Giving Birth in Canada, 1900-1950

Cynthia R. Comacchio is an associate professor of history at Wilfrid
Laurier University. She is the author of Nations Are Built of Babies:
Saving Ontario’s Mothers and Children.

A pioneer in the social history of medicine in Canada, particularly in
the area of women’s health, Wendy Mitchinson once again turns a
careful eye to what has historically been the definitive feminine
objective: giving birth. Giving Birth in Canada is a thorough
examination of the ideals and realities, the discourses and practices,
pertaining to Canadian women’s experiences of childbirth during the
first half of the 20th century. Mitchinson has painstakingly undertaken
a close reading of myriad sources, from the specialized and published
(medical textbooks and journals), to the popular (advice literature and
women’s magazines) and the unpublished (archival material hidden in
patient records). Fascinating glimpses into “actual”
experiences—showing perspectives both complementary and
contrasting—are provided by means of oral testimony from women
patients and their (primarily male) physicians.

Mitchinson traces the trajectory of a determined, ongoing
professionalization of medicine and its concomitant process, the
medicalization of childbirth, revealing the active pursuit of these
goals by organized medicine while also demonstrating that Canadian women
were eager to avail themselves of medical assistance, and not simply
targets of medical power. The latter, in fact, has perhaps been made out
to be more hegemonic than it actually was. This is made evident in the
author’s discussion of such “alternatives” as midwifery (outlawed
by the state on behalf of organized medicine, but still an important
option for those in isolated settlements and those who could not afford
fee-for-service medical care) and the woman-centred Aboriginal rites
that were easily scorned and dismissed by the “scientific”
white-male-predominant profession.

The history of childbirth in Canada is a complex intermixture of
gender, class, race, and regional elements and their relationship with
both civic expectations and professional aims. This study contributes
much to what we know of medicine and gender in early 20th-century
Canada.