The 1946 publication of Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care signaled the pervasive influence of expert 'medicalized motherhood' in mid-twentieth-century America. Throughout the previous two decades, pediatricians and women's magazines alike advised mothers of the importance of physicians' guidance for the everyday care of their children, and Spock's book popularized this advice, particularly among white, middle-class women.
When Jacquelyn S. Litt interviewed African-American and Jewish women who raised their children in the 1930s and 1940s, she found that these women responded to experts' advice in ways uniquely shaped by their ethnicity, race, and class. For middle-class African-American and Jewish women, medicalization took place in ethnically/racially segregated networks and functioned as a collectively held strategy for social advance as much as a set of technical practices for raising healthy children. For poor, single African-American mothers, everyday networks offered limited access to medical institutions or mainstream norms. Medical discourse was largely controlled by white women and men, which left these women disempowered in medical institutions and marginal to dominant definitions of acceptable mothering.
Litt's book is enriched with many narratives from the mothers themselves. Both the women's voices and her acute sociological research bring to light how medicalized motherhood, while not the single cause of difference and inequality among the women, was a site where they were produced.
Jacquelyn Litt is Dean of Douglass Residential College and Campus and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is currently writing a book, Women of Katrina: Crossing Borders, Weaving Networks, and Taking Care which documents the strategies of survival women took to disaster recovery in the Katrina Diaspora. She is co-chair, with Kai Erikson, of the Social Science Research Council Network on Persons Displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Her primary research has been on motherhood, carework, and inequality, and she has many articles and two books on the topic: Medicalized Motherhood: Perspectives from the Lives of African American and Jewish Mothers (Rutgers University Press 2000), which was cited by the race, gender, and class section of the ASA for outstanding scholarship in race, class, and gender, and Global Perspectives on Gender and Carework, with Mary Zimmerman and Christine Bose (Stanford University Press 2006). She was also the founding Department Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies (2005-2011) and Principal Investigator (2007-2010) of “Mizzou ADVANCE,” a $500,00 NSF PAID/ADVANCE award to promote the status of women faculty in STEM at the University of Missouri. From this project she has published numerous articles on mentoring tenured faculty and established new mentoring programs at numerous universities. She serves as a consultant to NSF ADVANCE grants for faculty women in STEM.
