Learn from book reviews, Part Tres

Pain in childbirth had been considered inevitable until the 19th century, when chloroform came into more common use during labor. Donald Caton, an anesthesiologist, wrote a history on the use of anesthesia and analgesia titled, What a Blessing She Had Chloroform, itself a declaration attributed to Queen Victoria.

Interestingly, the idea that childbirth need not be painful also spurred others to consider alternatives to medication, which itself presented problems, not the least of which included serious side effects and consequences for women's own experiences of childbirth. An early proponent of "natural" childbirth in the mid 20th century was Grantly Dick-Read, an obstetrician who cited examples of painless "primitive" birth from late 19th century anthropology in his book, Childbirth without Fear.

This story has been told before, but a book review in the May 31 issue of The Nation suggests another dimension that seems well worth exploring. The review, by Paula Findlen, discusses Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. As Findlen explains:

The objective developments in science of the preceding century gave way to subjective reflection about the meaning of understanding nature. Poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats marveled at the new vision of the world wrought by science. At the same time, the British astronomers, naturalists, chemists and experimenters of their generation developed a conception of the world that was, in its own way, profoundly poetic.

One of the developments of Romantic science was nitrous oxide:

In spring 1799, Humphrey Davy invited a circle of friends to experience the giddy effects of laughing gas. He was inspired enough to write a poem about it. Davy's celebrated self-experiment, in which he inhaled six quarts of N2O on May 5, 1799, led to a loss of consciousness, feeling and memory.... The psychosomatic effects (to borrow Coleridge's term) of Davy's discovery fascinated his contemporaries. He invented a new pleasure for which they had no name.

If Romanticism began as an exploration of the enhancement of the senses, at the height of its success it grappled with the novel sensation of feeling nothing at all.

It makes me wonder what we want today - to feel more or to feel less or both at the same time - and what that means.

Doula

Just learned that the wonderful doula who supported StraightMan and me during Beanie's birth has decided to "retire" - at least for the moment.

The reasons that she gives for leaving it aside resonate with me. This just is not the right time for this kind of work. It always struck me as an irony of doula work that the women who esp. feel called to it are exactly in the "right" place to know all the fears and hopes of a woman in labor - so many doulas having been motivated by their own (recent) birth experiences - and also in the "wrong" place in their own lives to drop what they do in order to attend a birth.

Women's lives do not proceed in exactly the "order" of men's lives. To borrow a metaphor from my fiber crafting friends - we knit, we weave, we tangle, we unstitch, we start again, we make do.

Still, I feel loss at doulicia's announcement. She was so much a part of Beanie's birth, which in my mind remains An Especially Special Birth because, after all, it was my first. (Bubbie, your birth, too, is especially special.)

Next week, Beanie "graduates" from kindergarten. Or as she crooned to me, to the tune of "New York, New York," rehearsing a bit from their performance next week: "I want to be a part of it, First Grade, First Grade!"

So, I guess I should just say, good luck in first grade, doulicia!

Keeping up with The Times

Just read philosopher Peter Singer's contribution to the Opinionator, "Should This Be the Last Generation?"

Which on the one hand brought to mind a joke that StraightMan likes to make about teaching and parenting: That had he known in advance what they both involved, he might have reconsidered one of them.

The exact wording, the brevity, the delivery, and with them, the impact, might be lost, but I think you get more or less the idea.

On the other hand. I found Singer's piece interestingly provocative, as it clearly is intended to be, but I admit that I also thought: Written like a man.

I mean that without essentializing either "man" or "woman." Of course. Mindful of the gendered existences and experiences that "we" have. That said, I think men and women build their relationships to / with a child rather differently. Having a child, or not having a child, becomes attached with importances and meanings. How we feel about having children and what we do about it, in fact, genders us.

It might be just my disciplinarily-bred defensiveness or my crankiness with the field of "ethics" - I has less problem with ethics themselves - but I disagree with Singer's contention that "very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself. Most of those who consider that question probably do so because they have some reason to fear that the child’s life would be especially difficult — for example, if they have a family history of a devastating illness, physical or mental, that cannot yet be detected prenatally."

Given that at least some kind of testing has become routine in the medical management of pregnancy in the United States - and this includes fetal ultrasound imaging, which has become more or less a ritual for "seeing" the baby - I suggest that the question of coming into existence haunts a lot of women in the family way.

Anthropologist Rayna Rapp wrote a compelling ethnography, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus, documenting women's decisions to have or not have an amniocentesis performed to test for chromosomal anomalies. Again, given the common use of the test, which is strongly recommended, almost required, for women over age 35, I think it is not unfair to say that a lot of American women face the dilemmas of do I test or not, do I want to know or not, what will I do with this information, what will I decide? Their, or I should say our choices might have been "either / or," but their / our questions and answers were far more complicated, including not only notions about the child's own "good," but also the good of their other children, who would be the siblings and possibly eventual caregivers of children with disabilities.

There is no "bracketing" or leaving aside "for the sake of argument" their experiences, expectations, and identities as women and particularly as mothers making choices for their children. I almost feel as though Singer were asking me, as a woman and mother, to inhabit his perspective without his making a similar attempt to challenge his own imagination. At risk of sounding like a stark raving feminist, I confess: I have begun to see this storied philosophic strategy of "just supposing" as an important means of universalizing a particular gendered perspective. Women constantly are asked, persuaded, pressured, and forced to accommodate men's arguments, ideas, and perspectives. Try asking men to "take on" women's ways of seeing: Become accused of being political or worse - soft, subjective, unscientific, not so smart.

The questions that Singer poses to readers are intended to be provocatively interesting, but I do not find them exactly that. I mean, are they not the questions that guide the ideas and practices of women and men across cultures and societies, in the past and in the present?

If a child is likely to have a life full of pain and suffering is that a reason against bringing the child into existence?

If a child is likely to have a happy, healthy life, is that a reason for bringing the child into existence?

Like so many other decisions that we as human people make in our lives, the "choice" to have (or not have) a child is itself constrained and conditioned and culturally mediated and socially policed and historically and politically / economically situated and gendered.

Feminist technologies

Linda Layne, an anthropologist whom I much admire, has a blog about her new book on Feminist Technologies. In her first posting, she poses an interesting question: Are fashionable birth control packs feminist or antifeminist?

I will give the prototypical cultural anthropologist's response right here: I suppose it all depends on what you mean by "feminism" :)

I know, I know: This is "just" another example of marketing. However. I like the cute case. I like the sense of play that it evokes. I think feminism can be playful. I think feminists themselves / ourselves can be fun and funny.

This question called to mind a conversation that I had this semester with a student whom I was advising on his independent study project on masculinity and the male pill. We started to think about the kind of packaging that might be developed for a birth control pill for men.

A soft slim case that looks like a condom stashed in a man's wallet? Or a hard sleek case that resembles a smartphone? It even could send a text message reminding him to take his pill at a given time.

(I bet there already is an iPhone app for women that can be used to track ovulation / menstruation?)

Sophomore slump

Miserable is the ABD anthropology graduate student. Approximately as miserable is the PhD who seems to have no second project.

That would be me. The latter, I mean.

I have a few irons in the fire, but with a 4/3 teaching load - yes, you read that correctly, and no, I do not teach at a two-year / community college - the fire burns low and slow.

A project with which I am flirting is the anthropology of spas, in particular looking at contemporary American ideas and practices surrounding hydrotherapy (water) and balneotherapy (baths).

In my random readings, I found an article titled, "The Bath: A Nursing Ritual" by Zane Robinson Wolf (1993), which considers the importance and meaning of bathing (especially others, but also selves) for the profession of nursing. "The nurse who learns to perform the bath artfully is proficient, knowing, subtle, and able," Wolf wrote. She concludes with a reflection on the importance of the bath as a ritual of knowledge and healing:

Consequently, it may be professionally hazardous for nurses to discard the bathing ritual by giving it up to nonprofessional personnel. The bath is more than a standardized and repetitive series of activities; it may be required by the rules of nursing (Gluckman, 1975). The bath can be viewed as a healing rite with great healing power; it may symbolize order, solidarity, and purity (Douglas, 1970).

This calls to mind the emphasis placed on the newborn's first bath (which nurses perform after the birth) and on the need for parents to learn how to bathe the infant properly - that is, safely and hygienically and so on. Following the cutting of the cord, the first bath in the hospital seems another step in the process of individuating (infant from woman), but also of socializing.

A bath is not always just a bath.

Keeping up with The Times

In today's Opinionator, Olivia Judson explains what "sexual tension" means for evolutionary biologists:

Normally, it’s not possible to free one sex from the constraints of the other, because the two are condemned to evolve together. But again, fruit flies are an exception. In the laboratory, it’s possible to let one sex to evolve while holding the other still.

In other words, it is not what was happening between various male and female characters on "Firefly." Yet, fascinating nevertheless.