Based on interviews with 40 first-time mothers, the authors develop an argument that supplements the critique of medicalized childbirth by focusing on the social context in which women give birth. Particularly important about that context is women's privatized responsibility for babies' well-being, and a dearth of social supports for mothering, including the sharing of that responsibility by fathers. Contextualizing childbirth in this way makes clearer not only why many women are favorable toward medical intervention but also the decisions women make (...) during hospital births. The women we interviewed displayed widely ranging reactions to giving birth in the hospital. Describing their experiences, these women often emphasized pain and anxiety. Both conditions appear to have been relieved as effectively by social support as by medical assistance. Furthermore, women who had generally supportive partners were less likely to receive medical intervention during the birth and less likely to suffer postpartum depression. (shrink)

Based on in-depth interviews, this article examines a sample of 48 Canadian women’s feelings about their changed postpartum bodies, their sense of self, and the factors that affect both. Our findings suggest that understanding women’s postpartum feelings requires contextualizing them in the work of infant care and women’s life circumstances, as well as ideologies about mothering and feminine appearance. Motherhood afforded the women in this study a new appreciation of their bodies, and a positive embodied sense of themselves, but only (...) if they felt their bodies performed maternal functions well. Concerns about appearance persisted and became especially salient when women faced the return to paid work. Moreover, varied life circumstances influenced women’s overall feelings about their changed bodies as insecurities were displaced onto women’s body images. (shrink)

This article reports a content analysis of advertisements for household goods appearing in Ladies Home Journal between 1909-1910 and 1980, with the aim of understanding the ideological campaign that characterized the years in which households were mechanized and women's domestic labor transformed in the United States. More Journal ads featured directives about housework than descriptions of the product; they emphasized work performance far more frequently than liberation from housework, and they also promoted service to family. These findings supplement other evidence (...) that advertisers' efforts to create a market for household appliances and other means of domestic labor involved promotion of an ideology about housework that reinforced women's dedication to it. (shrink)