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Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births by Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick (review)

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.2023.a911015

1097-3729

S. Y. Cheung,

Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies

Reviewed by: Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births by Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick S. Y. Cheung (bio) Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births By Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. Pp. 344. Designing Motherhood is a stunning volume on the material culture of human reproduction in design history. Arranged in four parts—reproduction, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum—the work collects over a hundred designs that "[remain] so hidden even as they define the everyday experience of so many" (p. 15). Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, with their team of contributing curators, fill the pages with objects that highlight the lived experience of maternity, including newborn ID bracelets, abortion kits, and postpartum mesh underwear, while exploring broader cultural phenomena like breastfeeding, masculine birth, and contemporary social movements like #listentoblackwomen. They mix in interviews with scholars, artists, and activists, and the visual materials range from historical advertisements for pregnancy corsets to eugenic propaganda posters. Designing Motherhood follows contemporary conversations on reproductive inequality and is ultimately a political project that hopes to provoke a public reckoning with how the everyday designs that govern reproduction systematically devalue maternity. The volume's explicit emphasis on intersectionality updates classic works on the material politics of gender in the history of technology. For example, while we may already know that forceps and speculums were designed by men to control women's bodies, Designing Motherhood contextualizes the rise of gynecology within the history of slavery. "Home Birth" recounts how the profession's consolidation of power facilitated the de-skilling of midwives, who were Indigenous, and later Black, women. Enslaved women endured experimental surgeries without anesthesia because it was believed that Black people did not feel pain. Joining recent scholarship in the history of technology and medicine that uses race, class, and gender as an analytic, such as Donna Drucker's Contraception (2020) and Deirdre Cooper Owens's Medical Bondage (2017), Designing Motherhood's intellectual orientation is reproductive justice, a framework conceptualized in activist communities. A partnership with the Maternity Care Coalition, a Philadelphia-based anti-poverty organization, brings women of color to the foreground, and the work features interviews with scholar-activists Loretta J. Ross and Khiara Bridges. Reproductive justice shifts focus away from individual autonomy and choice to emphasize social infrastructure—the housing, food, transportation, and health systems that shape reproduction—as points of intervention. This is a book on design, but feminist historians will recognize the curatorial team's approach to challenging mainstream, androcentric understandings of what counts as technology. The breast pump, for example, connects [End Page 1307] women's bodies to industrial capitalism. Yet early prototypes, including a modified bovine milking machine designed for hospital use in the 1920s, were excluded from the Museum of Modern Art's inaugural exhibit on design, Machine Art (1934). As we know, devices related to women's bodies often do not get to be part of "innovation." Designing Motherhood includes things like the Boater, a waterproof diaper that Connecticut housewife Marion Donovan improvised with shower curtains in 1946. While this was a paradigm-shifting invention that paved the way for disposable diapers, popular accounts attribute their invention to the male engineers of Procter & Gamble who created Pampers a decade later. In reconsidering the provenance of such objects, Designing Motherhood recognizes women inventors like Donovan and Margaret Crane, the young graphic designer who made the first home pregnancy test in the 1970s but remained unknown until recently. The work also shows how newer designs made by "users" can disrupt existing power relations. Birthing furniture like pools and undulating birthing chairs, for example, offer alternatives to the horizontal position of standard hospital birth, which, while convenient for doctors, can be disempowering for the person giving birth. Designing Motherhood articulates the multiple relations of power that inform each design. Sonograms, Doppler fetal monitors, and thalidomide embody the successes and perils of postwar technology. Doulas capture tensions between community-oriented care and the interventions of highly capitalistic biomedicine. These material histories shine light on the policy environments that allow things to be the way they are. The mass production of baby formula is inexorably tied to political questions...