‘THE SUBJECT OF HEATED CONTROVERSY’: Maternity care for indigent
mothers, c 1918-1943
Janet Greenlees, PhD, Glasgow Caledonian University
Abstract: Poor,
pregnant women have always received the healthcare that society chooses for
them. Together, their poverty and pregnancy have led medicine and Western
societies to label these women as being doubly vulnerable. This paper explores
the relationships between poverty, pregnancy, vulnerability, and maternity care
through the lenses of both patients and practitioners in the United States
after the First World War. Centering
vulnerability within the matrix of charitable and low-cost maternity care
available in slum neighborhoods, the
paper combines hospital, dispensary, community nursing, midwifery, and public
health records to trace evolving stories of provision, practitioners and their
patients.
Janet Greenlees is an
Associate Professor of Health History within the Department of Social Sciences
at Glasgow Caledonian University (Scotland). She is Principal Investigator of
an international project highlighting the challenges, resilience and lived
realities of one-parent families and Co-Director of the Centre for the Social
History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH), a research collaboration between
Glasgow Caledonian and Strathclyde University. She is a Co-Editor for the
journal Social
History of Medicine and
was managing editor between 2024-25.