Modernizing Women's Health Practices

A recent episode of the A&E show Mad Men, set in 1963, showed Betty Draper giving birth to her third child. Betty entered the hospital with her husband Don, but the two were quickly separated. A nurse escorted Betty to the labor room, while Don was shown to the waiting room, where he spent the next several hours bonding with an anxious father-to-be over a bottle of Scotch. (While they drank, Betty was transferred from the labor room to the delivery room and heavily sedated for the birth. She woke up the next morning in a hospital bed with the newborn in her arms.) In her new book, Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room, Judith Waltzer Leavitt, a pioneer in the history of childbirth in America, turns her attention to the men in the waiting room and their experiences with childbirth in the four decades after World War II. Leavitt's first book, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950, was one of the first to examine women's birth experiences. It analyzed the use of interventions like chloroform, ether, forceps, and twilight sleep, and explained the movement of birth from home to hospital between roughly 1900 and 1950. In her latest book, Leavitt breaks new ground as she returns to this familiar subject and rectifies an omission in a literature that she claims "has entirely neglected the fathers-to-be" (p. ix). Contests of power between pregnant women, midwives, and physicians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been well documented, by Leavitt among others, as have the consequences of moving childbirth from home to hospital. In Make Room for Daddy, Leavitt argues that the history of childbirth in the hospital is not complete until it includes an analysis of husbands who became active participants in this event after World War II. Her book accomplishes three important objectives. First, it provides a detailed discussion of medicalized childbirth after 1950. Leavitt is among the first historians of this topic to situate her study solely in the second half of the twentieth century, and this chronology requires her to identify and explain trends in this period in greater depth than historians who track the event across longer periods of time. (Jacqueline H. Wolf's Deliver Me from Pain, published in 2009, also offers a detailed overview of childbirth after 1950 through the lens of obstetrical anesthesia.) Second, Leavitt situates laymen in this historically female event, and her treatment of men as subjects deserving of both study and respect should be held up as a model for other women's historians. Make Room for Daddy grants fathers-to-be the same type of agency that women's historians insist their subjects possess and shows the ways in which women and men acted together to create a shared birth experience that benefited both partners. Third, Leavitt demonstrates that men's increased participation in childbirth reflected changing definitions of fatherhood and men's relationship to the nuclear family in the decades after World War II. In this way, Make Room for Daddy extends beyond the history of childbirth and contributes to the fields of American social history, family history, social medicine, masculinity studies, and gender studies.

Men began the journey Leavitt describes as Don Draper did: isolated in waiting rooms, anxiously smoking and pacing, and at times, bonding with each other over the shared experience of being left out of an important moment in their family lives. In the 1950s, some men, generally white middle- and upper-class men possessing the requisite social authority and economic power, began to push hospitals to allow them to accompany their wives into labor rooms. They did so largely in response to their...