ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Sanidad y Santidad: Medicalizing Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Spain

• In Event: The Long-longue Durée of Iberian Science and Medicine

English Abstract

My paper examines the intertwined biological and political construction of the mother and motherhood in nineteenth-century Spain. Between 1830 and 1870–an era marked by the collapse of the Spanish empire, the rise of modern European nationalism, and depopulation fears–women’s ability to birth healthy infants and then raise future upstanding citizens increasingly became a matter of national and state interest. The biological gestation and delivery of a healthy child was just the first step: a mother both needed to keep her children alive and physically healthy and raise them according to a prescribed (Catholic) moral code. Published medical treatises asserted that in order to protect her children’s health, a mother had to keep her own body and soul clean; what these texts do not address are the women who fell short of the lofty goals. Maternity home records provide one avenue to better understand the reality of this gendered emphasis on a mother’s (or maternal-surrogate’s) role in the health of her children. Some women who gave birth in these institutions left with their children, while some women relinquished the custody and care of their child to the institution.

In this paper I ask: how did science and religion coexist in understanding(s) of maternity? What scientific and medical expertise dominated the maternity home? Did some women meet the criteria for proper motherhood, while others failed? I argue that a fusion of medical scientific thought and Catholic morality shaped an ideology of motherhood. This nineteenth-century peninsular story echoes themes of crisis and responsibility, religious and moral sentiment, perceptions of womanhood and maternity, and notions of (social) health that reverberate across the long-durée of science in the Hispanic world.

Author

• Mary Kate Wolken, University of Minnesota