Ideal Births and Ideal Babies: English-Canadian Advice Literature in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

This paper explores how the ideal birth was constructed after World War Two, noting in particular the abstract enthusiasm on the part of physicians and government advocates for technological innovation accompanied by simultaneous silence regarding the specificities of labour and delivery in advice literature. The relationship of prescriptive mothering to the nascent medical ideology of prevention-oriented surveillance had a direct impact on the disembodying of women in the birthing process. Both vaginal and surgical childbirth were kept firmly within the realm of medical expertise, painting parturition as something that happened to women, rather than something they did themselves.