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Session 2: Maternal and Child Health

 

Session 2: Maternal and child health care

Session Outline

In this session, we will survey how nurses and midwives were integrated with the provision of maternal and health care that was promoted both by the governments (local and central) and other organisations (charitable, community, medical, hospital, etc.).  We will firstly examine how the specific political, economic and medical arguments (e.g. modern warfare, economic depression, migration and urbanisation, medical discourse on ‘degeneration', etc.) as well as the cultural values (e.g. cult of motherhood and the notion of infancy) nurtured the concept of ‘maternal and child health care' in the early twentieth century in both Europe and North America.  We will then see how these specific contexts shaped the view that the female professionals of nurses and midwives were particularly optimal for the kind of care.  We will finally consider how nurses and midwives perceived their new role and whether or not they saw this as an opportunity to advance their professional cause.

Session leader

Janette Allotey

Aya Homei

Aims

  • - To permit students to critically engage with the idea of maternal and child care in its specific historical contexts
  • - To offer various arguments that invited nurses and midwives to take part in maternal and child health care
  • - To understand perspectives of nurses and midwives, especially in relation to their professional development.

Content of the session

  • - The emergence of the notion of ‘maternal and child health care' in the early twentieth century and its implication for nursing and midwifery practices
  • - The medical rhetoric for the ‘health' of mothers and children and the appropriation of the idea by nurses and midwives
  • - The link between the cultural values placed on the ‘motherhood' and the moral values placed on the ‘female' professions of nursing and midwifery
  • - The feature of the actual practice of nurses and midwives in maternal and child health care provisions
  • - Maternal and child health care and the professionalisation of nurses and midwives

Teaching methods to be used

Lecture, pre-reading, tutorials and seminar presentations

Indicative Reading

Apple, Rima D. and Janet Golden (eds.) Mothers and Motherhood: Readings in American History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997).

Apple, Rima D. Reaching Out to Mothers: Public Health and Child Welfare (Sheffield: European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Publications, 2002).

Apple, Rima D. Mothers and Medicine: A Social History of Infant Feeding, 1890-1950 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

Christie, D. A. and Tansey, E. M. (eds.) Maternal Care: Wellcome Witness to Twentieth Century Medicine, Vol. 12 (The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2001).

Davies, Celia ‘The Health Visitor as Mother's Friend: A Woman's Place in Public Health, 1900-14', Social History of Medicine, 1 (1), 1998, pp. 39-59.

Digby, Ann and John Stewart (eds.) Gender, Health and Welfare (London: Routledge, 1996).

Fildes, Valerie, Lara Marks and Hilary Marland (eds.), Women and Children First: International Maternal and Infant welfare 1870-1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

Golden, Janet A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (Cambridge: CUP, 1996).

Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

Loudon, I. (1993) Death in Childbirth: An International Study of Maternity Care and Maternal Mortality, 1800-1950, Clarendon Press, London.

Marks, Lara V., Metropolitan Maternity: Maternal and infant welfare services in early twentieth century London (Amsterdam: Ropodi, 1996).

Marks, Lara V., Model Mothers: Jewish Mothers and Maternity Provision in East London 1870
1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Seligman, Stanley A., ‘The Royal Maternity Charity: The first hundred years', Medical History, 24, 1980, pp. 403-18.

Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black women's health activism in America, 1890-1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).

Young, J. H., St. Mary's Hospitals Manchester 1790-1963 (Edinburgh and London: E. & S. Livingstone, 1964).