Abstract
Make Room for Daddy has much to offer as a historical account of the transformation of married men’s involvement in the birthing process in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Leavitt, a professor of Medical History and Women’s Studies, frames her analysis by accentuating a matrix of issues involving place, privilege, and power. The book explores how the early architecture of labor and delivery units made a difference for fathers and mothers while working against fathers’ more active involvement. Although a more theoretical approach to place and space would have been ideal, Leavitt’s decision to highlight the spatial perspective—often overlooked in the social sciences—is commendable. In addition, considerable attention is paid to how hospital administrators, doctors, and nurses negotiated authority claims among themselves and leveraged their relative power to either deter or encourage fathers’ participation in their wives’ labor and delivery. The reader is treated to a behind-the-scenes description of heated debates and challenges to the gendered, authoritative knowledge that unfolded over a number of decades.
With an eye toward showcasing the diversity of the reproductive experience for Americans in the middle and late twentieth century, Leavitt vividly portrays the practical realities that defined the timing of when and how fathers were permitted to be present and engaged in different phases of labor and delivery. She does so by integrating the voices of a wide range of stakeholders: policy makers, hospital administrators, doctors, nurses, mothers, and, most importantly, the fathers themselves. This historical interpretation is anchored in brief diaries, interviews, solicited birth stories, and public documents that are produced largely by middle-class whites. Leavitt skillfully augments this material with numerous observations about the larger cultural landscape as represented in cartoons, TV sitcoms, popular press magazine articles, and newspaper commentaries. The more than 70 visual images offer yet another powerful means to absorb the evolving sentiments that defined several eras of American childbirth in the twentieth century. Male characters are resurrected from classic shows like I Love Lucy, All in the Family, Happy Days, and others to show how they parodied real men’s emotions and ambiguity about their experiences in those designated hospital sites where labor and delivery were discussed, negotiated, and performed.
After reviewing the historical forces that produced the medicalization of childbirth, the heart of the book is organized by a spatial theme that targets fathers’ experiences in waiting areas, labor rooms, prenatal education workshops, delivery rooms, and the integrated settings that can accommodate labor and delivery today. In selective spots, Leavitt offers a glimpse into how the birthing experience differed as a result of urban/rural status as well as race and social class. An abundance of material reveals the variability in married fathers’ desires to be actively involved in the business of their wives’ labor and delivery. Leavitt’s critical lens shows how fathers’ increased involvement often reinforced the gender hierarchy that placed them as heads of households and positioned physicians as medical experts with paramount authority.
As these remarks suggest, there is much to applaud about this book, but its value is compromised by poor editing. Five of the seven chapters include significant portions of Leavitt’s previously published material, which may explain why the volume is laced with redundancy. Too often messages in the same or separate chapters are repeated about matters such as men’s involvement in waiting rooms and their views about being more actively involved in labor and delivery, mothers’ views about whether and how their husbands should participate, doctors’ perceptions about allowing fathers into labor and delivery rooms, hospital policies about fathers’ involvement, Dick-Reed’s influence in getting men to take a more active role in birthing as well as his contributions to transforming hospital policies so that fathers were allowed into these previously forbidden areas, the impact of hospital architecture on the social processes linked to labor and delivery, and so forth. This pattern of redundancy is reinforced by the inordinate use of comparable quotes that add nothing theoretically or substantively beyond what is illustrated effectively by previously used narratives.
Despite my reservations, I encourage readers to wade through this book because it makes a significant contribution to several literatures of interest to many gender scholars. In whole or in parts, the book provides undergraduate and graduate students in various disciplines an invaluable historical perspective on the transformation of fathers’ involvement in the multilayered birthing system in the United States. It clearly documents how successive cohorts of fathers and mothers made the journey from seeing men’s participation in their baby’s birth as an afterthought, to a possibility, to a privilege, to a right. I will refer to this book often when exploring the overlap between the medicalization of childbirth and the natural childbirth movement that made fathers more active participants in their children’s births.