I am writing a brief history of the Queen Victoria Hospital in Launceston, Tasmania. It is/was a maternity hospital originally built in 1897, the year of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and underwent a number of building changes, the most extensive being in the 1960s.
What I am looking for is contextual material on maternity/women/medicalisation, including the use of space to nurture/control women.
The most useful texts I've found to date are:
Kerreen Reiger The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernizing the Australian Family 1880-1940(1985)...deals with medicalization of childbirth
The section on childbirth in Pat Jalland's Women, Marriage & Politics 1860-1914...upperclass Englishwomen (1986)
M. Truby King's Mothercraft (1934)
The papers of the Hobart Maternal and Dorcas Society ...mainly 19th century philanthropic women/midwives/poorwomen in confinement, but also shows evolution from individual care - midwives visiting the only exception being unworthy women who are institutionalized for childbirth - to institutions being the norm for all women.
The only text I have found so far that deals with spatial control in a way I have found helpful is Nicole Rafter's "Chastizing the Unchaste: Social Control Functions of a Women's Reformatory,
1894-1931" in Cohen & Scull's Social Control and the State (1983).
This has been x-posted to H-Anzau w/some variations.
Adams, Annmarie Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses and Women, 1870-1900 (McGill-Queens UP, 1996)
"Rooms of Their Own: The Nurses' Residences at Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital", Material History Review 40 (Fall 1994)
Apple, Rima, ed. Women, Health and Medicine in America: A Historical Handbook (Rutgers, 1992)
Brost, Charlotte _Catching Babies: The Professionalization of Childbirth, 1870-1920_(HUP, 1995)
Goodstein, Anita Nashville, 1780-1860: From Frontier to City p. 189
Holmes, Linda and Margaret Charles Smith _Listen to Me Good: The Story of an Alabama Midwife_ (OSU Press, 1996).
Kunzel, Regina Fallen Women, Problem Girls (Yale, 1993)
Levitt (Leavitt?), Judith Walzer Brought to Bed (Oxford, 1986)
Lewis, Jane The Politics of Motherhood (London: Croom Helm; Montreal: McGill-Queen's, 1980)
Marks, L. articles in the _Economic History Review_vol. 46 no.3 (1993); _Oral History_vol.23 no.1 (1995); and _Social History of Medicine Journal_ vol. 13 vo.1 (1990)
Mitchinson, Wendy The Nature of Their Bodies
Morton, Marian And Sin No More (Ohio State Press, 1993)
Safer, M. Tew _Safer Childbirth? A Critical History of Maternity Care_(Chapman & Hall, London, 1990)
Stansell, Christine City of Women
Weisman, Leslie Kane Discrimination By Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (U. of Illinois, 1992)
Wertz & Wertz Lying-In
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