Documenting Canadian Women's Pregnancies through Historic Photographs

Photographs of late 19^th and early 20^thcentury white, middle class women often camouflage pregnancy.  Women used newspapers, side tables, children, purses and even cauliflowers to conceal their pregnant bellies and to conform to standards of respectability.  In examples of photographs pulled from numerous public and private archival collections, I trace the different ways in which Canadian women (and their presumably male photographers) sought to camouflage the most outward sign of a woman’s sexuality and how generations of archivists and historians have compounded the absence of pregnancy in archival catalogues.

From 1910-1960, discussions of birth control and women’s sexuality became more commonplace, specialized maternity clothing became widely available through mail order catalogues, Baby Boom families expanded rapidly, and yet photographs rarely made their subjects’ pregnancies obvious to the viewer until the 1991 Demi Moore pregnant, nude Vanity Fair cover broke through all boundaries. The interesting exception to this trajectory towards openness in revealing women’s pregnant bodies on film can be found in photographs of racialized women.  Early 20^th century Indigenous and Eastern European women were posed and photographed in stances that clearly demonstrated their pregnancies.  Ethnographic photography standards made popular in the late 19^th century, the political usefulness of showing racialized women as fertile ‘others’ and perhaps the agency of the women themselves combined to create an entirely different trajectory for these photographs. In this study, I will juxtapose images (1859-1991) of pregnant Canadian women from different communities in hopes of opening a window on a conspicuous absence in the photographic record.