The University of North Carolina Press

400 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 72 illus., notes, index

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-3255-4

Published: June 2009

Paper

ISBN  978-0-8078-7168-3

Available: August 2010

Make Room for Daddy

The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room

By Judith Walzer Leavitt

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In Make Room for Daddy, historian Judith Walzer Leavitt offers a fascinating look at an important but long-neglected aspect of childbirth in America--the changing role of the expectant father.

Leavitt uses fathers' first-hand accounts from letters, journals, and personal interviews along with hospital records and medical literature to offer 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 labor 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 medical literature, films, and television shows such as I Love Lucy, All in the Family, and Happy Days and from popular magazines including Ebony and McCall's, this book explores popular depictions as well as the real experiences of fathers across the country. Telling much of the story using fathers' and mothers' own voices, this engaging book will strike a chord with many readers, reminding them of their own experiences even as it offers important new insights into childbirth in modern America.

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. She is author of Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950 and Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health.

Reviews

"A narrative history--illuminating and engaging--of what fathers actually did while mothers were giving birth over the past 80 years. . . . Ms. Leavitt's fascinating history suggests that childbirth is just one more area where our narcissism has swamped our seriousness."
--The Wall Street Journal

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

"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

"A wise and often surprising history of how changing understandings of childbirth have transformed relations between fathers and infants, patients and hospitals, husbands and wives. Splendidly illustrated, wonderfully readable--give it to every prospective parent you know!"
--Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship

"Leavitt's richly textured account reveals unprecedented dramatic changes in men's role in childbirth from the 1930s to the 1980s. Make Room for Daddy enlarges the history of the family, masculinity, gender roles, and fatherhood; the history of medicalization, professionalism, and expertise; and the intersection of these two, the history of the medicalization of the family."
--Martin S. Pernick, University of Michigan

"Judith Walzer Leavitt takes us on a journey through the modern history of the father's role in childbirth, from being completely excluded in the waiting room to being fully included and expected to help in the delivery room. Parents and maternity caregivers will recognize and be inspired by the important changes that have taken place over the past fifty years and by the significant effects on the family with the new father's participation in birth, enhancing the bond between parent and infant as well as the bond between parents."
--Marshall Klaus, M.D., and Phyllis Klaus, M.F.T., M.L.S.W., coauthors of Your Amazing Newborn, The Doula Book, and Bonding