Present at the Creation

By JONATHAN V. LAST

High on the list of Richard Nixon's sins is the creation of Father's Day. The holiday was recognized by Congress in 1956, but it was Nixon who, in 1972, established the official observance at a time when the whole idea of American fatherhood was in flux, moving ever more rapidly away from the traditions of "Father Knows Best" but still not completely redefined.

Judith Walzer Leavitt describes a small, but telling, part of the evolution of fatherhood in "Make Room for Daddy."Her study is a narrative history -- illuminating and engaging -- of what fathers actually did while mothers were giving birth over the past 80 years.

Fathers today are steeped in the fine points of birth coaching and Lamaze, but once upon a time they had, literally, nothing to do with the event other than participating in the kickoff nine months earlier. As late as 1938 half of American women were still giving birth at home and men were, as they had been for thousands of years, unwelcome on the premises. The mother gathered her lady friends around her; the father was sent packing. In one charming bit of correspondence from the period, reproduced by Ms. Leavitt, a letter-writer observes how the womenfolk managed the event: "Mrs. Warren, who was absolute in this season of female despotism, interposed, and the happy father was compelled, with reluctant steps, to quit the spot."

As birthing increasingly moved to hospitals in the 1940s, fathers became more involved, at first confined to the waiting room, sometimes dubbed the "Stork Club" or, more quaintly, the "Husband Room." These were the days of chain smoking or ducking out to a bar while the women and doctors did whatever it was they were doing. Ms. Leavitt reports that one hospital sent fathers home and later dispatched a telegram announcing that the blessed event had occurred.

In the 1950s, fathers were pulled into the process thanks to a book by Dr. Grantly Dick-Read. His "Childbirth Without Fear" advocated natural birthing -- this was before the targeted anesthesia of epidurals, when many women were simply knocked out for the duration. Dr. Dick-Read also argued that husbands should be with their wives up to the moment of delivery, supporting and comforting them. The book was a sensation. Men began migrating to labor rooms, where they rubbed their wives' backs and witnessed the preliminary motions in the great feminine trial.

The natural child-birth counterculture was helped along, oddly enough, by the development of caudal anesthesia, a revolutionary drug that permitted women to manage pain while remaining awake during birth. Ms. Leavitt quotes one woman who was amazed at how the new drugs changed the labor-room experience, allowing certain civilized rituals to be observed: "When I'd drained [the coffee], my husband lighted a cigarette and passed it over to me. I took it gratefully." Shortly after, she was wheeled into the delivery room, leaving behind the cigarette-provider.

It wasn't until the late 1960s that men began taking the last step. Urged on by books such as Robert Bradley's "Husband-Coached Childbirth," men started going the distance. By 1970, the delivery room had been pried open.

All manner of idiocy followed: tape recorders, cameras, video. Husbands huffing and puffing with the mothers. The expression "we're pregnant." Various fads have cajoled fathers into cutting the umbilical cord or playing catcher as the baby exits the birth canal or stripping off their shirts and clutching the newborn "skin-to-skin." By the late 1970s, a man was considered something of a monster if he didn't at least stand north of the equator during the delivery of his child.

For her part, Ms. Leavitt is genuinely proud of men's progress. A professor of women's studies at the University of Wisconsin, she is a feminist in good standing. She instructs readers to remain alive to the three p's -- place, privilege and power. And she seems a little taken aback that the migration of men into the delivery room "actually helped reinforce the nuclear family and men's domestic authority."

But if anything Ms. Leavitt is not hard enough on men. The increasing involvement of fathers in childbirth has been mirrored by a decreasing involvement of fathers in fatherhood. Between 1940 and 1980, the American divorce rate more than doubled. In 1940, 2% of babies were born out of wedlock. Today that number is closer to 40%. There is something unwell about a society that requires fathers to pretend to find beauty in effaced cervixes, episiotomies and the bloody show -- but then allows them to skip out on the rearing of the child.

Explaining how the dinosaurs once rationalized keeping men in the Stork Club, Ms. Leavitt quotes one doctor's argument from the mid-1960s: "As the charm of woman is in her mystery, it is inconceivable that a wife will maintain her sexual prestige after her husband witnessed the expulsion of a baby -- a negligee will never hide this apparition." Another doctor concluded: "On the whole, it is not a show to watch."

We all laugh at how benighted such views are. (Even if there is, just possibly, some truth in them.) Yet today it is socially acceptable to father a child without marrying the mother or to divorce her later on if mother and father actually do bother to get hitched. And at the same time there is zero tolerance for a husband who says: "No thanks, I'll be in the waiting room with cigars." Ms. Leavitt's fascinating history suggests that childbirth is just one more area where our narcissism has swamped our seriousness.

source: online.wsj.com