Maternity care and the indigent during the Depression: ‘without distinction of color, creed or nationality’

Description

During the 1930s maternal mortality among American hospital deliveries rose, yet hospitals also provided valuable services for poor women unable to afford a midwife for a home birth, including medical care, food and rest. This paper charts the changing nature of hospital and home deliveries at the Women’s Medical College Hospital of Pennsylvania (WMCHP) during the Great Depression. Utilising delivery records from the hospital, their outpatient clinics and city midwife registries, it sheds light on the changing ethnic and racial composition of the women utilizing hospital inpatient and outpatient delivery services in Philadelphia during the 1920s and 1930s. These records also reveal the shifting neighborhoods and clientele the different maternity providers served. While some of the evidence alludes to women’s shift to choosing a hospital rather than a home birth during this period and which is highlighted in maternity histories, this paper reveals a more complex story about poor women’s maternity experiences and choices. Moreover, the WMCHP obstetrical specialists remained committed to providing both home and hospital deliveries through the Depression and charged based on a patient’s ability to pay, despite broader financial concerns for the hospital. The doctors did not openly promote hospital births. By contextualising the ‘universal’ experience of maternity, this paper lends nuance to existing histories about the medicalization of childbirth, highlighting the varied and gradual nature of the changing location of birth and practitioners’ attitudes towards and services offered to indigent mothers of different race and ethnicity.

Period	1 May 2025 → 4 May 2025
Degree of Recognition	International