Volume 47, Part B, September 2014, Pages 257–266
Transforming Pregnancy Since 1900
Wartime women giving birth: Narratives of pregnancy and childbirth, Britain c. 1939–1960
- Open Access funded by Wellcome Trust
- Under a Creative Commons license
Open Access
Highlights
- •
- Women’s maternity narratives are complex and multilayered.
- •
- Wartime tropes were central to their birth stories.
- •
- Their accounts reflect the association between maternity and military service.
Abstract
Women
in Second World War Britain benefitted from measures to improve
maternal and child health. Infant and maternal mortality rates continued
to fall, new drugs became available, and efforts were made to improve
the health of mothers and babies through the provision of subsidised
milk and other foodstuffs. However, in return, women were also expected
to contribute to the war effort through motherhood, and this reflected
wider cultural ideas in the North Atlantic world in the first half of
the twentieth century which equated maternity with military service. The
aim of this article is to examine the interplay between narratives of
birth and narratives of war in the accounts of maternity from women of
the wartime generation. It will explore how the military-maternity
analogy sheds light on women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth
in Britain during the Second World War, whilst also considering
maternity within women’s wider role as ‘domestic soldiers’, contributing
to the war effort through their traditional work as housewives and
mothers. In doing so, the article reveals the complexity of women’s
narratives. It demonstrates that they do not simply conform to the
‘medical vs. social’ binary, but reflect the wider cultural context in
which women gave birth. Women incorporated the dominant discourses of
the period, namely those around war, into their accounts.
Keywords
- Second World War;
- Britain;
- Maternity;
- Narrative
1. Introduction
During
the Second World War efforts to increase Britain’s population resulted
in renewed attention being paid to maternal health.1
It was not the first time that the experience of war had encouraged
concern with maternal and infant welfare. Ann Oakley argues that the
Boer War 1899–1902 was a critical moment in the history of antenatal
care by revealing what appeared to be a shockingly low standard of
health among the male population recruited to fight in that war. This
revelation forced political attention on the actual condition of the
Empire’s citizens.2 Infant welfare was included in the campaign to improve physical efficiency.3 Jane Lewis posits that the concern to stop the wastage of infant life ‘became even more explicit during World War I.’4
The loss of population during the war increased awareness of the
importance of infant mortality, and child and maternal welfare work was
extended to include the antenatal period. When the Ministry of Health
was created in 1919, one of its six departments was devoted to maternal
and child welfare. Such state intervention was justified in terms of the
national good and rational improvement.5
The
outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 again heightened the value of
children for the future of the country. According to Lewis, ‘Fears about
not only the welfare but also the numbers of people increased.’6
Irvine Loudon has shown that in consequence of this renewed focus on
children’s wellbeing measures were brought in that were considered too
expensive or politically unacceptable in peacetime.7
The National Milk Scheme introduced in June 1940 made subsidised or
free milk available to all pregnant women or nursing mothers. In 1942
the Vitamin Welfare Scheme was extended to include expectant and nursing
mothers (and children under five), allowing them free or inexpensive
orange juice, cod liver oil or vitamin A and D tablets. By 1943, seventy
percent of those eligible were participating in the Milk Scheme;
forty-three percent of those eligible took up the orange juice;
thirty-four percent the vitamins and twenty-one percent the cod liver
oil.8
In addition, the number of hospital maternity beds rose by fifty
percent during the war, thus ensuring that the pre-war trend towards the
hospitalisation of childbirth continued. By the end of the war a
majority of births took place in an institution for the first time.9
Within this overall picture of wartime development there were some
retrenchments. Jose Harris points out that ‘the wartime growth of some
social services has to be set against the wartime collapse of others.’10 Nonetheless maternal and infant health improved during the middle decades of the twentieth century.11
The
aim of this article is to examine how these transformations in the
maternity services in Britain were experienced by women giving birth
during the war years. Given that developments in provision and practice
were particularly wide-ranging during the war with the wartime
experiments serving as a precedent for the National Health Service
(NHS), studying the wartime generation is a useful way of assessing how
women experienced and articulated change in maternity care. The article
will investigate the importance women placed upon changes in the
availability of healthcare services (both as a result of the war and the
introduction of the NHS) in their narratives. In addition the essay
will consider how wartime pronatalism portrayed women as contributing to
the war effort through their traditional role as housewives and
mothers. It will explore how these discourses were employed in women’s
stories and the interplay between narratives of birth and narratives of
war in their accounts. Finally it will ask whether the
military-maternity analogy can shed light on women’s experiences of
pregnancy and childbirth in Britain during the Second World War, whilst
also considering how wartime rhetoric about women’s roles as ‘domestic
soldiers’ shaped wider discourses about maternity and motherhood.
