“Jungle Childbirth and Modern Motherhood: Delivering Race, Gender, and Modernity in Mid-Century American Magazines”

During the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, natural childbirth, a method that challenged the widespread practice of sedated childbirth by training women to recreate the supposedly painless birth experiences of “primitive” women, garnered an outpouring of photographic representation in the popular press. My poster will explore the ways that these pervasive images helped to shape and express interrelated constructs of gender, race and modernity during this period. In looking at representations of female bodies in labor, or more specifically, in childbirth and in motherhood, I build on the work of Jennifer Morgan, Kathleen Brown and Laura Briggs who look respectively at early modern European and Euro-American understandings of the ways that female indigenous, poor, and/or enslaved bodies in Africa and the Americas performed labor, both productive and reproductive. These scholars argue that those understandings of female labor were a central component in inscribing gender and racial difference. My work will look at this relationship between understandings of female reproductive labor and constructs of gender and of race in the context of mid-twentieth century America. Recognizing that the study of visual culture provides a widow onto multiple and competing views of identity and expression, I will compare and contrast popular magazine photographs depicting motherhood, natural childbirth, sedated childbirth, and midwife-assisted childbirth to demonstrate that representations of natural childbirth portrayed particular ideas of postwar modernity and femininity—a femininity that both supported and defied the submissive post-war “domestic ideal” and a modernity that included only whites.