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Book Review
| Kerreen Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies: the Forgotten Women's Movement, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001. pp. xvii + 335. $38.95 paper.
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| Our Bodies, Our Babies is the result of a long and detailed research project undertaken by Kerreen Reiger over more than a decade. It has as its focus the various mothers' organisations which set out, from the 1960s, to change attitudes to childbirth and breastfeeding in Australia. These organisations, Reiger argues, represent a forgotten women's movement because, at their core, they set out to empower women in the face of the medical model which, basking in its success in dramatically reducing infant and maternal mortality, had scant respect for birthing women as consumers. Focusing on the Childbirth Education Association (CEA) and the Nursing Mothers Association of Australia (NMAA), Reiger sets out to document the way in which women organised 'to assert their desire for more control over birth and lactation' (p. 37). |
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Motherhood, Reiger argues, has been a blind spot for Australian feminism, under-theorised and often marginalised as a distraction from the struggle for equality. The founders of the mothers' organisations were often unconcerned with equality, arguing instead for a reclaiming of maternal power and the defence of the domestic sphere. In a world which counterposed work and home, they all too readily fell into the latter category. Yet this counterpositioning, Reiger suggests, was an artifice, disguising the commonality between two groups of women all of whom were using the advantages of their improved educational and economic position to challenge existing hierarchies of power and argue for a say in the way in which they performed their chosen roles. Not surprisingly perhaps, they also displayed similar flaws: a blindness to inequalities based on class, race and ethnicity, and a tendency to use their gains to establish a new orthodoxy, which had the potential to alienate many of the women for whom they claimed to speak. |
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There are, however, competing threads in the story that Reiger sets out to tell. There are points at which the argument is almost overwhelmed by a detailed discussion of tactics which comes to look like a far more orthodox organisational history. While this serves to demonstrate that even within these maternalist organisations professional rivalries and power struggles could and did disrupt notions of a common purpose, this point could have been more concisely made. The rich oral record provides much of the material on which such discussions are based but there is no matching material to provide any assessment of how these organisations were received by the majority of birthing women who chose not to become involved. |
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This silence provides a link to the second problem Reiger confronted in completing this book so long after the original research had been undertaken, for in the interim the debate around birthing and breastfeeding has moved on. While both the CEA and the NMAA could, particularly in their early years, claim to have made significant changes in both birthing and breastfeeding practices, childbirth is now more medicalised than ever before and debate now centres on minimising the disruption of childbearing in women's lives. Despite the disquiet around high rates of monitoring and intervention evident in recent government enquiries, technology is triumphant in contemporary obstetrics and breastfeeding in public is still a subject of contestation. |
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This is not, Reiger argues, evidence that the mothers' organisations failed. They were, in their time, remarkably effective agents of change and, although considerably reduced in size, continue to provide valued support. However, with the dramatic reduction in the birth rate and the increasing age of first time mothers, the agenda has changed, giving the medical promise of a safe delivery and a healthy child a new valency. The place of feminist activism in the new landscape, Reiger suggests, is to inform women of their choices and encourage a recognition of diversity amongst the consumers of maternity services. |
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| Australian Catholic University |
SHURLEE SWAIN | |
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