American Medicine and Divided Motherhood: Three Case Studies from the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract

On the basis of interview data, this article examines the mothering practices of three women, one Jew and two African-Americans, who raised their children in the 1930s and 1940s, a period in which medicine became the dominant discourse of motherhood. Each mother referred to medicalized motherhood with a discourse of scientific universals (e.g. “it was scientific”). Yet their approach to medicalized motherhood reflects their racial, ethnic and social class positions. Medicalization gained meaning for women not as an abstract body of scientific knowledge but as a signifier of social position, enabling mothers to measure their own practices in relation to others. If women were injured by medical discourse, as a long line of scholars suggest they have been, it is not because medicine rendered them the objects of a standardized construction of “the good mother.” Rather, it is because medicalization invited mothers to participate in creating and measuring separation among women themselves.