The Subject of Heated Controversy: Maternity Care for Indigent Mothers, c 1918-1943

Speaker: Janet Greenlees, PhD, Glasgow Caledonian University

Tea and Cake, 4-6 in the President's Library

Abstract: Poor, pregnant women have always received the healthcare that society chooses for them. Together, their poverty and pregnancy have led medicine and Western societies to label these women as being doubly vulnerable. This paper explores the relationships between poverty, pregnancy, vulnerability, and maternity care through the lenses of both patients and practitioners in the United States after the First World War. Centering vulnerability within the matrix of charitable and low-cost maternity care available in slum neighborhoods, the paper combines hospital, dispensary, community nursing, midwifery, and public health records to trace evolving stories of provision, practitioners and their patients.

Janet Greenlees is an Associate Professor of Health History within the Department of Social Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University (Scotland). She is Principal Investigator of an international project highlighting the challenges, resilience and lived realities of one-parent families and Co-Director of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH), a research collaboration between Glasgow Caledonian and Strathclyde University. She is a Co-Editor for the journal Social History of Medicine and was managing editor between 2024-25.