Analysis of Reproduction

Creating Choice, Japanese American Midwives, Village Mothers, and Who Decides? address topics ranging from reproductive practices and childrearing to contraceptive choice and abortion. Susan Smith’s Japanese American Midwives roughly focuses on Japanese American immigrants in an era when public maternal health emerged, challenging folk medicine and midwifery. David Cline’s Creating Choice recounts events from a crucial bridge decade in modern America when contraception and abortion were transformed by reproductive rights ideology. Shoshanna Ehrlich’s Who Decides? spans the gap between contemporary history and recent events by looking at the post-Roe era and female teenagers’ abortion rights. David Ransel’s Village Mothers analyzes reproductive issues in Russia in the twentieth century; he interviewed three generations of women from several distinct regions within Russia in an ambitious study of “reproductive culture” (2). By producing richly contextualized studies of reproductive issues, these scholars offer good models for other researchers to emulate. The researchers’ arguments most notably reflect the positioning of informants’ knowledge and authority in genuine and respectful ways. In this review essay, however, I will suggest three areas, common to studies of reproductive issues, most in need of revision and exploration: the framework of reproduction issues; the concept of medicalization; and the construction of the male gender and sexualities.

As mentioned, the voices of individuals occupy central positions in the authors’ analyses. They are not mere informants, treated as raw data to be given meaning by researchers, but partners in a dialogue about their specific subjects. Ransel argues that his work is “a story primarily about women and how they mediated efforts to alter their reproductive ideas and practices, a story of willing acceptance of some changes and selective acceptance of or outright resistance to others” (3). Cline argues that his oral history of Pioneer Valley, Massachusetts, individuals and groups active in birth control and abortion access demonstrates “how ordinary people became agents for social change that reverberate through American society” (8). Ehrlich claims, “At the heart of [her] work are the voices of 26 young women from Massachusetts who, under state law, elected to seek court authorization for an abortion rather than obtain consent from a parent” (xiii). Smith envisions her project as an exploration of the “experiences of Japanese, immigrant midwives and the shifting meanings of midwifery from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century” (1).

David Ransel’s presentation of his findings demonstrates the ways scholars can both analyze and respect informants’ knowledge. His skill at laying out the causes of high infant mortality and limited adult childcare without falling into a reductivist argument of ignorant peasants culturally afraid of modern medicine is commendable. In fact, he thoroughly interrogates modern medical ideology as articulated by the urban, reformist, doctors of Russia in the first two chapters of the book. His research more importantly reveals how the lack of access to medical personnel, modern western medicine, childcare services, and consumer products was often as significant in reproductive and childcare practices as indigenous knowledge. By placing these things on an equal par, he illuminates change among the generations and variation among groups in a convincing fashion. Ransel formulated questions and chose interviewees within an expansive framing of “reproductive culture,” thus allowing for the inclusion of healing folk arts.

David Cline, by contrast, used a tightly defined concept of reproductive choice with no less impressive results. His final product is a benchmark work of cooperative oral history based in a community...