Emotions, fertility, and the 1940s woman.
This paper looks at the ways that women's reproductive issues, particularly sterility, were explained during the post-World War II period. In the absence of a clear physiological basis, sterility was depicted as a product of psychoanalytic causes rooted in women's psychology. When women were yearning for a reason for their infertility and desperate for effective treatments, a psychoanalytic framework treated deficiencies lurking in the field of infertility. Framing infertility within a psychiatric construct influenced how women were treated by their medical specialists and how they were perceived by a public that expected married women to reproduce. An infertile woman was already considered a failure by society. By establishing her illness within the context of her own repressed desires, she was no longer an unwitting victim, but a culprit.
Program in the History and Ethics of Public Health, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, 722 West 168th Street, 9th Floor, New York, New York 10032, USA.
Randi Hutter
RH
Epstein
D000328:Adult; D001294:Attitude to Health / Q000208:ethnology; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D007247:Infertility, Female / Q000523:psychology* / Q000628:therapy; D008393:Marriage / Q000208:ethnology / Q000523:psychology; D011287:Prejudice; D011613:Psychotherapy; D012962:Sociology, Medical / Q000266:history*; D014481:United States