"The mother is the factory"
Who said:"the mother is the factory, and by education and care she can be made more efficient in the art of motherhood"
That was written in 1942 by Grantly Dick-Read, widely considered to be the father of modern "natural" childbirth.
I was alerted to the sexist and racist history of "natural" childbirth by the articles of Amananta and Naomi Shapiro, and did some research to find out if their assertions were actually true. They are.
"Natural" childbirth was invented by a man to convince middle and upper class women that the pain of childbirth was in their minds, and thereby encourage them to have more children, so that the world would not be overrun by inferior people.
Below you can read about the fact that Grantly Dick-Read's theory of "natural" childbirth grew out of his racism and sexism. He was concerned that "inferior" people were having more children than their "betters" and that this trend must be reversed by encouraging the white middle and upper class women to have more children. He believed that women's growing freedoms led them away from the "natural" profession of motherhood toward totally unsuitable activities. He thought that their fear of pain in childbirth might also be discouraging them, so they must be "taught" that the pain was due to their false cultural beliefs. In this way, women could be "educated" to have more children.
In Holistic obstetrics: the origins of "natural childbirth" in Britain, O Moscucci, PMJ 2003;79:168-173, Dr. Ornella Moscucci writes:
Health policy became the subject of intense public debate in the aftermath of the Boer war, when Britain’s near defeat at the hands of a barely trained army focused the attention on the physical fitness of new recruits... Adherents to the new science of eugenics on the other hand blamed heredity. In their view, health policy should aim to prevent reproduction among "low quality" human stock .., and encourage reproduction among "good" stock...
The development of "natural childbirth" owed much to the activities of physicians and health professionals who were in sympathy with the aims of reform eugenics...
[T]hese health reformers were concerned about the differential birth rate—the tendency of poorer, less healthy sections of society to have larger families than their "betters". Thus, as well as endorsing plans for the sterilisation and detention of "degenerates", they also sought to encourage the middle classes to have more children... Female education and employment were seen as a particular evil, insofar as they led women to regard motherhood a burden and to neglect hearth and home...
One obvious way to reverse the falling birth was to entice women of "superior stock" back into the home, where they would fulfil their functions as wives and mothers. Health reformers took up the challenge by developing an ideology of childbirth that emphasised the "naturalness" of pregnancy and birth. This ideology functioned at a number of levels. It was prescriptive, in that it rooted woman’s social role in her biological capacity for reproduction... Motherhood was not only a woman’s supreme fulfilment and reward, but also her civic duty...
Health reformers ... were confident that the ill effects of civilisation could be reversed if women reformed their habits and adopted a more "natural" mode of life... As Dick-Read wrote in 1942: "Education and research are the essential of progress, particularly in child production . . .the mother is the factory, and by education and care she can be made more efficient in the art of motherhood".
Arguments against obstetrical intervention were not purely medical, however. Religious and moral considerations also played an important part. In the cosmology of health reformers, physical health was a state of spiritual and bodily wholeness, disease a fall from grace; healing could be attained by favouring God’s "natural" cures rather than the artificial remedies of orthodox medicine. It is no accident that non-conformists, Christian Scientists, and theosophists were prominently involved in the movement for natural childbirth,.. Health reformers were disaffected with official creeds and orthodox medicine alike, seeking to replace both with a unified, holistic philosophy of spiritual and bodily health. In so doing they harked back to traditional values, which they located in an organic past or in the rural community...
Grantly Dick-Read shared [the] belief that society’s hopes for regeneration lay in a return to a more natural mode of birth... In his view, the psychological make-up of modern woman was far more significant than diet or exercise: "for motherhood is of the mind, and the body is usually subjected to the mental processes, unless any gross abnormality exists". This psychosomatic approach informed Dick-Read’s attempt to solve one of the most urgent obstetrical problems of his day: the relief of pain in labour...
Dick-Read was a social reformer with a strong interest in preventive medicine. He was also a profoundly religious man, fired by an evangelical faith in the spiritual significance of motherhood. Dick-Read believed that childbirth revealed God’s presence in the universe ...
[His] book, the first of many on the subject, had been prompted by eugenic concerns about the decline in middle class fertility... Dick-Read believed that the fear of childbirth was deterring the better off from having large families. ... the problem could not be overcome simply by providing wider access to pain relieving drugs. Dick-Read’s objections were twofold—medical and moral. First, obstetric analgesia and anaesthesia encouraged meddlesome midwifery, thus indirectly increasing the risks of childbirth. Second, they prevented mothers from being fully conscious at the moment of birth. This was important to Dick-Read because he believed that the "spirit of motherhood" remained dormant unless it was awakened by the first cry of the baby...
The argument developed in Natural Childbirth and in its more famous sequel, Revelation of Childbirth (subsequently Childbirth Without Fear), mixed Darwinian themes, neurophysiological theories, and cultural stereotypes of childbirth among "primitive" people... Whether women experienced pain or not depended on cultural attitudes to childbirth rather than on some property inherent to parturition. Dick-Read ... claimed that primitives experienced easy, painless labours. This was because in primitive societies the survival value of childbirth was fully appreciated and labour was regarded as nothing more than "hard work" in the struggle for existence. In civilised societies on the other hand a number of cultural factors conspired to distort woman’s natural capacity for painless birth, producing in woman a fear of childbirth that hindered normal parturition...
To eliminate pain, the fear-tension-pain cycle must be broken ... Women had to be "tactfully, gradually and carefully initiated into the job they were about to perform". Education in the "facts" of natural childbirth and instruction in the methods of relaxation were the chief weapons in the battle against fear... According to Dick-Read, these psychological techniques would not only eliminate pain, but also shorten labour and reduce the need for surgical interference.
By arguing that motherhood was a sacred calling, Dick-Read sought to appeal to the middle classes’ sense of social responsibility and persuade them to have more children. Women should drop their claims to emancipation and return to their "natural" role as child rearers and homemakers. "Woman fails when she ceases to desire the children for which she was primarily made", wrote Grantly Dick-Read in Motherhood in the Post-War World. "Her true emancipation lies in freedom to fulfil her biological purposes"...
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