Culturally patterned medical and socio-religious beliefs practiced to regulate the birth
cycle and ensure successful delivery. Early folklorists took a simple approach to
pregnancy and birth. They collected beliefs about prenatal marking and dietary intake and
gathered traditional practices associated with pregnancy, delivery, and early infancy.
Marie Campbell’s Folks Do Get Born (Campbell 1946) and material in Volume 6 of the
Frank C.Brown Collection of North Caroline Folklore (Hand 1961) are representative of
this approach. Such collections cataloged and preserved knowledge concerning beliefs
and represent the bulk of folkloristic materials concerning pregnancy and birth. These
works, however, often treated individual examples as isolated and unrelated and reflected
earlier definitions of folk medicine, which was seen as resting “…between official,
scientific medicine (the top layer) and primitive medicine (the bottom layer)” (Hufford
1988:229). This definition was cultural evolutionary in nature and represented an
understanding of folk medicine as “…having developed from its crudest, most primitive
form into its modern, Western, highly sophisticated state” (Hufford 1988:228). This
approach obscured or ignored entirely the dynamic interrelationship between birthlore,
societal attitudes, changes in medical knowledge and practice, and the role of women
within the community.
Many writers in the fields of anthropology, folklore, sociology, women’s studies,
history, and professional medicine have attempted more comprehensive studies of
pregnancy and birth. Some (see Hoffert 1989; Leavitt 1986; and Scholten 1985; Wertz
and Wertz 1989) employed a tripartite categorization, presenting a chronological
progression of the history from a time when birth was a social project through a period of
transition when medical authority assumed influence, and culminating in an era when the
medical profession consolidated its hold on the process of pregnancy and birth. This
approach attempted to move beyond mere categorization and listing by addressing
changes in practice in relation to changes in cultural attitude and belief as well as
advances in medical science. This categorization, however, created an image of birth
traditions as characteristic of only limited periods of history that faded out of practice in
response to the pressure and development of modern obstetrics.
The folklore of pregnancy and birth does not reflect the earlier ideas of “primitive”
medicine versus “official” medicine, nor does it characterize a period of American
history before the advent of professional obstetrics. Instead, traditional practices of
pregnancy and birth are still practiced alongside, and in conjunction with, standard
obstetrical technique and care, although they are frequendy practiced without the
knowledge or consent of obstetricians. Likewise, the contemporary alternative-birth
movement utilizes and employs many so-called traditional or folk medical approaches to
pregnancy and birth in a highly stmctured atmosphere. The presence of midwives, family
and community involvement, herbal remedies, “natural” birth, and the revival of birth
chairs are characteristic of this. However, like other forms of alternative health practices
and folk medicine, the alternative-birth movement and the use of traditional pregnancy
and delivery practices exist in tension with official attitudes and is often condemned as
dangerous, primitive, and marginal.
There are three interrelated subjects of traditional beliefs and practices: conception,
pregnancy, and delivery. Such practices and beliefs sought to ensure conception, guard
against miscarriage or bring about abortion, protect the modier and child during gestation,
determine the sex of the child, regulate diet and activity, and bring about a safe birth. The
most detailed and rigorously employed practices were those diat dealt with the actual
approach to delivery and techniques to effect it.
Specific examples of traditional American beliefs associated with conception include
these: that rubbing one’s stomach against a pregnant woman’s or ingesting large
quantities of eggs would bring about conception; that vinegar-and-water douches would
result in the birth of a boy, and eating salty food prior to conception would bring about
the birth of a daughter; and that paint fumes, strenuous horseback riding, or drinking
turpentine would produce an abortion, while swallowing fruit seeds would prevent
miscarriage.
Many pregnancy practices are related to food taboos. These practices resulted from the
“doctrine of maternal impression,” the notion that certain foods would contaminate the
milk supply, cause a difficult birth, bring about an abortion, grow a strong or a weak
child, or “mark” a child with either a birthmark, a physical deformity, or an emotional
disposition. Perhaps the best example of dietary practice during pregnancy is the
widespread cultural symptom of pregnancy: cravings. The practice of “pica”—the desire
for, and ingestion of, nonfood items—is a significant element of pregnancy folklore. Pica
includes the eating of dirt or clay (a practice called geophagy), and/or the ingestion of
laundry starch, matches, ice, or hair. Pica has a long association with pregnancy in the
United States, with numerous examples and accounts in folklore materials and medical
journals, as well as mention in popular American novels such as Toni Morrison’s Song of
Solomon and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The traditions associated with food
intake during pregnancy, like other forms of pregnancy folklore, are widespread and are
not culturally and ethnically specific. Mexican Americans, African Americans, those of
European decent, Asian Americans, and others all have beliefs concerning various forms
of food taboo and regulation as well as forms of pica during pregnancy.
Practices associated with delivery are concerned with ensuring a successful delivery
for both mother and child and were the product of participation in neighboring women’s
births and the dissemination of knowledge from mother to daughter, from midwife to
assistant, and from woman to woman. The practices are predicated on an understanding
of birth as a natural consequence of nature, and they respond to and react to the event of
birth. Delivery practices, therefore, serve to assist the mother as she delivers, intervening
only in the event of difficulty or danger. Such practices include the choice of midwives
and female members of the community as birth attendants, methods to alleviate the pain
and apprehension associated with delivery, and, significantly, the use of birth chairs or an
attendant’s lap to assist in the preferred upright posture of delivery. Once delivery is
completed other beliefs govern divining the future of the child based on the incidents and
time of its birth. For example, in the United States it was traditionally believed that a
child born with a caul would have some ability to foresee the future, a child born during a
storm would have a stormy personality, or a child born with clenched fists would be
greedy and selfish.
The folklore of pregnancy and birth in the United States incorporates many different
ethnic and cultural approaches. The practices are cultural constructions—responding to
the attitudes and beliefs within the context of society. As society changed its attitudes and
beliefs, the practices and beliefs associated with pregnancy and birth likewise altered. All
reflected a philosophy of birth as natural and were similar in their quality of responding
to the event as opposed to manipulating or directing the process.
Amanda Carson Banks
References
Campbell, Marie. 1946. Folks Do Get Born. NewYork: Rhinehart.
Hand, Wayland D., ed. 1961. The Frank C.Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Vol. 6.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hochstein, G. 1968. Pica: A Study in Medical and Anthropological Explanations.In Essays on
Medical Anthropology, ed. T.Weaver. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Hoffert, Sylvia. 1989. Private Matters: Attitudes toward Childbearing and Infant Nurture in Early
NineteenthCentury America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hufford, David. 1988. Contemporary Folk Medicine. In Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in
America, ed. Norman Gevitz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Leavitt, Judith. 1986. Brought to Bed: Childbearingin America, 1750–1950. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Scholten, Catherine. 1985. Childbearing in American Society, 1650–1850. New York: New York
University Press.
Wertz, Richard, and Dorothy Wertz. 1989. Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.