The Department of Gender Studies
presents
Paula Michaels:
"Lamaze: The Surprising Cold War History of Natural Childbirth"
11 a.m., 3 Febr. 2015, Nador 9, MB Popper Room
In the 1970s "natural childbirth" was in vogue in Europe and North America. The name of French obstetrician Fernand Lamaze was synonymous with this way of giving birth. The Lamaze method, also known as psychoprophylaxis, used patterned breathing and conscious relaxation to help women manage the pain of labor without reliance on drugs. But the method's roots lay in the Soviet Union, where in 1951 Lamaze witnessed a birth using psychoprophylaxis. Paula Michaels reconstructs the surprising Cold War story of how psychoprophylaxis cross the Iron Curtain and what this history can tell us about knowledge transfer and ideas about pronatalism, female psychology, and women's empowerment in maternity care.
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Paula Michaels a Senior Lecturer in modern history at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). She is the author of C*urative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin's Central Asia* (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), which won the Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. In 2014 she published *Lamaze: An International HIstory* (Oxford Univtersity Press), which was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's History Award and received honourable mention for the Heldt Prize.