The baby boom era holds a special place in the hearts of many Canadians. The years between the end of World War II and the beginning of social and cultural upheaval in the 1960s seem for many a touchstone of normality, family values, and national social cohesion. Compelling as this image is for many Canadians, it has been problematized by several historians seeking to free post-war history from what Stephanie Coontz has termed “the nostalgia trap.”1 These historians have demonstrated that the post-World War II-era focus on normality and middle-class heterosexual nuclear family values was used to disenfranchise certain members of society and that, despite the hegemonic power of “normal,” the boundaries of normality had to be constantly (re)defined, enforced, and protected.2
One of the many ways that the boundaries of normal were continuously enforced and reinforced was through focusing hegemonic discourses upon the body. Dominant groups such as the medical community examined and sorted citizen’s bodies into binary categories, dividing those who were deemed normal and useful to the wider state from those bodies deemed abnormal and deviant, according to the dominant episteme.3 This concentration on the body helped increase the authority of the medical community, empowered through structures such as the hospital, to gather information about the body and to ultimately set parameters for the disciplining of both normal and aberrant bodies. The medical community was empowered “not only to distribute advice as to a healthy life but also to dictate the standards for the physical and moral relations of the individual and society in which he lives.”4 This search for control of bodies is demonstrated clearly in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), the primary national medical journal of the day. The journal is a remarkable archive of discourse: it represents not only a voice of the medical profession but one intentionally edited and presented to create at least the appearance of a united medical opinion. In a sense the CMAJ is not only a reflection of the dominant hegemonic voice of Canadian medicine; it was a dominating and hegemonizing voice from within the medical profession itself.5 In its pages, the contributors, editors, letter-writers, and advertisers attempted to create a discourse that would police the gendered boundaries of Canadian men and women and to create sexualized hegemony on a national scale.
Yet, this project was never entirely successful, and this incongruity is aptly demonstrated by the oral histories of individual embodied experience. Oral histories, the product of eighteen open-ended interviews with women who lived and married during the baby boom period (1946–1966), demonstrate an ambivalent response to this dominant medical narrative. The women benefitted from their own bodies’ “normalcy” as heterosexual women in monogamous marriages, but at the same time problematized the dominant narrative through the persistent individuality of their experiences.6
Foucault applied his insights into medical knowledge and power mainly to the Victorian era; however, his notion of how the medical profession as an authoritative structure was tasked to sort citizens’ bodies into normal and abnormal, useful and deviant categories is relevant for Canada during the baby boom. As the nation continuously sought stability in the wake of a deep economic depression and two world wars, there was an increasing focus on the heterosexual nuclear family, with its concomitant gender roles, as the bedrock upon which to build a stable state.7 Medical doctors and psychiatrists were increasingly called upon to provide solutions to issues affecting the family such as juvenile delinquency, divorce, pornography, and sexual education. In giving such advice the medical community usually portrayed the family as both crucially important and incredibly fragile. As one editor of the CMAJ remarked in 1959, “it seems to be generally agreed that in Western countries the stability of family life is not what it was in a less enlightened age.”8
A close examination of the journal demonstrates a startling continuity in its articles, letters, and editorials; a hegemonic voice that both reflected and projected wider societal concerns about Canada’s citizen bodies.9 When viewed as a whole this dominant discourse creates what Moira Gatens identifies in her 1996 work Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality as “an imaginary politic”—an imagined, non-corporeal body created by discourses and against which individual bodies are judged.10 Gatens argues that any bodies deviating from the “imaginary body politic” are immediately disenfranchised from full participation in society and their actions deemed ugly or inappropriate. For Gatens this ultimate body politic was a male “Leviathan” corpus created to disenfranchise women; if we expand Gatens’ framework, however, the juxtaposition of imaginary ideal bodies to the fleshy bodies of individual citizens becomes an even more useful tool of analysis.11 Within the dominant discourse of the CMAJ, two “Leviathan” bodies were created during the Canadian baby boom: one male and one female. These were imbued with the normalized gender values of the day and created to complement each other to further reinforce discourses of the importance of the heterosexual nuclear family.
Such rigidly defined body politics disenfranchise “problematic bodies” from full and open participation in society. The CMAJ body politics, in its embodiment of, and emphasis upon, strict gender roles of male breadwinner and female homemaker and its normalization of heterosexual marriage, disenfranchised homosexuals as well other “deviants” such as unwed mothers. 12 However, these “dominant bodies” also impacted “non-deviant” citizen bodies that they, as an idealization, were supposed to represent and reflect. Yet because these corporeal bodies were assumed to exist within the range of “normal” (because of their relative closeness to the ideal imaginary body), it is much more difficult to see the effects of the imaginary body. Further, because these bodies do derive many societal benefits from this closeness to the imaginary ideal, it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming these “normal” bodies were unproblematic. But the CMAJ body politics and the heterosexual couples they were meant to represent were not perfect mirrors which, if held facing each other, would simply reproduce endless copies of the same “perfect” body into infinity. Instead individual Canadian bodies were imperfect copies, at best reflecting some of the features of the CMAJ body politics back onto themselves, while distorting others, sometimes beyond recognition.
This essay seeks to explore these distortions by comparing and contrasting one of the dominant Canadian medical body politics, that of the female, to the bodies of individual women who, by engaging in married heterosexual relationships, were assumed to fall within the range of “normal.” These individual bodies demonstrate an often uniquely western Canadian perspective, suggesting the importance of place, but problematize dominant, overarching national narratives, using their local bodies to displace such claims to legitimacy. Thus, while the bodies of these eighteen women are not meant to be representative of all women in Canada, and indeed are not meant to even be a representation of western Canadian heterosexual married women, they do demonstrate the ways that individual corporeal or “fleshy” bodies could both reflect and contradict the national medical body politic as presented in the CMAJ. They also demonstrate how such reflections and contradictions both further empowered the dominant body politic and, in subtle and often indirect ways, counteracted it.
The primary characteristic of the medical body politic, and the one that allowed the medical profession authority over the female heterosexual body during the baby boom, was its knowability—its permeability—to the outside world. At a time when science and medicine were still invested with a great deal of authority, discourses of the body within the CMAJ emphasize a body whose most intimate secrets could be unlocked by a trained medical professional. Not only were doctors deemed able to “know” a patient’s body through their ability to interpret clinical data such as symptoms, they also had the instruments and the authority to penetrate the skin of their patients and, thus, to “know” that body from the inside out.
Medical authority came with a sense of assumed responsibility. The medical community was clearly concerned about disseminating its own vision of heterosexual normalcy, via their particular body politic, to the public. Several CMAJ articles discussed how medical doctors should conduct themselves in radio and television broadcasts and the importance of medical input and control over sexual education within schools.13
While the CMAJ body politic was clearly visible, knowable to the doctors and thus able to be penetrated by the external medical world, the individual bodies of the women I interviewed were more defined by their very opacity to their owners, who remained largely ignorant of their bodies’ function and biology. This opacity came out most clearly in reoccurring narratives of their loss of virginity, which for many was their first real introduction to their body as a sexual entity. Many women, especially those who married at the beginning of the time period, were confronted with their lack of knowledge on the very eve of their weddings. Margaret Brown recalls, “I remember um when I knew I was getting married…and I remember sitting in the bath and getting out and drying myself and I thought how is it all going to work…? We never look at ourselves…we never looked…. I knew there was something going to happen but I couldn’t imagine how it would happen.”14 Ruth Bell, after losing her virginity on her wedding night, not having been told that some bleeding was to be expected, actually cut off sexual relations with her husband because she thought she had begun menstruating. She notes, “I can’t imagine that there are grade school children that are that innocent [nowadays]. But I was. I was completely a virgin and I had no experience.”15
On the surface this opacity seems to support the authority of the medical profession over the female body and the profession’s right to disseminate information about it to lay people. However, even those women who had access to medical information about their bodies usually relied more on rumour for information about sexuality. Jessica Bateman, who was training to be a nurse when she became engaged to her husband, remembers that, though they learned about STDs and cleanliness in regards to sex, the “old matron” who taught them was a “spinster” and would get very embarrassed when discussing the actual mechanics of intercourse. Jessica’s main sources of “information” were her sexually experienced friends, and, she notes that, as she was pretending to know more than she did, it is quite possible that they too were attempting to seem more “worldly” than they actually were. Indeed, she found out later through her own experiences that much of the information she heard was wrong.16 Bateman’s story demonstrates a plurality of non-official sources through which most of the women interviewed gained their information about their bodies, sex, and sexuality. They were not reliant upon medical knowledge in this regard. Indeed, a reoccurring theme amongst women who grew up on farms was that their sexual education was facilitated “behind the barn” through their observations, and subsequent questioning of, the breeding of the farm livestock.17
The post-World War II Canadian medical profession gained a new tool to “know” the body in new ways—Freudian-based psychoanalysis. This new tool had a profound impact on the way that the female body was medically perceived. Though Freudian psychoanalysis had been around since the turn of the century, it gained legitimacy in the post-war period as its efficacy in dealing with veterans’ postwar stress was determined.18 This adoption of Freudian concepts allowed the Canadian medical community to make new connections between the mind and body. This further pushed medical body politics, especially its view of the female, to embody ideals of masculinity and femininity within a heterosexual binary.
As the last vestiges of the Victorian image of the sexless woman were swept away and sexuality was seen as normal and even healthy, there was an attempt to contain female sexuality within marriage. The medical community suggested that only abnormal women expressed sexuality outside of marriage or were unwilling or unable to express sexuality within a marriage. Thus, a connection between mind and society was made. If a woman was having abnormal sexual symptoms it meant that she was transgressing societal boundaries and the transgressions had to be addressed as part of the cure. In this sense the contributors to the CMAJ were able to embody femininity—to make femininity flesh.
For example, in a 1958 article reporting on a study of women suffering from Premenstrual Tension Syndrome (PTS), doctors J.N. Fortin, E.D. Wittkower and F. Kalz directly linked the symptoms of PTS to their patients’ supposed inability to embrace their femininity and adjust to their feminine role. In the study they compared women who did not have PTS (the “control group”) to women who experienced symptoms such as “tension, irritability, depression, anxiety…swelling of the abdomen and limbs, itching, thirst, and various tendencies to migraine, asthma and epilepsy.”19 They concluded that PTS was often a response to guilt over sexuality and resentment at being a woman. They noted: “the control group demonstrated a better acceptance of the feminine role and of the inevitable restrictions imposed on a girl; a reaction of pride to the menarche with emphasis on the positive aspects of femininity; a dependant relationship to the mother with fewer hostile features; and a better sexual adjustment.”20 In contrast, those in the experimental group who had PTS were unable to embrace their femininity, resented their mothers, and envied boys’ freedom from both social and biological restrictions. Further, the experimental group girls often came from homes where marital discord was common, apparently signalling their mothers’ inability to fulfil their own feminine roles (according to the researchers).
Many CMAJ contributors viewed pregnancy and motherhood as the culmination of a woman’s journey to biological and emotional maturity. Daniel Cappon, in a 1954 article, argued that “pregnancy crowns a female psychosexual evolution.... Though ambivalence may exist, there is triumph of life over death, of motherhood over self-preservation, of motherliness over sexuality, of passivity and submissiveness over aggression and of femininity over masculinity.”21 He continued that the proper motivation for a woman to get pregnant was not only to show love and gratitude to her husband—by providing biological proof of their healthy heterosexual relationship—but also “to prove her womanhood.”22 That is, by having a baby a woman could provide the world with physical proof of her normality, fulfil her gender role, and generally demonstrate the viability of her marriage and her own psychosexual maturity. This privileged normality was only extended to women in heterosexual marriages. Pregnancies that occurred out of wedlock or as a result of adultery were pathologized in direct opposition to “normal” pregnancies. Instead of indicating the strength of a marriage and a woman’s psychosexual maturity, these abnormal pregnancies demonstrated that the mother was “an essentially frigid, masculine protesting Western woman…who has exhibited class striving and arrogance, rejection of family and aggressive emancipation,”23 or that she had marital conflicts and was generally, “unable to accept femininity.”24 These abnormalities would make themselves known by physical symptoms such as extreme nausea during pregnancy, intermittent or absent orgasm during heterosexual relations, a problematic relationship with the father of her child, and resentment of, or disconnection with, her own parents.25
Crucially, this embodied femininity did not translate to embodied masculinity in the CMAJ’s complementary male body politic. Indeed, if a woman’s husband refused, or was unable to fulfill, his male gender role it was usually she, not he, who suffered. His gender transgressions were written on her body. This demonstrates how, for the contributors to the CMAJ, the female body politic did not, in a sense, belong to itself. The female body politic was a familial body placed, like a keystone, in the centre of the family body politic both supporting it and reflecting its inadequacies. In a 1952 article on postpartum psychosis, Doctor F.E. McNair presented two cases in which he directly attributed a patient’s psychosis to their husband’s inability to fulfil his masculine role, thus forcing the woman outside of their normal feminine role. According to McNair, Mrs. J.G.’s psychosis was caused, and later exacerbated, by her husband’s inability to be a “man.” McNair noted in the case records that, “while pregnant she routed a thug’s attack on herself and her husband.” Later, “as her illness developed momentum her husband became indecisive, did not assume responsibility and her elder sister took over.” In another case study, Mrs. D.G. was the “war bride of a husband whose mother still dominated him.”26 In both cases the patient’s husband was unable to fulfil the requirements of his gender role—whether through the application of physical force to protect his wife and unborn child, take control of the household, or even simply to govern the other women in his life. This inability, according to the physician, forced the wife into a more masculine role, causing, or contributing to, her illness.
In her role as keystone of the embodied nuclear family, it was the wife and mother who was supposed to make adjustments to her body and whose role it was to preserve, as much as possible, the gendered and sexual normality within the family. Many decisions that affected individual women’s bodies were deemed familial decisions by the CMAJ body politic. This can be most clearly seen in cases of birth control. In some ways the CMAJ was very progressive in its attitudes towards birth control. Most contributors argued that despite the fact that mechanical or pharmaceutical birth control was illegal, taking birth control actually strengthened a marriage by allowing the couple to maintain physical closeness, free from the fear of maternity or potential pregnancy. Indeed, many contributors to the CMAJ argued that without birth control the stress on married couples would cause marital breakdown. In a 1963 editorial, the editor argued, “complete continence in a happily married couple can be reasonably looked upon as an impossibility” and “fear of pregnancy produce[s] much human misery, ill-health, marital tension and unhappiness.”27 However, any limitation of fertility was to be a joint decision and many articles and editorials warned doctors that to prescribe birth control without the husband’s consent was potentially to deprive him of his right to progeny within marriage, which raised both moral and even potentially legal complications for the doctor.28 Further, when CMAJ contributors reported on trials of different types of birth control, including the Pill, the feelings of the husband about the wife’s reaction to the particular kind of birth control and his comfort level with using it was included and contributed to their overall assessment of the method. For example, in a 1965 trial of the acceptance of oral contraceptives for married women the questionnaire included the line “Husband’s opinion of the method.”29 In a 1966 study of intrauterine devices (IUDs) the authors noted that “the husband of one woman suffered a penile hematoma after being ‘stabbed’ by the tail of the device. The woman’s coil was removed because of alleged excessive vaginal bleeding and cramps. We were unable to determine whether she actually had these symptoms or whether her husband had insisted that the coil be removed.”30
In contrast to birth control, which reaffirmed the familial body, abortion was usually framed as the result of a selfish desire on the part of the woman and thus a decision she made on her own, divorced from family considerations. Though there were articles suggesting that abortion laws be relaxed within the CMAJ, during this time they focused on placing more control over the decision whether an abortion was appropriate into the hands of doctors. This measure was to help protect doctors from prosecution and was not a call for women’s right to access safe abortion on demand.31 According to Dr. E. Zarfas in a 1958 article “Psychiatric Indications of Termination of Pregnancy,” women who sought out therapeutic abortion were usually engaged in problematic marriages where their own gender inversion was the main cause of the problem. Dr. Zarfas diagnosed several of the patients in his study as being overly masculine, describing one patient, a German immigrant, as an “aggressive, demanding, intolerant woman who hated her husband.”32 In a 1963 letter to the editor C.P. Harrison argued that women who wanted to be rid of a pregnancy were divorced from their inherent femininity and maternity: “surely Nazi Germany lives in memory as an example. Sacrifice the weak to the strong is the cry—a strange travesty of motherlove.”33
In addition to giving up full control over her own body, the wife and mother, in her role as family keystone, was expected to adjust herself to maintain sexual normality within the family. In 1960 three Montreal doctors published an article entitled “Impact of Sudden Severe Disablement of the Father Upon the Family” wherein they traced several families in which the husband and father had had a debilitating accident or sudden onset of a disabling disease. They argued that the importance of understanding such family dynamics was paramount to treatment, as “when a person marries he and his wife enter marriage with a series of conscious and unconscious needs which they expect to be fulfilled through interaction with each other.”34 These conscious and unconscious needs included the discipline of bodies to the heterosexual model, which supported the male as breadwinner and the female as homemaker and the preservation of masculinity and femininity derived from that binary. The authors ultimately concluded the families that attempted to maintain these gender roles after the husband was incapacitated were the most successful in the long term. For example, in “Family C” the mother, according to the authors, showed “remarkable understanding, skill and tact…” by taking a job only while her husband was too ill to work and quitting it as soon as he was well enough to return to work, noting that “she said ‘we have to let him feel that we are dependent on him.’ ”35 The authors concluded the article by suggesting: “By and large, one had the impression that families in which the respective roles of father and mother were clearly defined functioned better than those in which some uncertainty in role functioning existed.”36 It should also be noted that in cases where the roles could not be not maintained because of a long-term disability, the wife and mother was criticized if she tried to take on patriarchal authority in addition to her new role as family breadwinner.
It is clear that some sense of responsibility over the maintenance of gender roles did transfer to the individual bodies of the women I interviewed. When asked to identify how their marriages were different or similar to marriages of today’s generation and what advice they might have for women getting married, many echoed the sentiment of the wife in “Family C.” Alice Hall, when asked what she thought was the secret to a long, happy marriage answered: “well I think you have to let the husband be the boss. Because it makes them feel stronger.”37 Margaret Brown compared her two daughters-in-law noting that, while both were very clever, only one of the women was clever enough to still allow her husband arenas within the marriage to demonstrate his capability. “I mean it’s a different world. But I still think ideally boys need to see some sort of a male role model Dad making certain decisions…. You see I have a husband that can fix anything and all that…and I’ve seen [my sons] look with admiration at Dad and I think that’s probably good.”38
There is a key difference, however, between the CMAJ body politic and the views of individual women whom I interviewed. In the CMAJ a woman who took over a man’s normal role was immediately pathologized as abnormal. Her gender role inversion, even if inadvertent, could cause mental and physical anguish for both her and the rest of the family; the most concerning outcome was that a dominant and overbearing mother would actually cause her male children to become homosexuals.39 However, the interviewees’ decisions to allow their husbands to “be the boss,” or at least feel like he was, was not an attempt to prove their normality; nor did they blame themselves or other women if they failed to live up to that standard. For them it was an eminently practical, even empowered, situation that helped to maintain peace in their marriages. Moreover, all of the women were still able to assert themselves to their husbands in cases where they felt the issue was too important to relinquish control, such as if they believed their husband was drinking too much, in cases concerning their children, and also in cases of infidelity.40 Thus, this process of allowing their husband to feel like the boss was clearly not a mere imposition of patriarchal will or total maternal sacrifice—it was a negotiation. There was only one case in which a woman chose to sacrifice her own body to preserve that of her husband without his knowledge. Fiona Shortt was told by her family doctor that her husband’s blood pressure was dangerously high and that she should go to work to take some of the financial strain off of him. She was also told to keep him from worrying too much. “I saved him…. I was told not to let him worry. If there were any problems with the school I dealt with it. I dealt with my children. I never took problems to him and I just did whatever I could. And then we moved to Vancouver and I went out to work and my son said to me ‘please mum don’t go out to work.’…[but] better that I be a working wife than a working widow.” This strain eventually manifested itself on Fiona’s body; she collapsed from nervous exhaustion and suffered a miscarriage.41
There is also some evidence of the efficacy of the medical familial body in terms of birth control. All the women interviewed used some form of birth control during their reproductive lives and most used a few different kinds as new innovations such as the Pill became available. Several of the women did make the decision, with their husbands, to take birth control and modified their use of it according to his wishes. In some cases, like that of Mary Johnston, there was a direct transfer of the medical discourse to her through her doctor. Mary, who married an older man, was told to go on birth control to protect her husband’s health since he was in his fifties when their last child was born. The doctor was concerned that the stress of having more children would make her husband ill and it was not fair to expect that of him. Up until that point Mary, a Roman Catholic, had been using the rhythm method to limit their fertility.42 In other cases the use and modification of birth control came from both the doctor and the husband. Joyce Martin’s doctors modified her birth control to suit her husband by cutting off the tail of her IUD because it bothered her husband during intercourse. This caused problems later when another doctor tried to remove it.43 However, in most cases the women I interviewed went to get birth control on their own and did not remember the doctor asking if their husband approved. The women’s main concern was preventing unwanted pregnancy; STDs did not concern them, since only “nasty” people had STDs. Perhaps since an unwanted pregnancy would affect their bodies most, especially in cases of premarital sex, it seems to have been a responsibility undertaken primarily by the women.44
Only one woman out of the eighteen interviewed admitted to having an abortion. Yet her story is particularly interesting as it directly counteracts the images of female selfishness presented by the CMAJ body politic, fitting instead with the idea of the familial female body seen in CMAJ birth control discourses. For Margaret Brown, obtaining an illegal abortion was a sacrifice that she made for her family and one that she and her husband went through together as a couple. Margaret explained that her husband, who originally had a career installing television antennas, had to quit because of a back injury. He returned to school to train to be a teacher and Margaret went to work to make ends meet. As she tells it, “I worked for a real estate company…. I was a shorthand typist and bookkeeper and have been for all my working life. And anyway suddenly I found out I was pregnant. And we [her and her husband] cried a lot but I cried and I said ‘you know what this’ll be the end of the dream. You’ll have to stop what you’re doing.’ ”45 A short time later Margaret found out from a male colleague at work the name of a doctor who would perform illegal abortions. She went to a secret office with her husband and had the procedure and described the aftereffects. “It was worse than having a baby. Oh God! Cause then you lose it. That was when I lost it and oh we did cry. We both cried. I wish I had never done it. But I had no choice! It was either that or [he] I don’t know what he would have done for a living. He had no other skills.”46 Margaret went on to explain that both she and her husband would have liked to have had another child had the circumstances been different, and that for her having the abortion was something that she undertook out of love for her husband and concern for the entire family’s well-being. Though not ashamed of the decision she said, “I feel regretful though. I’m sorry I had to do it.”47
Both Fiona Shortt’s miscarriage narrative and Margaret Brown’s abortion narrative demonstrate imperfect reflections of the CMAJ body politic through subtle modifications to the hegemonic script. Though Fiona acquiesced to her determined role, placing her body in the service of maintaining her husband’s health, this gender role alignment did not have the successful outcome of a return to health for the whole family. Instead, the strain of such a sacrifice caused Shortt to miscarry and the loss of her child is a clear deviation from the image of the heterosexual family as a stronghold. Further, Brown, though she accepted the narrative of the familial female body, applied that script in a way the medical community deemed inappropriate. Her husband’s involvement in the decision to get an abortion and in facilitating that abortion repurposes the familial body discourse, and counteracts the image of the abortive mother as selfish.
Another distortion appears when the maternal CMAJ body politic is compared to the individual maternal body. Given the importance of maternity to the “wholeness” of the CMAJ female body politic it would seem natural that any issues of infertility, especially when due to the loss of actual physical reproductive ability rather than situational infertility, would be a major event in a woman’s life. However, this turned out not to be true. Two of the women interviewed had faced damage to their reproductive organs. Edith Small had an ectopic pregnancy which destroyed one of her fallopian tubes and reduced her ability to conceive. However, though Edith Small describes the event as physically traumatic, repeatedly recounting the “terrible excruciating pain,” when asked about the psychological trauma of losing a fallopian tube and the subsequent reduction in her fertility so early in her marriage she replied, “well I was so glad to be out of this thing I mean it was pretty painful and pretty serious. I don’t really go into tizzies about things you know not unless it’s really necessary and I realized it was serious and they had told me that it might be difficult to get pregnant then you see cause they said usually it’s your best side that goes but I wasn’t in the habit of worrying about things ahead of time and look at it we had six pregnancies after that.”48 This attitude was echoed by both Nancy Wilson and Joyce Martin. Nancy had a cyst on her ovary which required that the ovary be removed and which ultimately delayed the conception of her two sons. However, this event was given only a passing mention as she discussed her children more broadly.49 Joyce Martin, who was treated for infertility of unknown causes, remembers the treatment as more of an inconvenience than a psychological trauma. “It was a pain because I had to use the thermometer. I had to keep a record and I had to collect my urine for twenty-four hours and take it back. We were living in Milestone and I was doctoring in Moose Jaw because we had been living in Moose Jaw when I was trying to get pregnant at first I just kept with the same doctor.”50
Why did the experience of infertility seem to be minor in the face of the cult of motherhood and the medical importance given to maternity for these women? The answer is perhaps because they all went on to have children, and in the case of Edith Small quite a large family. The CMAJ body politic was dissected from any past or future, forcing each medical event to be studied in isolation and potentially giving it a false sense of significance. In contrast, the women I interviewed, looking back upon their lives with the benefit of hindsight, saw these events as less significant parts of a larger health and sexuality spectrum. Further, in contrast to the embodied femininity of the CMAJ body politic, the women interviewed did not tie their own femininity to its biological signifiers. For both Edith Small and Nancy Wilson the loss of their biological functionality did not reflect itself negatively on their image of themselves as women.
This refusal to tie their femininity to biological signifiers, such as intact reproductive organs, highlights the other way in which the individual body distorted the generalized body politic within the CMAJ. One of the great ironies of the CMAJ body politic is that despite the fact that it was essentially an imaginary body and thus had no corporeality, its consistent state of illness forced it to be constantly embodied and aware of its own embodiment. Thus, though the “metabody” created by combining and de-individualizing all the singular corporeal bodies within the CMAJ had no corporeality, by their very nature each body within the CMAJ was ill and looking for relief. So each body was conscious of itself, the body’s feelings and reactions, by virtue of that illness. Further, because the CMAJ body politic is made up of ill bodies, the sense of embodiment is usually negative and associated with pain or loss of function. In contrast, the women interviewed rarely thought about their own bodies, and remained largely unaware of their embodiment except for key moments of their lives when they experienced a clear bodily change—and this was not always negative. For example, I noted above the prevalence of loss-of-virginity narratives amongst the interviewees—this is likely because both the pain and pleasure of that experience resonated over the years. Pregnancy, especially difficult symptoms such as nausea or the discomfort caused by trying to do house or farm work in a state of advanced pregnancy, was also one embodied experience that was usually clearly remembered and a feature of most interviews. However, the interviews also make it clear that these women, like most people, went about their day-to-day lives not being aware of their bodies at all. Aside from a few flashpoints their bodies merely served to house them as they went about their daily lives, and it is this lack of body consciousness that directly contradicts the medical body politic’s image of the consistently ill embodied woman.
Despite these distortions, many of the interviewed women did reflect the CMAJ female body politic in one crucial way: they desired to be seen as sexually normal. Though their definitions of normal did not always directly align with that of the CMAJ body politic, it is clear there was some transference of the importance of sexual normality, which manifested itself in an aversion to being seen as different. When asked about the frequency of sexual contact between themselves and their husbands, most of the women replied with some variation of “probably average.” When pressed to define what a normal amount of sexual intercourse was for a married couple, most were uncomfortable saying a firm number and instead looked to me to give them a suggestion of what was usual.51 Jean Simpson originally answered that she and her husband had sex about four times a week but when she discovered that was higher than average she was anxious to change her answer. “Maybe I’m closer to two than four I don’t know. I was going to say two to three and then I thought four covers the whole thing…. I think that’s another myth that one has; this idea that if you’re happily married you’re sort of having sex all the time, yeah, but nobody tells you what is an average amount.”52 Thus, though the interviewed women did not fully accept the idea of embodied femininity, they did internalize the post-war discourse of the importance of normality which the CMAJ body politic certainly enforced.
The final distortion between the CMAJ body politic and the individuality of the interviewees’ bodies can be seen in the relationship of those bodies to the medical community itself. Within the CMAJ the image of doctor is fairly hard to pin down, as actual medical men and women rarely enter the narrative of patient care. Clinical case reports, which made up a majority of the content, were written deliberately with an air of detachment deemed appropriate to scientific enterprise. This detachment and hesitancy to write themselves into the narrative of patient care projects the image of a faceless and monolithic medical community working to bring people to health but not really interacting with them on any personal level. Indeed, even when the focus of an article or an editorial was the doctor him- or herself, the image of detached objectivity was maintained. For example, in a 1966 editorial on doctors’ relationships with their own wives the editor noted that, “the doctor, it is postulated, has been giving direction to others all day and suppressing his own emotional feelings, and he feels unable to switch to a two-way and emotionally tinged communications system with his wife…. The doctor is expected by most patients to wear a mantle of omnipotence and may therefore come to feel that way.”53
However, individual doctors with whom the interviewees engaged counteracted this image of the detached doctor focused only on the patient’s body. Brown’s story of the doctor who performed her illegal abortion was not the only case of doctors forced by personality or situation to change the patient-doctor script. The most common reason for this deviation was the difficulties associated with rural practice. Verna King’s doctor was forced to transport her son, very ill with bronchial pneumonia, in his personal car from their rural farm in Manitoba to Winnipeg during a terrible snowstorm. After hitting a snowbank he was forced to drive the rest of the way holding the driver’s side door closed because it was damaged.54 This highly personalized image of the doctor driving while holding his door shut, as well as the fact that the doctor, who had the only car in the area, used his personal transportation to move a patient counteracts the image of the medical profession as cold and faceless. Similarly, Joyce Martin’s interaction with her doctor was mostly over the telephone because her farm was so isolated. They often worked together to find home remedies or to use what medicine she had on hand to treat her family in order to save a costly and time-consuming trip into town to see him: “He knew our lifestyle. My husband had a ringworm in haying season and I phoned him and I said ‘listen, I have some salve here that we use on the calves; can I use it on my husband?’ He said ‘well, read off the ingredients’ and he said ‘yeah’ he said ‘it might work.’ ”55 Just as the individual bodies of the interviewed women counteracted the truncated and silenced body parts that made up the CMAJ body politic, the relationship between individual women and their doctors defied the image of a medical profession focused solely on bringing those ill parts to health. The locality of these narratives further breaks down the false image of national urban hegemony presented by the CMAJ in its very structure. Each clinical article published within the journal was identified by city of origin, and the placement of teaching and experimental hospitals meant that urban spaces were overwhelmingly overrepresented. Thus, the prescriptive discourse within the CMAJ usually assumed urbanity, including the near proximity of hospitals and specialists, when suggesting avenues of treatment. However, when rural doctors were faced with treating rural patients the urbanized body politic did not always transfer.
Though many Canadians view the time period making up Canada’s baby boom as a time of innocence and social cohesion, studies of the body politics responsible for promoting this image of hegemony, as well as the individual bodies they were meant to influence and reflect, demonstrate the fragility of categories of “normal.” This is not to say that the women interviewed did not benefit enormously from their even-partial reflection of dominant body politics, though these benefits can be hard to identify. Primarily they were able to live their lives out in the open and, though their heterosexual bodies were often pathologized within the CMAJ, to a certain degree they were protected enough by their veneer of normality to move within fairly wide boundaries of actual behaviour. In contrast, bodies within the CMAJ identified as deviant, such as homosexual bodies, were subject to much more surveillance and thus much more limited.56 One of the reasons for this comparative room to manoeuvre is that the medical community’s body politic was one of several sources of “normal” jockeying for position during this time period, and the women interviewed could pick and choose variations of normal from their medical community, their religious community and from the realm of popular culture. At the same time, it is clear that many of the elements of the CMAJ body politic did transfer onto the fleshy bodies of the interviewees. Most accepted, at least partially, a division of gender roles that privileged the male head of household and worked to maintain an image of his authority. Further, the general desire of most of the women to be seen as sexually normal demonstrates the power of the normal-abnormal binary.
Despite these elements of body politic–corporeal body congruity, distortions from the “perfect” body politic demonstrated by the individual corporeal bodies of the women I interviewed argues for the need to examine the resistances of not only those who were completely disenfranchised by hegemonic body politics but also those who reflected that body, albeit imperfectly. The bodies of the women interviewed did, though usually passively, disrupt medical claims to be the sole centre of knowledge about their bodies as well as attempts by the Canadian medical profession to make their bodies into living embodiments of femininity and familial sacrifice. Even Fiona Shortt and Margaret Brown, who in many ways followed dominant scripts for female interaction with the medical community and society, changed those scripts in ways which significantly disrupted their hegemonic power.
This form of largely passive resistance is not only more difficult to see than the active denunciations of completely disenfranchised groups; its impact is also more subtle and less effective in dismantling the dominant medical body politic—at least in the short term. Indeed, many of the women refused to be identified as feminists or “women’s libbers” and identified those labels with extreme action and being “anti-men” or even “crazy.”57 Yet through the subtle distortions they made in the mirror of the body politic, the connections between the baby boom era and the activist feminist era of the 1970s become clear. Often this was in the way that they raised their own sons and daughters, subtly rewriting gender scripts to include housework for their sons, narratives of premarital co-habitation in their children or grandchildren, and new roles for the female body. Ruth Bell consciously discarded narratives of female innocence and outside authority over the female body when she took the time to personally teach her daughter about her own body in a way that she had never been taught.58 Like water finding small imperfections in a stone wall over time, the minute resistances of the baby boom women would weaken the structure of hegemonic “normality” and ultimately aided in its destruction and reconstruction by subsequent generations.
1 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
2 Mary Louise Adams, The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Mona Lee Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Valerie J. Korinek, Roughing it in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). For works that examine this time period in an American context see, Beth L. Bailey, Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Wini Breines, Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Jessica Weiss, To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
3 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980) 55–57.
4 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 34–5.
5 The archival data demonstrates that the CMAJ also believed themselves to be the dominant voice of the profession and actively attempted throughout this time period to increase their scope of influence. For example, they gave free copies of the CMAJ to returning medical veterans of World War II and medical missionaries (LAC, Canadian Medical Association fonds, R3676-0-6-E, Microfilm reel M-7487). Their assertions to authority were also supported by the fact that throughout this time period they continuously raised the rates for advertising within the journal. As the managing editor reported in 1953, “Three advances in two and a half years totalling more than 50% have been accepted by our clients remarkably satisfactorily—all of which bears testimony to the position which our journal occupies as the medical medium of choice in Canada.” (emphasis in original—Canadian Medical Association fonds, R3676-0-6-E, Microfilm reel M-7491).
6 These oral histories were gathered according to the guidelines provided by, and with the approval of, the University of Saskatchewan’s and the Tri-Council’s Ethics Boards. The interviews were solicited via a number of invitations through public organizations such as seniors’ centres throughout western Canada. These invitations called for women who married between the years 1946 and 1966 who were willing to discuss their sexual histories with me, and only those interested were contacted. These interviews were open-ended and varied in length from half an hour to three hours. All interviewees were given pseudonyms and all identifying details were removed from the transcripts.
7 This national drive to promote and protect the heterosexual nuclear family is not only demonstrated in the secondary literature but also by the number of national commissions and conferences dedicated to the family. One of the largest of such endeavours was the Vanier Institute of the Family endowed by the Governor-General and his wife in 1965 to study and provide assistance to the family unit. The medical community as well as the religious community and the educational community were involved in the Vanier Institute a great deal in both creating and implementing its discourse and programs (LAC, Vanier Institute of the Family fonds, R2782-0-4-E, 1943–1978).
8 “Crises in the Family,” Canadian Medical Association Journal [hereafter CMAJ] 15 September 1959, 494.
9 Of course no source is ever totally monolithic and the CMAJ is no exception. There were calls for tolerance to those people who stepped outside the boundaries of normality such as unwed mothers or homosexuals but they were by far in the minority.
10 Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (New York: Routlege, 1996).
11 Gatens, Imaginary Bodies, 10–18.
12 For examples of gay and lesbian resistance to the heteronormativity of the baby boom era, see Brett Beeymn Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Historians (New York: Routledge, 1997); Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Heather Murray, Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
13 “National Health Week,” CMAJ, January 1950, 87; “In the Doctor’s Hands,” CMAJ, February 1952, 188; Robert R. Robinson, “Public Relations Prescription for M.D.’s,” CMAJ, December 1953, 649; M. B. Etziony, “Repetitio Ad Nauseam?” CMAJ, 15 December 1955, 992; L. W. Holmes, “The Doctor Speaks,” CMAJ, 1 March 1956, 396; L. W. Holmes, “Medicine on the Air,” 1 April 1956, 571; L. W. Holmes, “Doctors on Camera,” CMAJ, 15 April 1956, 652; “Is This You Doctor? Or Is Your Halo Getting Tight?” CMAJ, 15 January 1957, 146; L. W. Holmes,“Preventive PR,” CMAJ, 1 February 1957, 229; H. D. Baker, “Doctor-Patient Relationship or Doctor-Public Relationship,” CMAJ, 15 January 1958, 129; Hereford Still, “Medical Broadcasting,” CMAJ, 1 March 1958, 369; “Medicine and the Mass Media,” CMAJ, 15 May 1958, 786; “Doctors on Television,” CMAJ, 1 June 1958, 866; “Teenage Morals,” CMAJ, 21 October, 1961, 952; Raymond Miller, “The Facts of Life,” CMAJ, 15 January 1966, 147; G. W. Piper, “Facts of Life,” CMAJ, 12 February 1966, 352; W. E. Armour, “Sex Education in the Schools: The Doctor’s Role,” CMAJ, 3 December 1966, 1212.
14 Margaret Brown (pseudonym), personal interview, June 27, 2010.
15 Ruth Bell (pseudonym), personal interview, September 21, 2010.
16 Jessica Bateman (pseudonym), personal interview, July 19, 2010.
17 Joyce Martin (pseudonym), personal interview, December 2, 2010.
18 Nathan G. Hale (Jr.) also notes this in The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans 1917–1985 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4–5. This was also noted within the CMAJ, see: “Let Us Be Practical About the Psychoneuroses,” CMAJ, August 1949, 102.
19 J.N. Fortin, E.D. Wittkower and F. Kalz, “A Psychosomatic Approach to the Pre-Menstrual Tension Syndrome: A Preliminary Report,” CMAJ, 15 December, 1958, 978.
20 Ibid., 980.
21 Daniel Cappon, “Some Psychodynamic Aspects of Pregnancy,” CMAJ, February 1954, 148.
22 Ibid., 149.
23 Ibid., 153.
24 M. Straker, “Psychological Factors During Pregnancy and Childbirth,” CMAJ, May 1954, 512.
25 For abnormal pregnancy symptoms see, N.W. Philpott and Christina F. Goodwin, “Case of the Unmarried Woman and Her Child,” CMAJ, September 1946, 294; Cappon, “Some Psychodynamic Aspects of Pregnancy,” 147–154; Straker, “Psychological Factors During Pregnancy and Childbirth,” 510–513; E. Zarfas, “Psychiatric Indications of the Termination of Pregnancy,” CMAJ, 15 August 1958, 230–236.
26 F.E. McNair, “Psychosis Occurring Postpartum: Analysis of 34 Cases,” CMAJ, December 1952, 638–639.
27 “Oral Contraceptives,” CMAJ, 10 August 1963, 270.
28 In one article doctors were warned that they could be involved in divorce cases and risked being sued by the husband if they did not obtain his consent. G.P.R. Tallin, “The Legal Implications of the Non-Therapeutic Practices of Doctors,” CMAJ, 4 August 1962, 210.
29 “The Emotional Responses of Married Women Receiving Oral Contraceptives,” CMAJ, 5 June 1965, 1207.
30 C.A. Douglas Ringrose, “Clinical Experience with Margulies Intrauterine Contraceptive Device,” CMAJ, 2 July 1966, 15.
31 J.J. Lederman, “The Doctor, Abortion, and the Law: A Medicolegal Dilemma,” CMAJ, 4 August 1962, 216; Tallin, “The Legal Implications of the Non-Therapeutic Practices of Doctors,” 207; Walter Simpson, “The Doctor, Abortion, and the Law,” CMAJ, 13 October 1962, 821; C.P. Harrison, “The Issue of Legalized Abortion,” CMAJ, 9 February 1963, 329; S.G. Stern, “The Issue of Legalized Abortion,” CMAJ, 27 April 1963, 899; “Abortion,” CMAJ, 28 September 1963, 676.
32 Zarfas, “Psychiatric Indications of the Termination of Pregnancy,” 30-236.
33 Harrison, “The Issue of Legalized Abortion” CMAJ, 26 January 1963, 329.
34 R. Castro De La Mata, G. Gringras and E.D. Wittkower, “Impact of Sudden, Severe Disablement of the Father Upon the Family,” CMAJ, 14 May 1960, 1015.
35 Ibid., 1016.
36 Ibid., 1018.
37 Alice Hall (pseudonym), personal interview, June 28, 2010.
38 Margaret Brown (pseudonym), personal interview, June 27, 2010.
39 Marvin Wellman, “Overt Homosexuality with Spontaneous Remission,” CMAJ, 15 August 1956, 273.
40 Florence Anderson (pseudonym), personal interview, September 20, 2010; Jessica Bateman, (pseudonym), personal interview, July 19, 2010; Ruth Bell (pseudonym), personal interview, September 21, 2010; Karen Rand (pseudonym), personal interview, July 7, 2010; Fiona Shortt (pseudonym), personal interview, July 5, 2010; Diane West (pseudonym), personal interview, July 19, 2010.
41 Fiona Shortt (pseudonym), personal interview, July 5, 2010.
42 Mary Johnston (pseudonym), personal interview, April 19, 2010.
43 Joyce Martin (pseudonym), personal interview, December 2, 2010.
44 Jean Simpson (pseudonym), personal interview, July 5, 2010.
45 Margaret Brown (pseudonym), personal interview, June 27, 2010.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Edith Small (pseudonym) personal interview, September 19, 2010.
49 Nancy Wilson (pseudonym), personal interview, April 19, 2010.
50 Joyce Martin (pseudonym), personal interview, December 2, 2010.
51 Jean Simpson (pseudonym), personal interview, July 5, 2010.
52 Ibid.
53 “The Doctor and His Wife,” CMAJ, 8 January 1966, 93. There were other examples of doctor’s dealing with the expected detached clinical image including a flurry of articles about doctors and public relations as the question of universal healthcare in Canada came to a head. Ian MacNeill, “Is the Profession Misunderstood?” CMAJ, January 1952, 79; “In the Doctor’s Hands,” 188; A.D. Kelly, “Why Bother With Public Relations?” CMAJ, May 1952, 493; Robert. R. Robinson, “Public Relations Prescription for MDs” December 1953; L.W. Holmes, “Enter the Patient,” CMAJ, 1 December 1955; Etziony, “Repetitio Ad Nauseam?,” L.W. Holmes, “The Doctor and Community Relations,” CMAJ, 15 January 1956, 158; L.W. Holmes, “The Doctor and the Press,” CMAJ, 1 February 1956, 224; Kenneth G. Gray,“Sexual Deviation,” CMAJ, 15 February 1956; L.W. Holmes, “Medicine on the Air,” CMAJ, 1 April 1956, 571; L.W. Holmes, “Doctors on Camera,” F.B. Bowman, “Public Attitudes Towards Doctors,” CMAJ, 1 January 1957, 64; “Is This You, Doctor?,” 146; L.W. Holmes, “Preventive PR,” CMAJ, 1 February 1957, 229; Francis T. Hodges, “Medicine’s Seven Deadly Sins,” CMAJ, 15 April 1957, 660; L.W. Holmes,“PR Aid For Doctor’s Offices,” CMAJ 1 October 1957, 707; Harry Baker, “Doctor-Patient Relationship or Doctor-Public Relationship,” CMAJ 15 January 1958, 128; “Medicine and the Mass Media,” CMAJ 15 May 1958, 786; “Doctors on Television,” CMAJ 1 June 1958, 866.
54 Verna King (pseudonym), personal interview, November 25, 2010.
55 Joyce Martin (pseudonym), personal interview, December 2, 2010.
56 See for example, S.R. Laycock, “Homosexuality—A Mental Hygiene Problem,” CMAJ September 1950, 245; B. Kanee and C.L. Hunt, “Homosexuality as a Source of Venereal Disease,” CMAJ August 1951, 138; William R. Thomson, “Homosexuality,” CMAJ 1 November 1955, 760; Marvin Wellman, “Overt Homosexuality with Spontaneous Remission,” CMAJ 15 August, 1956, 273; William R. Thomson, “Homosexuality,” CMAJ 1 November 1957, 901; P. G. Thomson, “Sexual Deviation,” CMAJ 1 March 1959, 381; Ian K. Bond and Harry C. Hutchinson, “Application of Reciprocal Inhibition Therapy to Exhibitionism,” CMAJ 2 July 1960, 23; John F.H. Stewart, “Living with Homosexuality,” CMAJ 1 September 1962, 517.
57 Margaret Brown (pseudonym), personal interview, June 27, 2010; Alice Hall (pseudonym), personal interview, June 28, 2010.
58 Ruth Bell (pseudonym), personal interview, September 21, 2010.