Mander, Rosemary

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     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room toBirthing RoomCitation for published version:Mander, R 2010, 'Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room' Journal ofInterdisciplinary History, vol 41, no. 1, pp. 166-167.Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordPublished In:Journal of Interdisciplinary HistoryGeneral rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 28. Apr. 2017Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to BirthingRoom (review)Rosemary ManderJournal of Interdisciplinary History, Volume 41, Number 1, Summer2010, pp. 166-167 (Article)Published by The MIT PressFor additional information about this article                                                  Access provided by University of Edinburgh (14 Mar 2014 05:59 GMT)http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jih/summary/v041/41.1.mander.htmlmendable piece of scholarship, completing the link between culturaltheory, religious studies, and history.Robert S. WeiseEastern Kentucky UniversityMake Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room.By Ruth Walzer Leavitt (Chapel Hill, University of North CarolinaPress, 2009) 448 pp. $35.00How fathers made their way into the birthing room is the story of theirtriumph over entrenched institutional resistance. On their way, fathersforged alliances and overcame powerful opponents. Their changing ter-ritory provides a metaphor for their involvement in the woman’s birthexperience—starting with their lack of any place in traditional homebirth, through their relegation to keeping “vigil” in the waiting roomwhile their wives labored in a nearby “delivery” room, to what is pre-sented as their ªnal destination, the birthing room, where they suppos-edly became equal partners.Leavitt recounts this journey using a range of familiar sources—interviews and popular media, particularly television, which started tocome into its own just as fathers made their ªrst faltering steps into thebirthing room. She also consults selections from the mid-twentieth-cen-tury “Fathers’ Books”—reminiscences and reºections of fathers derivedfrom notebooks provided in the “Stork Club,” the name given to thewaiting room near the hospital labor ward. Fathers were encouragedboth to record their own reºections and to read those of their predeces-sors.These journals constitute a veritable goldmine of delectable dataabout fathers’ experiences. Their comments demonstrate joy and painbut, most of all, the agonizing tedium of waiting. The value of these tes-timonies may be constrained to some extent by their restriction to liter-ate fathers—a potential source of bias about which Leavitt does not re-mark. Moreover, Leavitt gives disappointingly little attention to theorigins of this extraordinarily signiªcant data source. She relies exclu-sively on material from Chicago, Illinois, and Madison, Wisconsin, al-though other midwestern states also took part in the program. Leavittdoes not discuss why the books emerged in this setting and not in others.The three major parts of Leavitt’s book are not particularly well in-tegrated. The popular media sources and interviews combine with theFathers’ Books to form the main part of the text. The ªnal part com-prises an “Epilogue,” strangely entitled “Expectant Fathers’ Expecta-tions.” The material in this section differs substantially from the majorpart of the book, almost contradicting it. The epilogue adopts a criticaland analytical approach to the presence of fathers, posing a wealth of166 | R O S E M A RY M A N D E Rcrucially important questions. This section is cogently supported,though not as plentifully supported as the other chapters, which draw ona wider and more populist literature base. In it, Leavitt neglects theabundance of research evidence demonstrating the less favorable and lessfrequently publicized aspects of the fathers’ experience.Leavitt’s book contains a wealth of amusing illustrations, thoughthey are not always fully integrated into the text. Providing a little morecontext for them would have facilitated a better understanding of fa-thers’ experiences. Although Leavitt frequently attends to the medicali-zation of childbearing, she fails to mention certain other concurrent de-velopments, such as the changing role and increasing contribution of theobstetric anaesthetist.1 Linked with the medicalization of childbearing isthe Irish leviathan, termed “active management of labour.”2 It is possiblethat health systems’ global economic problems and the resultant staffshortages may have facilitated fathers’ welcome into the labor, delivery,and birthing room.3 These late twentieth-century innovations are dif-ªcult to detach from the entry of another person into the birthingroom—the doula.Rosemary ManderUniversity of EdinburghWhere We Live Now: Immigration and Race in the United States. By JohnIceland (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009) 223 pp. $50.00cloth $19.95 paperSpatial assimilation, a key benchmark of immigrants’ integration in re-ceiving countries, refers to the process whereby immigrants move awayfrom ethnic enclaves, usually located in poorer areas of a city wherehousing is cheap, and attain residential propinquity with members of thedominant, native-born population in wealthier, middle-class neighbor-hoods. Virtually every immigrant group that settled in the United Statesexperienced residential segregation from white Americans, at least ini-tially. For instance, Irish and German enclaves were prevalent in Ameri-can cities during the nineteenth century, whereas Italian and RussianJewish ghettos dotted the urban landscape during the ªrst quarter of thetwentieth century. Over time, as European immigrants became accul-turated and climbed up the socioeconomic ladder, however, they wereable to co-reside with white Americans, and eventually become bonaªde Americans themselves—blurring the spatial and social boundariesREVIEWS | 1671 Mander, “Epidural Analgesia 1: Recent History,” British Journal of Midwifery, I (1993),259–264.2 Kieran O’Driscoll and Declan Meagher, Active Management of Labour (London, 1980).3 Janet M. Corrigan, Ann Greiner, and Shari M. Erickson, Fostering Rapid Advances in HealthCare: Learning from System Demonstrations (Washington, D.C., 2003).

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