Post-War Mothers

Reviewed by: Post-War Mothers: Childbirth Letters to Grantly Dick-Read, 1946–1956 Charlotte G. Borst Mary Thomas, ed. and intro. Post-War Mothers: Childbirth Letters to Grantly Dick-Read, 1946–1956. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1997. xv + 248 pp. $59.95. “Dear Dr. Read,” wrote a Maryland woman in 1947, “During my last month of pregnancy I read the condensation of your book ‘Childbirth Without Fear’ with great interest.” Attempting to employ Read’s methods, this mother reported that she had “arrived at the hospital in a high state of expectancy, happy in the thought that soon my daughter would be nuzzling at my breast.” However, this woman’s labor and delivery did not proceed as Read had said it should, and as she pointedly told him in her letter, “for my money the theory of ‘relax and enjoy it’ doesn’t hold water. I tried and I know. And one who has never been a mother, no matter how much observation, can never appreciate what it is like.” Turning Read’s famous phrase on its head, she concluded: “Maybe it ‘wasn’t meant to hurt’ but it does. It hurts like the devil!” (p. 134). As Mary Thomas explains in her introduction to this selection of Grantly Dick-Read’s correspondence with women in the United States and Great Britain, Read’s famous Childbirth Without Fear was published at about the same time that Anglo-American women were being fired from their wartime jobs and urged to return to their homes and bear children. The war also had an effect on childbirth: as a number of historians have shown, the exigencies of the period helped to move birth from the home to the hospital. For many women, the experience of a hospital birth proved to be very disappointing, and even traumatic. As women reveal in these letters, “scientific obstetrics” in the hospital meant that they were left alone during labor for hours on end, and then taken to delivery rooms in the second stage of labor, where their hands were often tied down, their legs and feet were put up into stirrups high above their heads, and then they were given heavy drugs to obviate the pain. Awaking hours later, they were not even allowed to hold their babies for very long, and breast-feeding often was not encouraged. Thus, when Dick-Read told women that they could have some control over childbirth, they eagerly bought his book. Many of the letters attest to the power of Dick-Read’s message. In an Anglo-American culture that made motherhood the center of a woman’s life, women were eager to gain some control over the process. However, as Thomas points out in her introduction, and as the above letter from the Maryland woman indicates, Dick-Read’s purpose was not to provoke a feminist response among childbearing women; rather, as his letters reveal, he wished to promote what really was a romantic return to some golden age of motherhood, where women’s reproductive capacities were celebrated as the epitome of their function as human beings. He consistently advocated that women have additional children, and that they would find their ultimate happiness in maternity. Thomas also points out, and the letters make clear, that Dick-Read also sought as much control over the maternity process as did the physicians he critiqued. Like the woman cited above, women who could not bear the pain of “natural childbirth” or who otherwise did not have a completely natural childbirth were made to feel that they had somehow failed in their mission as mothers and as women. [End Page 742] Though the letters have been divided into discrete chapters relating to various aspects of the history of childbirth, they do not really seem all that different. Indeed, many of them have a formulaic quality about them. Thomas insists that Dick-Read answered each letter individually, yet he obviously had a set response to allow him to keep up with what was undoubtedly a heavy correspondence. The themes are all similar: natural childbirth is the best way—in fact, the only way—to have a baby; few other physicians know how

Childbirth · Pregnancy · Psychoanalysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Medical History and Innovations · Psychology