Workshop
COST-Workshop: "Histories of Maternity: Ideas, Practices and Transfers"

Over the last two centuries, women’s bodies have been one of the main objects of biopolitics. In the framework of modernizing societies, control over women’s bodies, and in particular over their reproductive functions, represented a symbolic and practical tool for the implementation of social and political projects. While using health care as a core element of modern state and nation-building, states worked out special maternity programs for demographic, eugenic, and health goals. Medical practitioners meant granting mothers assistance prior, during, and after childbirth as a matter of ‘modernity’ and hygiene, and to some extent shared the priorities of the state’s elites who often looked at those practices as ones bettering the next generation’s health, enhancing mother-child relations, and implementing social cohesion. Private actors (midwives, organisations offering prenatal and postnatal care, etc.) engaged in mother’s health care both to deliver support for particular groups of mothers or to implement alternative health care or birth-giving practices. Increasing interest in mothers’ health care minimum standards was also expressed by international actors who articulated the assessment and spread of mothers’ health care minimum standards within a discourse of rights and humanitarian aid to be granted irrespective of national, racial, or religious belonging. In turn, mothers did not remain passive objects but interacted and opposed delivered practices, influencing their effectiveness. Within this framework and regardless of their (often) ideological interpretations, the adoption of ‘modern’ maternity-related practices has been the result of the international circulation of medical knowledge and their adaptation to particular sociopolitical contexts and needs. How did different social, political, and cultural contexts interpret ‘modern’ maternity practices? What norms and values did they convey through mothers’ health care and childbirth practices? How did mothers react to delivered practices?

These and many other questions we aim to discuss in in this workshop which takes place in Prague and online. International scholars from various disciplines will discuss the construction, contestation, and transformation of ideologies of maternity, maternity practices, and mothers’ experiences over the last two centuries, and especially the following subjects:

• Ideologies of maternity and transfer of knowledge and practices
• Commodification of maternity
• Maternal/mother’s and child’s health care facilities and practices
• Relations between maternal, child and family health and care
• Maternity, class, race and religion
• Fertility
• Gynecology and paternalism
• Abortion and eugenics
• Delinquency prevention and maternal health
• Relations between medical/paramedical personnel and mothers
• State and international maternal health care actors
• Mothers’ voices

The workshop is organized by Working Group 3 “Patients” of the COST-Action CA22159 “National, International and Transnational Histories of Healthcare, 1850-2000 (EuroHealthHist)”. The main organizers are Dr. Andrea Griffante (Lithuanian Institute of History), PD Dr. Friederike Kind-Kovács (HAIT) and Prof. Shiran Bord (The Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, Israel) in cooperation with the Institute of Contemporary History (ÚSD) at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.

The Workshop is organized by Dr. Andrea Griffante (Lithuanian Institute of History, Vilnius, Lithuania), Prof. Shiran Bord (The Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, Israel), PD Dr. Friederike Kind-Kovács (Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the TU Dresden) in cooperation with the Institute of Contemporary History (ÚSD) at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.

More information and the complete conference programme are attached.