The History of Pregnancy Advice with Brittany Clair

In the 21st century, soon-to-be parents are inundated with information and advice everywhere they look, but are often limited in their perspective on how to think through the advice.

If you have questions like what to stay away from, what to eat, what not to eat and how to nourish your baby in pregnancy, you can quickly become filled with fear and uncertainty. Making sense of the overwhelming amount of guidelines available can become even more confusing as you uncover an array of contradictions in the information available.

We’re joined by writer Brittany Clair, who helps us to shed a light on where all of this information came from, why it exists and how it has impacted her own pregnancies.

In this episode, we’ll learn all about:

The history and origins of dietary recommendations for pregnancy and how they have changed over time
Notable points in history and what the recommendations were for movement and exercise
The role of misogyny, race and class in the history of recommendations
How various guidelines have impacted Brittany’s pregnancies

For confused pregnant mamas out there, this is not one to be missed!

Show Notes:

5:00 – “In the 21st century, we have unprecedented access to unprecedented amounts of information and I think that is really what’s driving this kind of stress and fear around

what we’re eating.”

13:00 – “The pregnancy dietary advice is subject to these ebbs and flows that we see with nutrition, where it’s kind of part of that broader field.”

16:00 – “When you’re inundated with all those ‘don’ts’, you internalize that and you worry.”

22:00 – “Generally the change over time has shifted towards a much more positive approach towards exercising and physical exertion during pregnancy and the fact that it has more benefits.”

26:00 – “The history of exercise and pregnancy is really closely related to these social cultural expectations about what women should be doing.”

27 – “We also have completely unrealistic expectations that we set for pregnant women and expect her to keep doing everything, keep her body looking a certain way and not slow down with work or with the home or her social life or anything else. And that’s a lot of pressure.”

Summary

In the 21st century, soon-to-be parents are inundated with information and advice everywhere they look, but they are often limited in their perspective on how to think through the advice.

We’re joined by writer Brittany Clair, who helps us to shed a light on where all of this information came from, why it exists and how it has impacted her own pregnancies.

In this episode, we’ll learn all about:

The history and origins of dietary recommendations for pregnancy and how they have changed over time
Notable points in history and what the recommendations were for movement and exercise
The role of misogyny, race and class in the history of recommendations
How various guidelines have impacted Brittany’s pregnancies

What are the history and origins of dietary recommendations for pregnancy and how have they changed over time?

What to eat and what not to eat is one of the first things that so many people think of when they find out they’re pregnant. All of a sudden, the seemingly simple decisions we’re so used to making every day are now much bigger and more overwhelming. The unlimited access to information available at our fingertips is the main driving force behind this kind of stress and fear around what we’re eating.

As far as medical history goes, however, this is by no means a new phenomenon. For as we have medical documents written, there are records of people telling pregnant women what to eat and what to avoid. This dates right back to the Middle Ages, where the idea existed that what a woman eats could somehow be related to miscarriage.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was an abundance of information coming from doctors and various different kinds of advice about what to eat and also about how to eat, which may sound familiar if you’ve been reading about the encouragement of small, frequent meals.

In previous generations, there were concerns about imprinting, and this related not only to food and what you ate, but also what you saw. There were ideas that if you saw certain things, it might somehow mark your child.

In the early 1900s especially, there were many different ideas about what pregnant women should or shouldn’t be eating, with some of them sounding pretty crazy. For example, there was a fruit-based diet where you only ate fruit to help keep your baby small, meaning it would lead to an easier delivery.

In the same period, there was virtually unanimous support for the idea of pregnant women drinking milk, with the recommended amount at four cups a day. Yes you did read that correctly!

The reason for this was because it really just coalesced with the broader social, political and cultural campaign to get Americans to drink milk during these decades. So they started with children, expanded to adults and they moved through the meals. There were radios, songs, different posters and public health advertisements trying to get people to drink more milk and you’ll see this reflected in the pregnancy literature as well.

Although there has always been information around dietary guidelines, one of the biggest changes has come in the way we receive this information. So years and years ago it was your community who informed you about guidelines and who gave you advice. Now those communities have expanded so much that those pieces of advice are coming from strangers and so the judgment can feel different. With the current onslaught of information online, we feel much more targeted in these assaults.

What are the notable points in history for the recommendations surrounding movement and exercise during pregnancy?

For most of the early 1900s and even before that in the Victorian period, the prevailing notion was to ‘take it easy’. Don’t over exert yourself, don’t do too much. You can still keep up with what you need to in your home though, just don’t go crazy. Considering it was mostly men making these directives up, that does seem rather convenient…

A pivotal moment came in the late 1960s, when there was an article published in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology. It essentially questioned why pregnant women shouldn’t over exert themselves and why there was anything wrong with being physically active to the point of fatigue. They could find no evidence that becoming fatigued is harmful. So this really turned things on its head and opened doors to start asking new questions.

Following this, in the 1980s the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists first issued its guidelines on physical activity during pregnancy, giving a further stamp of approval to go ahead and exercise.

Generally the change over time has shifted to a much more positive approach towards exercise and physical exertion during pregnancy and in fact shows that it has more benefits.

The history of exercise and pregnancy is really closely related to the social and cultural expectations about what women should be doing.

When it comes to historical changes in the ideal amount of activity according to the medical perspective, you begin to unpick some problematic threads which feature quite prominently. For example, in the late 1800s and early 1900s came the idea that you should really maximize your idle time, but that really only applied to white, wealthy, upper class women.

If you take it back a few decades earlier, it was the same men who thought that their wives needed to maximize idle time that also owned slaves. Slaves who were expected to continue working, often at grueling levels, throughout their pregnancies. So there have been a lot of racist ideas that have tied into the medical perspective throughout history, including the different expectations about different bodies that were incredibly discriminatory.

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More about Brittany

Brittany Clair is a researcher and writer with an M.A. and a Ph.D. in history, and specializes in the history of medicine.

Brittany worked as a professor teaching various medical history courses before she decided to turn her full attention to writing.

Inspired by her first pregnancy, Brittany found that despite there being a lot of really helpful books out there, there are also a lot of books that are condescending or that trivialize important issues. She wanted to write a pregnancy book for grownups and so her newest book, Carrying On, explores the history and science of pregnancy care in America.

Carrying On investigates the origins of prevailing health norms during pregnancy by exploring how issues such as morning sickness, weight gain, ultrasounds and induction have changed over the years. Brittany delves into questions like when women began taking prenatal vitamins and why and where the idea that pregnant ladies should ‘eat for two’ originated from.

If you want a book that offers a free exploration of topics that are probably on your pregnant mind, but don’t want to be told strict guidelines to follow, then this is certainly one for you to read.