Introduction:Mothering, Medicine, and Health
Mothers are central to the stories we tell about medicine and health. They have been seen as critical healthcare workers in their own families, doctors have been called on to mother their patients, and over the last century, both pregnancy and motherhood have been medicalized. In this special issue, we shift the focus from motherhood as a constructed and contested identity to mothering as an action. As a broad and inclusive analytic term, mothering prompts us to look for relationships of care beyond traditional definitions of kinship. All of our papers include biological mothers in one way or another, and two focus in particular on the relationship between a famous physician and his mother. But this collection of papers shows that many people have been called on to mother, including [End Page 241] women doctors, wives of physicians, nurses, and midwives, sometimes in partnership with biological mothers, and sometimes in more fraught relationships. Particular technologies have even appeared to do mothering work all by themselves, without the need for human intervention. As historians, we show how historical ideas of mothering are entangled with class, gender, race, and conceptions of the body politic.
In a recent special issue in the journal Medical Humanities on maternity in the modern period, Whitney Wood, Heather A. Love, Jerika Sanderson, and Karen Weingarten brought together papers that showed the multiple ways in which modern maternity manifested across the globe. The papers demonstrate how politically important reproduction has been, from a variety of vantage points and in a global context over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, implicitly showing how the concepts of modernity and "the maternal" are in flux. In their introduction, the co-editors describe how maternity in the modern period has been "often in tension with the principles of what today we understand as reproductive justice,"1 demonstrating the critical work that historians do to explain the origins of present injustice while simultaneously opening up possibilities for empowerment and change in the future. In Canada, historians who have written about the intersection of motherhood and medicine have also made contributions to our understanding of the medicalization of birth,2 social inequalities with their deep historical roots,3 and the connection between motherhood and the history of emotions.4
This Canadian Journal of Health History/Revue canadienne d' histoire de la santé special issue has its origin in a panel the three of us organized at the 2023 annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine at York University in Toronto. As historians with diverse interests, we realized that our projects centered on issues at the intersection between medicine on the one hand and mothers, motherhood, and mothering on the other. In pondering the broader historiographical implications of our work, as well as our own experiences in mothering through the pandemic, we felt that this was a timely moment to reach out to the larger scholarly community for a conversation about this important topic. Following a call for papers, abstracts were submitted to us at the beginning of 2024. We found that several historiographical themes and areas of focus reverberated across a number of the abstracts, and we chose [End Page 242] papers that worked well together, papers that engaged with shared themes while also taking an innovative approach.
Collectively, the papers in this special issue showcase the multiplicity of methodologies, themes, topics, and historical questions that can be brought to bear on mothering, medicine, and health. In particular, we see four themes emerging across the papers: colonialism/race/capitalism; technology and scientific mothering; identity in its many iterations – personal, professional, national; and spatial knowledge and architecture. By using the analytic lens of mothering to explore these themes, we disrupt the static illusion of "mother" or "motherhood," showing how these categories are always changing and are produced through particular conditions and practices.
Oppressive Systems: Colonialism, Slavery, Capitalism
The specter of the oppressive systems that have scaffolded the modern era, capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and cultural imperialism, haunts the papers in this special issue. As Hirut Melaku, Karen Flynn, and Karline Wilson-Mitchell show in the context of slavery in Canada, enslaved women were forced to become wet nurses and mothers and then immediately subjected to the unimaginable loss and enslavement of their babies. We see how colonialism engendered debates over the role of wet nurses in the colonial project of raising Anglo-Indian sons to be imperial administrators in India, as John McBratney demonstrates in his contribution. The articles in this special issue contribute to the large body of scholarship over the past few decades, which has shown how ideologies of mothering have been central to capitalist, colonial, and imperialist projects of control, domination, and destruction5 and how this persisted into the early twentieth century and beyond, when eugenicists sought control over motherhood and mothering, including through the violence of involuntary sterilization.6 Vivien Hamilton shows how incubators were part of a eugenic and also capitalist project, commodifying women's bodies and babies in an agricultural model of birth. Personal and professional identities that emerge in the modern context are inflected by broader narratives and histories, as evident in the letters Annmarie Adams and Delia Gavrus analyze, where the politics of gender, race, class, nationalism, and immigration play out in the project of Republican Motherhood and the attempt to articulate particular iterations of Canadian national identity in the 1960s. [End Page 243]
The violence and control of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and cultural imperialism were also met with resistance, as scholarship has richly documented.7 Medical violence permeates the stories of enslaved mothers uncovered by Melaku, Flynn, and Wilson-Mitchell. Taking babies from these mothers sparked medical crises for both mother and child, causing malnutrition as well as emotional anguish. The denial of medical care also meant that enslaved and free Black women acquired midwifery skills, sometimes even taking care of themselves during labour. Ranjana Saha similarly argues that we need to look at sites of public health in colonial India as places where colonized peoples asserted their own agency, refashioning European medical advice within Indigenous frameworks. Bill Leslie's paper showcases the success of grassroots health organizations in a postcolonial context, after wars of independence in India and Bangladesh. And in Kim Girouard's article, some Chinese women doctors resisted the rules and expectations of missionary medical educators and Chinese reformers, embracing both medical careers and motherhood.
Techno-Scientific Surveillance
Many of the papers in this issue focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period in which mothering was increasingly medicalized and subjected to scientific scrutiny and surveillance by doctors.8 While mothers were seen to have an innate ability to care for their children, this instinct was often deemed insufficient, especially in the face of public health concerns about infant mortality.9 One mothering activity that has been especially subjected to medical attention is breastfeeding,10 which emerges as a notable site of medical surveillance in this special issue as well, particularly in the papers by McBratney, Hamilton, and Saha. Saha shows how doctors and nurses judged mothering practices during Baby Week exhibitions, as babies were measured and sorted to find the healthiest. Gavrus shows how this attitude of assumed medical expertise, even on social questions, extended into the 1960s, with the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield offering his vision for the Vanier Institute and the proper role of Canadian mothers.
Indeed, mothering behaviour has not simply been evaluated by medical experts; doctors have shaped these practices. In both Leslie's and Saha's papers, we see efforts to train Indian midwives (dais) in scientific methods of delivery. In McBratney's piece, doctors enlist [End Page 244] Anglo birth mothers in India to assist in the project of overseeing Indigenous wet nurses to ensure adherence to colonial standards of diet and hygiene. This same dynamic is present in Leslie's story in the later twentieth century as village mothers in India and Bangladesh were enlisted to be nurse/midwives and paramedics, learning new medical skills and also teaching other mothers about antibiotics and homemade oral rehydration solutions.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientific medicine became synonymous with technological medicine, with doctors relying more and more on tools such as blood pressure monitors and x-rays.11 Mothering medical technologies proliferated as well. Pregnancy calendars offered a new medical frame of reference for the experience of gestational time,12 and Saha shows in this volume how clocks became a crucial mothering technology governing the daily routine of feeding, sleep, bathing, and exercise for infants. In Hamilton's paper, the incubator even seemed to promise a full technological replacement for mothers, offering mothering care that looked steady and controllable, in comparison with unruly and fallible human mothering.
For others, complex medical technology has seemed threatening to healthy mothering relationships. Hamilton shows how critics of the incubator worried that this technology disrupted motherly affection and bonding, and Fiona L. Kenney shows how the first paediatric hospice in the later twentieth century was designed to emphasize feminine domesticity and downplay visible technology.
Identity, Professionalization, Citizenship
A focus on mother-concepts in action can illuminate, as well, how various mothering practices are connected to the unfolding process of identity formation – personal and professional, individual and collective. Such a focus can put the spotlight, for example, on professional claims to expertise (by doctors, midwives, etc.), which are made from within more or less cohesive professional identities; on how mothering can seek to transform personal understandings of self in relation to the world; and on how national identities can draw on discourses of motherhood. By highlighting action, the analytical tool of mothering underscores how all of these identities interact and intersect to modulate that complex social, cultural, political fabric that describes a moment in time. The papers in this special issue join decades of scholarship exploring the connection between domestic [End Page 245] spaces, identities, and the nation, including colonial and settler – colonial nations.13 Scholars have explicated ideologies of domesticity and ways in which the figure of the mother was positioned within it, and have analyzed as well how the domestic sphere was rhetorically and politically linked to women and their social roles.14 A large body of literature has explored the professional authority of doctors and scientists, examining how mothers navigated their identities in the face of expert advice.15 The interplays between careers and personal identities in science and medicine has also received some attention.16
Identity appears in this special issue in different contexts, clustering around three articulations – personal, professional, national – which fractally join and diverge in myriad ways.17 In Kenney's paper, we see how the building of a professional space – a paediatric hospice – drew upon the expertise of women carers and mothers being supported through an appeal to traditional ideas of the domestic sphere belonging to women. Professional and personal identity vis-à-vis medicine and motherhood diverge, intersect, and experience tension in interesting ways in China in the first few decades of the twentieth century, as Girouard shows in her article. Girouard highlights a diversity of experiences, with some women doctors going into private practice after having children and some appealing to their identities as mothers and wives to bolster their medical practice and their authority as doctors. And in Leslie's contribution we see how vital local women's identities as mothers were to local NGOs' success in delivering health care to rural areas in India and Bangladesh.
The domestic and the national collide in McBratney's article, where we see how the surveillance of wet nurses by doctors and by mothers hinges on the identities these actors impose on Anglo-Indian children, who are seen to represent the future in that colonial context. McBratney's paper shows as well that British doctors in the nineteenth century, leaning on their professional identity, argued that the private and public spheres were inextricably connected through "the proper care of children." Though in a different context, a similar move is at play in the rhetoric that the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield deployed to link women's role in the family to that of Canadian society and national identity, as Gavrus shows in her paper. Furthermore, in Penfield's life and work, "the medical mother" emerges as a mother-concept and as a figure who can mediate between the private and public spheres in the demanding life of a physician–scientist. [End Page 246]
Understanding identity and lived experience sometimes requires the articulation of new conceptual terms. Theorizing a new concept, that of "mother-midwives," Melaku, Flynn, and Wilson-Mitchell illuminate the identities and the lived experiences of Black enslaved women in their communities, in the space that would become Canada. They show how Saidiya Hartman's methodology of critical fabulation is useful in creating a space that allows the identities of mothers and midwives to become visible given the regrettably few archival sources that have been preserved documenting the lives of enslaved girls and women. In this fashion, the authors reclaim the identities of the women, highlighting the heartbreaking conditions of their lives, their horrific suffering, and the acts of resistance they engaged in.
Medical discourses impact identity in several ways across these articles. Saha shows how medical discourses – as well as resistance to such discourses – in colonial and nationalist contexts intersected with expert identities and participated in the process of identity formation and national self-fashioning. Hamilton asks how the project of mothering was reimagined when it was proposed to be carried out via medical technology. Leaning on their professional authority and identity, doctors could envision taking control over women's reproduction by means of this controllable technology and the pliable personnel who operated the baby incubators. This story raises questions about the impact such technology may have had on the identity of the mothers of the infants cared for in baby incubators, as well as the identities of the babies themselves, as fictional tales of the times illustrate.
The ways in which mothering modulates personal identity are evident in Annmarie Adams' exploration of the letters between the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield and his mother. Adams shows how depictions of space, place, and architecture contribute to the mother–son bond, to the correspondents' identity formation, and to their self-expression. In these private letters the neurosurgeon appears vulnerable, describing for his mother difficult moments and emotions along with the spaces he moves through, while his mother engages in mothering from afar through the written word.
These papers thus show the constantly intersecting and mutually constitutive ways in which identities – personal, professional, national – interact with medical discourses. Paying attention to mothering processes in these specific contexts sometimes also reveals [End Page 247] the importance of articulating new mother concepts to understand how identity is imagined, unfolds, and is part of lived experience.
Spatial Knowledge and Architecture
Our fourth theme is space, a wide-ranging concept embraced by scholars across the humanities since the 1980s. Just as mothers occupy a huge array of urban and rural spaces, the practices of mothering take place just about anywhere. Particularly notable in this special issue are studies of mothering spaces outside the traditional domestic sphere, from the scale of the incubator to that of the nation-state.
Like mothering, the term "space" can be elusive. Geographers might use the term to denote a colossal landscape.18 On the one hand, medical geographers have studied how physical environments influence maternal health. They are interested in how geography affects notions of healthy living, access to maternal care, and maternal mortality, as well as how social and economic factors interact with geographic location to shape maternal experiences. We witnessed this large-scale spatial thinking during the COVID-19 pandemic, as we watched with horror as the dreaded coronavirus circulated around the globe. Cultural geographers, on the other hand, often explore the meanings we attach to places.19 The same hospital that is terrifying for a new mother, for example, might be a beloved workplace for a nurse. Architectural historians tend to use the term space slightly differently than geographers.20 Space to architectural historians often refers to the arrangement of a building – for example, what shows in a floor plan – with emphasis on the interiors of buildings.21 Architectural historians, like literary scholars, are interested in power, agency, and atmosphere. Michel Foucault famously argued that the panopticon, a design by Jeremy Bentham for a prison, was a mechanism of power.22 Foucault's publication of the panopticon in French in 1975 and English two years later heightened interest in a social approach to space, especially institutions. Confusingly, the interchangeability of the terms architecture and space has intensified since the 1980s, when the study of everyday and vernacular architecture became more mainstream.23
Unsurprisingly, the secondary literature on motherhood and space in architectural history has focused on domestic architecture. Spaces directly linked to womanhood and motherhood are among the earliest topics that attracted second-wave feminist architectural [End Page 248] historians such as Dolores Hayden and Gwendolyn Wright, who wrote foundational books on women and houses.24 Before their pioneering work, most studies on the history of housing focused on the work of famous architects, with little reference to the buildings' occupants. There is a presumption in the spatial literature that houses "reflect" changing concepts of mothering, especially around the twentieth-century kitchen and the rise of the so-called "family room" in the postwar period. The home, in a myriad of forms and locations, has been studied as a place of limitation and confinement for mothers, as well as a space of liberation.25
The papers in this volume expand our views of mothering spaces in direct and indirect ways, moving far beyond the walls of home. Both Kenney and Adams engage architecture as a primary source, as ways to tease out elusive maternal experiences that are difficult to discern in traditional, text-based sources. Kenney reads the design of an early paediatric hospice, Helen House in Oxford, to show how the novel building typology and evolving philosophy of care were almost inseparable. Additionally, she looks at leaflets, photographs, and texts to uncover the significant roles of domestic and maternal expertise in the institution's operations. Adams taps spatial references in letters between Wilder Penfield and his mother to show how their shared interest in architecture kept the son and mother connected. The famous neurosurgeon drew plans for his mother, as a mode of positioning her in spaces he knew she would never experience. Adams argues that Penfield's reflections on architecture enabled his mother to participate actively in his adult life, though they lived thousands of kilometres apart, underlining mothering as a lifelong and sometimes remote practice.
Less directly, "space" plays a role in several other papers too. Girouard, for example, explores missionary space in China, illustrating how women missionary doctors blurred the boundaries between the domestic and professional spheres, even to their advantage. Hamilton's incubators were popular displays at fairs and exhibitions, occupying the midway space, notoriously a space of amusement, rather than the more respectable fair spaces dedicated to cultural topics. Hamilton probes the discourses around the tiny high-tech glass boxes, spaces in themselves, as stand-ins for human mothers. Leslie's work illuminates the construction of rural health centres in India and Bangladesh in the 1970s. These spaces served as purpose-built stages for the education of "village mothers," who dramatically improved health outcomes in the late twentieth century. [End Page 249]
The long-standing spatial link of women and home permeates all these papers. We expect spaces for mothers and possibly all women to look like houses. We imagine spaces that simulate home as more caring or comforting than institutions that look purposefully non-domestic, such as traditional hospitals. Domestic references – pitched roofs, fireplaces, cozy kitchens—are still understood today as somehow safer for children. Collectively, these papers probe the how and why of these spatial presumptions.
Conclusions
In this fraught moment in time, when we see the resurgence of natalist movements, fueled in part by anxieties over falling birth rates, historical thinking and continued attention to mothering are deeply important. Mothering has often been mobilized in service of imperialist, racist, and capitalist projects to control reproduction, and historical inquiry helps us imagine how it might be otherwise. The nine papers in this special issue speak to each other across themes of colonialism, techno-scientific surveillance, nationalism, identity, and space. Communally, they reaffirm the vital necessity of inquiry into the topics of mothering, medicine, and health, as well as the importance of continuously returning to these stories from different historiographical perspectives and with different lived experiences.
Annmarie Adams – Department of Social Studies of Medicine and School of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Contact: annmarie.adams@mcgill.ca
Delia Gavrus – Department of History, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
Contact: d.gavrus@uwinnipeg.ca
Vivien Hamilton – Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California, United States.
Contact: vhamilton@hcm.edu
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Madison Herget-Schmidt for her research assistance, Whitney Wood, Eftihia Mihelakis, and Caroline Lieffers for their editorial advice, and the Canadian Journal of Health History for supporting this project. We also thank the audience at the meeting of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine in 2023 for helpful questions and comments.
Notes
1. Whitney Wood, H.A. Love, J. Sanderson, K. Weingarten, "Making Modern Maternity," Medical Humanities, 50, no. 2 (2024): 197–200, 197.
2. Wendy Mitchinson, Giving Birth in Canada, 1900-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way: Women, Houses, and Doctors, 1870–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen's University Press, 1996) [especially chapter 4]; Annmarie Adams, Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893–1943 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008): 42–52; Katherine Arnup, Education for Motherhood: Advice for Mothers in Twentieth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); Denyse Baillargeon, Babies for the Nation: The Medicalization of Motherhood in Quebec, 1910–1970, transl. Donald W. Wilson (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009); Cynthia R. Comacchio, The Infinite Bonds of Family: Domesticity in Canada, 1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Peter Gossage, "La marâtre: Marie-Anne Houde and the Myth of the Wicked Stepmother in Quebec," Canadian Historical Review 76, no. 4 (1995): 563–97; Andrée Rivard, Histoire de l'accouchement dans un Québec moderne (Montréal: Remue-ménage, 2014).
3. Whitney Wood, "Medicare and Maternity: Historicizing Inequities in Women's Health," in Esyllt Jones, James Hanley, and Delia Gavrus, eds. Medicare's Histories: Origins, Omissions, and Opportunities in Canada (Winnipeg: Manitoba University Press, 2022).
4. Whitney Wood, "Pride, Shame, and Anger: Women's Struggles to Achieve Natural Childbirth in Postwar Canada," in Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney, eds., Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada's Second Wave (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022).
5. Jean Allman, "Making Mothers: Missionaries, Medical Officers and Women's Work in Colonial Asante, 1924–1945," History Workshop Journal 38, no. 1 (1994): 23–47; Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and US Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Margaret D. Jacobs, "Maternal Colonialism: White Women and Indigenous Child Removal in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940," Western Historical Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2005): 453–76; Brianna Theobald, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Carol Summers, "Intimate Colonialism: The Imperial Production of Reproduction in Uganda, 1907–1925," Signs 16, no. 4 (1991): 787–807; Felicity M. Turner, Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022); Sara Clarke Kaplan, The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021); Raka Shome, "Racialized Maternalisms: White Motherhood and National Modernity," in Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity and Contemporary Media Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 47–75; Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies:Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
6. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Random House, 1997); Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Anchor, 2007); Dana-Ain Davis, Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (New York: NYU Press, 2019); Deidre Cooper Owens, "The Birth of American Gynecology," in Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 15–41.
7. Karol Kovalocivh Weaver, "Her Infant at Her Breast': Breastfeeding as Survival and Resistance in Colonial Haiti," Journal of Women's History 35, no. 4 (2023): 76–96.
8. Rima D. Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
9. Richard Meckel, Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
10. Rima D.Apple, Mothers and Medicine: A Social History of Infant Feeding (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Jessica Martucci, Back to the Breast:Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
11. Stanley Joel Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Stanley Joel Reiser, Technological Medicine: The Changing World of Doctors and Patients (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
12. M.E. Leighton and L. Surridge, "The Reckoning Table, the Periodoscope and the Shaping of Modern Pregnancy in Nineteenth-Century Print Forms," Medical Humanities 50, no. 2 (2024): 201–10.
13. Ann McGrath and Winona Stevenson, "Gender, Race, and Policy: Aboriginal Women and the State in Canada and Australia," Labour History 71 (November 1996): 37–53; Margaret Anderson,"Denied the Joys of Motherhood': Infertility and Medicine in French Interwar Advice Columns," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 97, no.4 (2023): 560–84; Matthew J. Lindsay, "Reproducing a Fit Citizenry: Dependency, Eugenics, and the Law of Marriage in the United States, 1860–1920," Law and Social Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1998): 541–85; Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Yolanda Eraso, Representing Argentinian Mothers: Medicine, Ideas and Culture in the Modern Era, 1900–1946 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013).
14. Marilyn Francus, Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Flannery Burke and Jennifer Seltz, "Mothers' Nature: Feminisms, Environmentalism, and Childbirth in the 1970s," Journal of Women's History 30, no. 2 (2018): 63–87; Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Nora Doyle, Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
15. Samuel S. Thomas, "Early Modern Midwifery: Splitting the Profession, Connecting the History," Journal of Social History 43, no. 1 (2009): 115–38; Paula S. Fass, "What Mother Needs to Know: The New Science of Childhood, 1890–1940," in The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 86–126; Rima D. Apple, Perfect Motherhood.
16. Emily Monosson, ed., Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
17. On the fractal quality of identity, its fluidity and context-dependence, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Preface to the Princeton Classics Edition," in The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), ix–xviii.
18. J.B. Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
19. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
20. Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).
21. Abigail A. Van Slyck, "The Power of the Plan," Platform https://www.platformspace.net/home/the-power-of-the-plan.
22. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
23. Dell Upton, "Outside the Academy: A Century of Vernacular Architecture Studies, 1890-1990," Studies in the History of Art 35 (1990): 199–213.
24. Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981); Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago 1873–1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
25. The most famous condemnation of the middle-class American home, for example, is Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), where she likens it to a comfortable concentration camp.
