Representing Argentinian Mothers; Medicine, Ideas and Culture in the Modern Era, 1900–1946 by Yolanda Eraso (review)

As part of the tradition of Argentine history, most English-language publications deal with the history of the capital city, Buenos Aires, and scholars who are interested in provincial and regional topics quickly learn that it is easier to write about topics that focus on the capital. The publication in English of Eraso’s work on social medicine and motherhood provides a corrective to the prevailing idea that important history does not emanate from provincial sources. Indeed, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to focus on medicine and motherhood from the three vantage points offered in this book—medical, textual, and visual records that highlight the role of the Catholic Church and religious practitioners—without this change in perspective.

Representing Argentinian Mothers explores how Catholic efforts to retain authority regarding reproductive issues centered on the notion that Marian motherhood exemplified the modern role for women. Furthermore, Catholic priests and doctors who identified themselves as more influenced by religion than science thoroughly rejected not only feminist visions of modern motherhood but also the control of maternity hospitals and orphanages by female philanthropists, themselves often fervent Catholics. Women were supposed to birth children in silent suffering while men set policy. Even photojournalism and provincial art ignored the image of the pregnant woman, fixating instead on poor and desperate mothers. As Eraso cogently concludes, “Prospective motherhood emerged in Argentinian society as an object not defined by a unique discourse but rather as an object that remitted to a diffuse corpus where various competing, temporal, registers have penetrated it to shape its contours” (261).

This work looks closely at the province of Córdoba, north of Buenos Aires, which was always the center of religious piety and expression serving as a counterpoint to the liberal, secular world of Buenos Aires. Outside the capital city, despite the presence of a university, feminism developed later, and the science of maternity and child rearing remained conservative, nurtured more by papal encyclicals and Catholic Action than eugenics and French visions of child rearing or puericultura.

Eraso’s sensibilities derive from an undergraduate education in Córdoba, graduate studies at Oxford University, and exposure to an international historiography and bibliography of social medicine. The combination of these backgrounds enables her to present a fascinating and ultimately critical analysis of Catholic influence at a time when information from the United States and Europe about maternity, abortion, and the need to lower infant-mortality rates in the modern nation-state was undergoing intensive dissemination. The groups that she studies had little impact in Buenos Aires; women in Córdoba had to deal with notions of the body and of medical intervention that were largely foreign to the capital. Ideology and a lack of economic and medical resources in rural and poor areas conspired to produce a high birth rate and a high infant-mortality rate outside the capital city (Buenos Aires could boast of low birth rates—sometimes to the dismay of public officials—and low infant-mortality results).

This study should appeal to those who are interested in women’s history, the social history of medicine, and the history of eugenics.