Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room (review)

In Make Room for Daddy, Judith Walzer Leavitt has produced an extraordinary history of men and childbirth. Historians of gender and medicine might view it as something of a companion volume to her widely-acclaimed Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750 to 1950, published in 1986. This earlier work fundamentally altered the ways in which historians came to understand the experiences of childbearing women, especially for the mid-twentieth century, a period in which hospital birth largely replaced home birth. In the late 1930s approximately half of the births in the United States were taking place in hospitals, and by the mid- 1950s approximately 95 percent of American births were hospital births.

The first two chapters of Make Room for Daddy reprise several of the most important conclusions of Leavitt's earlier work, as she reminds readers that "for millennia, women had controlled childbirth practices. But in a relatively short time in the twentieth century, women gave up what they had for something even better: safety and security to survive the dangerous experience of childbirth." Far from resisting medical control, women "participated actively in transferring authority to the medical experts, to those they hoped would save them from the dangers that had plagued childbirth throughout history." (32). And although the reality did not live up fully to the promise, throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century most women did not seem to regret their collective bargain.

Make Room for Daddy explores the involvement of fathers in the birthing process, beginning with their role as anxious outsiders. During the 1930s and 1940s, most expectant fathers waited for their wives' safe delivery in hospital lounges set aside for their use. They smoked; they paced. Sometimes they wrote of their anxieties and hopes in notebooks that the hospital placed in the room, so that men could leave a record of their thoughts and read the musings of those who had sat in that room before them. In a very real sense, these expectant fathers were experiencing childbirth not with their wives, but with each other. Gradually, the situation changed, and by the 1950s many but not all hospitals allowed men to be with their wives during labor, although not generally during delivery, and this altered men's experiences in significant ways.

By the 1960s, prenatal classes that included both expectant parents were widespread, and by the 1970s such classes had practically become the norm. Natural childbirth had become commonplace and men were not only in the labor room, but in the delivery room as well. Although both natural childbirth and the father's presence during delivery engendered considerable controversy from the 1950s to the 1970s, by the end of this period they were considered a given. In the end, however, having one's husband in the delivery room often meant that the new father now bonded with the (male) doctor. As one such obstetrician put it in 1965, "a properly trained expectant father can be an ally to the doctor." (145) The delivery room came to be accessible to fathers, according to Leavitt, "because of pressures that were grounded in support for the nuclear family and respect for medicine." This movement was decidedly not a challenge to "basic cultural values and institutions." (235.)

Inevitably, it seems, as men became ubiquitous in the delivery room, they began to fret that the childbirth experience revolved too much around the women giving birth and did not provide enough recognition of their own experiences. As early as the 1970s, there were men who insisted that "the father's own needs should govern his participation, instead of only his wife's wishes or family-centered needs." (263). By the turn of the twenty-first century some men were expressing their discontent to anthropologist Richard Reed, telling him that their experiences in the delivery room failed "to provide for [the father's] needs. There are no notes in the chart...