Sarah Lias Ceide, Lehrstuhl für Zeitgeschichte, Univ. Heidelberg

Time: 25.-26.06.2026
Venue: Univ. Heidelberg
Proposals by: 22.02.2026

The international workshop seeks to develop nuanced, plural understandings of „progress“ and „modernity“ in regard to maternity in a global context by moving beyond their interpretation as Western-centric, future-oriented, top-down phenomena. In shifting attention away from obstetrics as a medical discipline as well as from physicians and medically trained midwives as the sole carriers of authoritative knowledge, the workshop seeks to foreground actors and discourses situated outside conventional medical and clinical settings. Which alternative imaginaries of „modern“ pregnancy and childhood existed in the „long“ twentieth century alongside the ones propagated by Western obstetrics?
From the late eighteenth century onward, pregnancy and childbirth came to occupy a central place in discourses centered around the notion of progress. With the Enlightenment began a process of male-led scientization and institutionalization of pregnancy and childbirth which, by the late nineteenth century, had seen the establishment of obstetrics as a distinct field of medical specialization in most Western countries. As a consequence, the concepts of maternity – here meaning the biological process of pregnancy and childbirth that “makes” a mother, not to be confused with motherhood-, progress, and modernity became increasingly and intrinsically intertwined. This interdependence has long been reflected in the scholarly literature. Historians have traced the emergence of obstetrics and gynecology as a “man’s world” to a progress-driven and increasingly imbalanced antagonism between traditional female midwifery and male-dominated obstetrics from the late eighteenth century onward, also highlighting the biopolitical dimensions of institutionalized childbirth within the broader medicalization of the female body (Metz-Becker, 1997; Labouvie, 1999; Duden, 2002; Aschauer, 2020). More recently, the role of Western models of pregnancy and childbirth in colonial and postcolonial contexts beyond the Global North has been increasingly emphasized (Hunt, 1999; DeBarros, 2014; Hugon, 2020). Read more and source … (Web)