Description
Book SynopsisDr Benjamin Spock's 1946 publication """"Baby and Child Care"""" signaled the pervasive influence of medicalized motherhood. In this text, the author conducted interviews with African American and Jewish women who raised children in the 1930s and 1940s to see how they engaged with these ideas.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction Scientific Motherhood
Part I Encountering Medicine, Constructing Motherhood ``I Was a Modern Mother'': Americanization and Jewish Women's Medicalization
``My Mother Was with Me All the Time'': The Southern Context of African-American Women's Medicalization
Part II Women's Networks, Divided Motherhood, and the Legitimation of Medical Authority ``The Doctor Was Just Like One of Us'': Insiders, Outsiders, and Jewish Women's Medicalized Mothering
``We Tried to Work with Our People'': African-American Upper-Middle-Class Networks and the Making of Medicalized Motherhood
``I Don't Know Any Doctors'': Contradictions in Poor and Working-Class African-American Mothers' Medicalization
Conclusion Appendix. Biographical Profiles
Notes
Bibliography
Index
