2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

The history of feminist health activism on pregnancy occupies an important space in the broader narrative of American public health.  Beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, feminists repeatedly pointed to the medical establishment’s control over the female body as a major source of women’s political and social inequality, but also highlighted the importance of improving the odds for women’s healthy pregnancies and births as the key to advancing society. This panel will explore feminist health activism regarding pregnancy and labor in order to explore larger trends in both twentieth-century public health and the feminist movement.  Lauren MacIvor Thompson’s paper explores the early twentieth-century controversy around “twilight sleep,” or the use of morphine and other drugs during labor to treat women’s pain. She analyzes why the rhetoric of the Twilight Sleep Association represented a distinct political moment within Progressive Era feminism and symbolized a longer history of women’s health advocacy. Shannon Withycombe’s paper examines the advent of prenatal health advocacy, couching it in terms of larger twentieth-century public health efforts and changes in popular thinking about the value of medicine in a healthy pregnancy.   Finally, Naomi Rendina’s paper examines how this kind of advocacy surrounding childbirth would transform again by the 1950s, with women advocating for less medical intervention in order to better control their pregnancies and birth experiences. Together, the three papers illustrate the often contradictory ways that feminists sought to employ medicine and medical power to achieve the right to control their own bodies.