Medicalized
Motherhood
[Editors note: This excerpt is from Medicalized Motherhood by Jacquelyn Litt]
When the medical profession entered the nursery, it may have resulted in healthier
children, but not necessarily a healthier society.
The rise of medicine's role in child
health, its impact on mothers and its consequences for race relations is examined
in a new book by Jacquelyn Litt, a sociology and women's studies professor at
Iowa State University. Litt's Medicalized Motherhood (Rutgers University
Press) is a mix of medical and social history and first-person narratives.
"Medicalized motherhood refers
to a situation where medical ideas about child health dominate the way motherhood
is understood in society," Litt said.
Social reformers in the early part
of the last century hoped that the medical profession could create a "community
of mothers, a unified motherhood" that would improve child health, as well
as heal social inequalities among women, Litt said. This hope was not achieved,
however, because ethnicity, race and class ultimately defined the relationship
between women and the medical profession.
Litt interviewed Jewish and African
American women who were mothers in the 1930s and 1940s in Philadelphia, when
the medical profession was becoming a force in child health, replacing Old World
remedies.
"These two groups of women came
from cultures steeped in home remedies, and they were the first generations
to make the transition from that to going to the doctor instead," Litt
said. "Medicine became a dominant authority figure, and these mothers measured
their relation to it as a sign of their family's social advancement and inclusion
in society."
To find doctors, upper- and middle-class
Jewish and African American women turned to their own homogenous networks. Jewish
families sought Jewish doctors. African American families sought African American
doctors.
As one Jewish woman told Litt, "I think you could talk more openly with
a person of your own religion . . . That doesn't mean Christian doctors weren't
good doctors. They probably are. But you felt, I felt, more at ease with a Jewish
doctor."
By using their own networks and patronizing
black professionals, affluent African American mothers rose above the racism
inherent in a medical profession dominated by white males.
"Attempting to eliminate the racism in medicine and gaining access to medical
advance was a struggle waged in and through these networks," Litt wrote.
"We do not hear these women desire a return to folk remedies but rather
express a focused conviction that access to dominant medical technologies and
institutions (both as patient and practitioner) was essential to survival."
Ms. Litt is a professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the Iowa State University in Ames.