- Title
- Confined: constructions of childbirth in popular and elite medical culture in late-nineteenth-century Australia
- Creator
- Featherstone, Lisa
- Relation
- Gender, Health and Popular Culture: Historical Perspectives p. 3-21
- Relation
- https://wlupress.wlu.ca/Catalog/warsh-gender.shtml
- Publisher
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- In late-nineteenth-century Australia, a woman had numerous sources for information about pregnancy and childbirth, including her family, friends, and neighbors. Yet by this period, biomedicine and, in particular, gynecology and obstetrics had increasingly replaced women's traditional knowledge as the authority over the birthing process. The disciplines of obstetrics and gynecology functioned to define, order, and treat the reproducing body, and the strict regimen of the hospital informed even the home birth. This chapter explores the multiple ways in which the medical disciplines attempted to discursively understand and describe childbirth in both elite and popular texts. As historians have suggested, pregnancy and childbirth were pathologized, turned into medical disorders that required the expert intervention of the doctor. Yet this chapter suggests that medical advice differed substantially, depending on the perceived audience. Specifically, the concerns raised in popular self-help guides published by doctors were substantially different from the debates found in medical journals and professional texts; there are notable differences in the medical descriptions of the seemingly static act of birth. This chapter considers the similarities and differences in the constructions of pregnancy and childbirth in popular culture and elite medical discourse. Through this analysis, it suggests that there are multiple ways in which childbirth is socially, rather than biologically, constructed. This has important implications for studies of childbirth, both historically and in the contemporary world, where birth must be understood as culturally specific and as mediated and understood through the wider frameworks of society.
- Subject
- childbirth; gender; medical discourse; constructs
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1062601
- Identifier
- uon:17120
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781554582174
- Language
- eng
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