Who said: “the mother is the factory, and by education and care she can be made more efficient in the art of motherhood”?
That was written in 1942 by Grantly Dick-Read, widely considered to be the father of modern natural childbirth. Most people don’t realize that natural childbirth was invented by a man to convince middle and upper class women that childbirth pain is in their minds, thereby encouraging them to have more children. Read’s central claim was that “primitive” women do not have pain in childbirth. In contrast, women of the upper classes were “overcivilized” and had been socialized to believe that childbirth is painful.
In Holistic obstetrics: the origins of “natural childbirth” in Britain, O Moscucci, PMJ 2003;79:168-173, Dr. Ornella Moscucci explains the backdrop against which the philosophy of “natural” childbirth was promulgated:
Health policy became the subject of intense public debate in the aftermath of the Boer war, when Britain’s near defeat at the hands of a barely trained army focused the attention on the physical fitness of new recruits… Adherents to the new science of eugenics on the other hand blamed heredity. In their view, health policy should aim to prevent reproduction among “low quality” human stock .., and encourage reproduction among “good” stock…
The development of “natural childbirth” owed much to the activities of physicians and health professionals who were in sympathy with the aims of reform eugenics…
[T]hese health reformers were concerned about the differential birth rate—the tendency of poorer, less healthy sections of society to have larger families than their “betters”. Thus, as well as endorsing plans for the sterilisation and detention of “degenerates”, they also sought to encourage the middle classes to have more children… Female education and employment were seen as a particular evil, insofar as they led women to regard motherhood a burden and to neglect hearth and home…
One obvious way to reverse the falling birth was to entice women of “superior stock” back into the home, where they would fulfill their functions as wives and mothers. Health reformers took up the challenge by developing an ideology of childbirth that emphasised the “naturalness” of pregnancy and birth. This ideology functioned at a number of levels. It was prescriptive, in that it rooted woman’s social role in her biological capacity for reproduction… Motherhood was not only a woman’s supreme fulfilment and reward, but also her civic duty…
Read himself stated:
“Woman fails when she ceases to desire the children for which she was primarily made. Her true emancipation lies in freedom to fulfil her biological purposes”..
The comparisons between “overcivilized” white women and “primitive” women who gave birth easily was not merely the product of racism, but reflected the anxiety that men felt about women’s emancipation. This anxiety was expressed in medicine generally, and in obstetrics and gynecology particularly, by the fabrication of claims about the “disease” of hysteria and the degeneration of women’s natural capabilities in fertility and childbirth compared to her “savage” peers. Simply put, the result of women insisting on increased education, enlarged roles outside the home and greater political participation was that their ovaries shriveled, they suddenly began to experience painful childbirth and they developed the brand new disease of “hysteria”, located in the uterus itself.
Pain in childbirth served a very important function in this racist and sexist discourse: it was the punishment that befell women who became too educated, too independent and left the home. The idea that “primitive” women had painless childbirth was fabricated to contrast with the painful childbirth of “overcivilized” women.
Moscucci writes:
Whether women experienced pain or not depended on cultural attitudes to childbirth rather than on some property inherent to parturition. Dick-Read … claimed that primitives experienced easy, painless labours. This was because in primitive societies the survival value of childbirth was fully appreciated and labour was regarded as nothing more than “hard work” in the struggle for existence. In civilised societies on the other hand a number of cultural factors conspired to distort woman’s natural capacity for painless birth, producing in woman a fear of childbirth that hindered normal parturition…
To eliminate pain, the fear-tension-pain cycle must be broken … Women had to be “tactfully, gradually and carefully initiated into the job they were about to perform”. Education in the “facts” of natural childbirth and instruction in the methods of relaxation were the chief weapons in the battle against fear… According to Dick-Read, these psychological techniques would not only eliminate pain, but also shorten labour and reduce the need for surgical interference.
Grantly Dick-Read was issuing a warning to women of a certain social class: if you step beyond the roles prescribed for women, you will be punished with painful labor. And if you have had painful labor, you should understand it as a punishment for ignoring your “natural” duty to stay home and procreate.
In light of this, the contemporary popularity of natural childbirth is more than a bit ironic. The central claims of natural childbirth, that childbirth is not inherently painful, and that if you “prepare” properly, your birth will be painless, too, were utter fabrications. Read would be delighted that these fabrications have been embraced by many women and that his philosophy has been propagated so successfully that most women don’t even realize that the central tenets of natural childbirth are racist and sexist fabrications.