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Medicalized Motherhood: Perspectives from the Lives of African-American and Jewish Women (review)
- American Jewish History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 90, Number 4, December 2002
- pp. 469-471
- 10.1353/ajh.2004.0007
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
American Jewish History 90.4 (2002) 469-471
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Dr. Benjamin Spock's influential Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, is often regarded as a tour de force for medicalized mothering, a scientific approach to housekeeping, feeding, and baby care that emerged in the early twentieth century. Consistent with other progressive-era policies, pediatricians, women's magazines, government pamphlets, as well as visiting nurses, began to advocate for scientific motherhood, practices that would enable minority and immigrant women to become "fit" and respectable [white] Americans. Admonishments to "fight segregation. . . with soap" suggested that "mundane matters of child feeding, hygiene practices, housekeeping, dress, and so on were deeply significant for the fight against racism and segregation" (31).
Litt interviewed Jewish and African American women who were mothers in Philadelphia during the 1930s and 1940s to learn how they experienced and made use of this emerging medical discourse. These two groups were among the implicit, if not explicit, marginalized "others" that were the targets of such Americanization campaigns. Their thick descriptions of everyday household child-rearing practices, Litt suggests, will help us better understand the development of medical authority in the first half of the twentieth century. Her analysis of these women's narratives reveals multiple and contradictory meanings of medical discourse, depending on the ethnoracial and social position of the narrator. These differences "show medical discourse not as a culturally neutral set of technical practices but as a site where social movement and inclusion for some and cultural dislocation and exclusion for others is enacted" (40).
Eighteen of the mothers interviewed by Litt were Jewish. Fifteen of these were daughters of immigrants; three were immigrants themselves. Litt's analysis demonstrates that Jewish women tended to seek out medical expertise for the purpose of social mobility, i.e. to become socially mainstream. The narratives of the second-generation Jewish women were infused with the distinction between that which was "old fashioned" and "what we do today" (55). Medicalization for many of them became an obligation. "You had to go" to the doctor's office to weigh your baby if you wanted to be a good mother. In another example of obligation, a mother attracted to baby magazines counseled others to throw them away lest they fall out of favor with the visiting physician.
In contrast to the Jewish women who experienced medicalized motherhood as a route to social advancement, many of the twenty [End Page 469] African American women spoke in terms of social isolation and alienation. Although the backgrounds of the African American women were more diverse than the Jewish sample, they shared skepticism, if not fear, of the new medical practices. Instead, their narratives detail the advantages of traditional methods of caretaking and remedy of the South, where these women were born. "Segregated from the medical establishment, many African-American women developed mothering practices grounded in their local knowledge and traditions. "You don't need no teachin' on it" (87), one woman commented.
Litt locates the experiences of these women in their larger social networks. Jewish women were part of socially homogeneous, upwardly mobile communities that included physicians advocating a more scientific approach to motherhood. Thus, she suggests, medicalized motherhood was attractive to Jewish women because it was integrated into the everyday relations of life as a socially unambiguous route to modernization and mobility. Confronting a racist profession, upper-class African Americans established formal network ties with African American professionals who could help secure access to middle-class institutions for their children. Medicalized motherhood was attractive to them as it operated in support of actors and institutions who they thought would be agents of social change. Poor African American women forged ties to medical institutions without the support of either the informal and formal networks of other mothers. Instead, they encountered medical discourse in the homes of their domestic employers, in the doctors' offices in which they worked, and other places...