Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room - Softcover

Leavitt, Judith Walzer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807871680 ISBN 13: 9780807871683

Publisher: University North Carolina Pr, 2010

Synopsis

Using fathers' first-hand accounts from letters, journals, and personal interviews along with hospital records and medical literature, Judith Walzer Leavitt offers a new perspective on the changing role of expectant fathers from the 1940s to the 1980s. She shows how, as men moved first from the hospital waiting room to the labour room in the 1960s, and then on to the delivery and birthing rooms in the 1970s and 1980s, they became progressively more involved in the birth experience and their influence over events expanded. With careful attention to power and privilege, Leavitt charts not only the increasing involvement of fathers, but also medical inequalities, the impact of race and class, and the evolution of hospital policies. Illustrated with more than seventy images from TV, films, and magazines, this book provides important new insights into childbirth in modern America, even as it reminds readers of their own experiences.

About this title

Review:

This book serves as a platform for considering today's inequalities in class and race.--Nursing Standard

Extends beyond the history of childbirth and contributes to the fields of American social history, family history, social medicine, masculinity studies, and gender studies. . . . Contribute[s] important findings to the literature on women's health while simultaneously broadening our knowledge of larger trends in American history.--Reviews in American History

Leavitt uses dozens of humorous, nerve-wracking and often touching stories from fathers to bring these experiences to life.--Wisconsin Week

No brief review can do justice either to the sophistication and analytical depth of Make Room for Daddy, or to the sheer pleasure it is to read. . . . One of the most important books on gender and the family to be published in the past two decades. . . . An exceptional work of history that deserves a wide scholarly and general audience.--Journal of Social History

A pioneering history. . . . A wonderful addition to the project of plumbing the Oprahatic melange of identity, sentiment, and personal need at the core of examined life in our times.--The Journal of American History

Timely, erudite, and accessible. . . . Leavitt's narrative is both eloquent and analytical. . . . We now understand more about the role of men in the birthing process, greatly expanding our understanding of the history of the family, medicine, and gender.--American Historical Review

Amusing and absorbing throughout, this book is most provocative when it details the 'three P's': the 'place, privilege, and power' of childbirth that 'provides a lens through which to view larger issues of twentieth-century medicine and its inequalities, ' class foremost among them.--The Atlantic Monthly

Illuminates men's involvement with the childbirth experience, adding fathers-to-be as vital players in understanding American childbirth history. . . . Highly recommended.--Choice

A serious and meticulous investigation of territory where few scholars have previously ventured. . . . [A] much needed addition to the blossoming scholarly work on childbirth history.--Women's Review of Books

A requisite work for medical historians . . . also recommended for obstetricians, nurses and hospital administrators as they consider policies in the twenty-first century. . . . A highly convincing and well-written book, [this] serves as a basis for future scholarship, since it enriches our understandings of the cultural and biological event of childbirth while recognising the increasing importance of men in that process--Social History of Medicine

About the Author:

Judith Walzer Leavitt is Rupple Bascom and Ruth Bleier Professor of Medical History and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

About this edition

• Publisher: University North Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0807871680
• ISBN 13: 9780807871683
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400