Constructing Maternal Risk: Social Work and Medical Frameworks in Postwar America

Matty Lichtenstein, Florida Atlantic University

This paper examines how child welfare and medical professionals shaped the regulation of pregnancy and the postpartum period in the United States from 1945 to 1965. Drawing on archival records and an analysis of historical professional journals, it traces both the convergence and divergence of social work and medical frameworks in defining pregnant and postpartum women as subjects requiring intensive oversight and intervention. During this period, federal and state child welfare agencies expanded investments in maternal and infant health programs, working closely with state and local health departments and medical professionals, yet their priorities increasingly centered on infant outcomes rather than maternal well being. These agencies also developed classificatory schemes for identifying “risky” mothers and developed new approaches to foster care and adoption as tools of social management, particularly for children labeled “illegitimate.” At the same time, emerging medical research on “failure to thrive,” low birthweight, and related conditions, often linked to structural inequities but frequently attributed to maternal inadequacy, reinforced a clinical focus on maternal risk. By analyzing these parallel developments, the paper illuminates the roots of a growing divide between social work and medical approaches, even as both fields converged in their shared framings of the perinatal period as a time necessitating heightened and often collaborative professional control.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 86. Gender and Health: From Coal Miners to Motherhood