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

Already a leading figure in the history of childbirth, Judith Walzer Leavitt makes a significant contribution to the social history of medicine with her examination of an understudied, but distinguishing feature of modern American birth: the role of the father. Leavitt's accessible and engagingly written social history of the shifting role of men in childbirth puts the voices of these men and the women they supported front and center. The author captures the dramatic, emotional, and at times traumatic experience of childbirth as told by parents themselves. In addition to popular magazines and newspapers, Leavitt draws to great effect on birth stories that she solicited through the New York Times and On Wisconsin, as well as a rich cache of "Father's Books," journals that capture the story of one Chicago maternity wards' waiting room in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Filled with expectant and new fathers' reflections on their experience in the "Stork Club," as these waiting rooms were sometimes called, Father's Books give insight into men's feelings of helplessness while they waited, the camaraderie they felt with fellow fathers, and the rush of relief, love, and pride they experienced upon hearing the news of their baby's safe arrival.

The author organizes Make Room for Daddy both spatially and chronologically. After an introductory chapter on the medicalization of childbirth, the story begins in earnest in the mid-twentieth century waiting room. The reader subsequently follows a few pioneering men into the labor room in the 1950s and early 1960s. Leavitt provides a chapter on men's experiences in childbirth preparation courses, popularized as part of the natural childbirth movement, part and parcel of men's increasing participation in American birth, and usually a prerequisite for entry into the labor room. The author then returns to the spaces of childbirth during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, examining men's increasingly routine presence in labor rooms, their rising entry in delivery rooms, and then the development of family-centered birthing rooms that became increasingly popular in the United States.

Leavitt makes several important arguments about the role of men in twentieth-century American birth practice that have implications for our understanding not just of the history of medicine, but of masculinity and American society. She emphasizes the significance of male bonding. Whether in Stork Clubs or childbirth preparation classes, men sought support from and took comfort in their shared experience of becoming fathers. Leavitt also stresses the male bonding that went on between fathers and obstetricians, who, especially in the middle decades of the twentieth century, turned to fathers to authorize procedures and to reinforce their authority over the birthing woman. Leavitt makes clear that "the childbirth reform that led to increased participation of laymen [such as fathers] actually helped to reinforce the nuclear family and men's domestic authority. The reforms that succeeded were those that promoted women's roles as mothers, fathers' roles as breadwinners, and physicians' roles as childbirth experts" (287). Leavitt also rightly keeps an eye on the diversity of men's experiences based on race and class, of course, but also on their individual personalities. She tells a complicated story about men's range of responses to childbirth, from elation to revulsion. Rather than laud men's entry into labor and birthing rooms as progress, Leavitt never fails to give voice to men's ambivalent feelings and the stress of their at times ill-defined role. With great compassion, she tells a story of men trying to find their footing as the terrain of American masculinity shifts beneath their feet.

The range of voices that Leavitt marshals to examine men's role in childbirth is both the source of the study's richness and an impediment to deeper analysis. The book's major shortcoming is its failure to unpack adequately the words of the men and...