Changing Maternal ‘Busyness’ and Declines in Child Mortality in the Past and Present

• In Event: 3129 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 10. Infant and Child Health

Abstract

In contrast to the preoccupation with gender in the literature on child mortality in developing countries, women are barely mentioned in debates on the rising life expectancy (fueled largely by falling infant and child mortality) in historical demography; the focus is largely on the relative contributions of economic development and progress in medicine. But the historical literature on social change in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has much to say about the changing ‘ideology’ of the family and especially on the changing emphasis on the wife and the mother and the rising demands on women’s time and attention by the family. These rising demands are coterminous with improvements in health and mortality and must have contributed to the latter if one applies the literature on women’s roles in child mortality today to understand the falling child mortality of the past. This paper combines the literature on maternal roles and child mortality in the developing world and that on ideological changes around maternity in the past to suggest that in both the past and the present good health outcomes often depend on a clamping down on rather than an expansion of the autonomy of women. I expand on this possibility by examining changes time allocation and in the availability of ‘free’ time to women as infant and child health improved in the 19th and 20th century western world. In both the past and the present, the ideological change underlying the enhanced abilities of mothers to improve child health might have less to do with autonomy than with a new set of norms about appropriate maternal ‘busyness’.

Author

• Alaka Malwade Basu, Cornell University