Sanctifying Pregnancy: Motherhood and American Catholicism, 1930-1981

In this dissertation, I show how Catholic women in the United States responded to developments in reproductive technologies and practices by critically examining religion, childbearing, and motherhood in private and in public between 1930 and 1981. In the 1930s and 1940s, a thriving Catholic press published pamphlets on dating, marriage, and family life, the majority authored by priests and men religious. But by the early 1950s, a growing number of white, educated, middle- and upper-class lay women began to contribute to this public discourse on religion and reproduction. They evaluated natural childbirth theories and techniques in the pages of periodicals and pamphlets. Years before Pope Pius XII officially addressed the issue of natural childbirth in 1956, women had already begun to incorporate it into their lives and faith. Just as Catholics made natural childbirth Catholic in the 1950s, lay Catholics in the 1960s assessed the rhythm method of birth control as a “natural” means of family planning in line with Church teachings. Publicly, within the pages of Catholic magazines, and privately, in letters and surveys to the Papal Commission on Birth Control, couples shared their experiences of parenthood through the rhythm method. I draw from surveys, articles, and letters to the editor to argue that the rhythm method was not just a form of birth control. For many mid-century Catholic women, the rhythm method was their path to motherhood and an integral part of their everyday religious, reproductive, and marital lives. By the mid-1960s, Catholic women articulated a shared understanding of maternity founded on their suspicion of mainstream medical authority, their belief that childbearing was a religiously significant event, and their participation in grassroots and peer-led activism. These authors also reached across political and religious divides to appeal to feminists, spiritualists, environmentalists, and other figures in the women’s health, natural childbirth, and homebirth movements. I argue that lay Catholic women were members of an intellectual community committed to the belief that motherhood could be a personally, sexually, and religiously significant experience.