The Politics of Female Pain: The Twilight Sleep Association, Mary Ware Dennett, and Feminist Childbirth Advocacy, 1913-1915

The medical intervention of “twilight sleep,” or the use of a scopolamine-morphine mixture to anesthetize laboring women, caused a furor among doctors and early twentieth-century feminists. Suffragist (and later sex education and birth control activist) Mary Ware Dennett led the Twilight Sleep Association in a quest to encourage doctors and their female patients to widely embrace the practice. Activists like Dennett felt the method revolutionized the notoriously dangerous and painful childbirth process for women. They touted its benefits as the key to allowing women to control their birth experience at a time when the maternal mortality rate remained high despite medical advances in obstetrics. Yet many physicians attacked the practice as not only dangerous, but antithetical to the expectations for proper womanhood and motherly duty. While historians of women’s health have cited twilight sleep as the beginning of the medicalization and depersonalization of the childbirth process in the twentieth century, this paper will reposition and contextualize the feminist political arguments for the method. On the one hand, the feminist rhetoric on twilight sleep symbolized a continuation of long-running tensions between women patients and physicians. It also represented a distinct political moment within Progressive Era feminism, wherein women were encouraged to imagine their lives beyond the traditional roles of mother and wife. On the other, as this paper will show, the advocacy around twilight sleep also exposes the ways the women’s movement in this period excluded working-class women and women of color from their larger goals.