From Home to Hospital: Jewish and Italian American Women and Childbirth, 1920-1940 (review)

Angela D. Danzi. From Home to Hospital: Jewish and Italian American Women and Childbirth, 1920-1940. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997. xiii + 200 pp. Ill. $41.50.

Reaching beyond the study of professional obstetrics, historians have uncovered a rich diversity of childbirth practices and beliefs. They often find ethnicity and generational differences to be useful lenses for examining changing values and routines in childbirth. For example, Charlotte Borst's investigation of midwifery in Wisconsin highlights the significance of the parturient's ethnicity in the selection of birth attendant; her recognition of the importance of ethnic identification helps explain the shift from midwives to physicians. Similarly, Jacquelyn Litt's articles cogently demonstrate both cultural continuities and discontinuities over several generations of Jewish American women. ¹ These authors are now joined by Angela Danzi with her close study of Jewish and Italian American women who birthed at home and in hospitals and clinics during the period between the World Wars.

Danzi observes that before 1920, most Jewish and Italian immigrant women relied on midwives to help conduct home births. After 1920, most Jewish women readily turned to male physicians associated with local medical institutions, while the choices made by her Italian informants were more diverse: some continued with midwives, others utilized private physicians and hospitals associated with public clinics, still others had their earliest births at home and only later moved into the hospital. For Danzi the important question is, what explains this variety? Why did some second-generation mothers easily move into the modern hospital setting and medically directed childbirths, while others did not?

The heart of Danzi's study is a series of interviews conducted with nearly eighty second-generation Italian and Jewish American women who birthed before 1940. All her informants spent their formative childhood years in the United States, they self-identified as Italian or Jewish American, and they lived their early married and childbearing years in New York City. Beyond these criteria, the women represent a wide range of familial, educational, and economic backgrounds and experiences. From these experiences, Danzi extracts the critical factors that shaped her informants' childbirth choices. Paramount is the role of personal networks. From the experiences of mothers, aunts, older neighbors, and peers, women learned about traditional and contemporary childbirth practices as well as the opinions of women who had birthed before them. From older women and peers, they gained introductions to birth attendants and were directed to available public clinics. Their level of education, and most particularly the extent of parental supervision, influenced how second-generation women responded to what they learned from their networks. Another very important element shaping childbirth decisions was direct personal relationships with physicians. Moreover, Jewish daughters were relatively autonomous when compared with their Italian American peers. For Danzi, reasons such as these explain why her Jewish informants turned earlier to hospitals and physicians.

Historians of childbirth will be very interested in the interview material in From Home to Hospital. The choices made by the informants and the reasons for their decisions are convincingly presented; the book is replete with quotations that enable the reader to hear the voices of these women clearly. It is unfortunate that such a rich history was not more carefully edited, because the book is filled with annoying typographical errors. Of greater disappointment is Danzi's decision to maintain a narrow focus, limited to childbirth. Though her informants' narratives touch on allied areas such as abortion and birth control, she does not pursue these in any depth, leaving the reader without a broader context for appreciating the difficulties and choices her informants faced.

Rima D. Apple
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Note

1. Charlotte G. Borst, Catching Babies: The Professionalization of Childbirth, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Jacquelyn Litt, "Mothering, Medicalization, and Jewish Identity, 1928-1940," Gender & Soc., 1996, 10...