Designing Motherhood Aims For A More Inclusive Definition Of A Loaded Role

You only have to experience pregnancy and childbirth — or even just a regular gynecological check-up — once to realize how little is actually known about the female body, and how much the tools used to treat one can be improved. In an ambitious and sprawling project that includes a book, two exhibitions currently open at the Mütter Museum (through May 2022) and the Center for Architecture and Design in Philadelphia (through November 14, 2021) and a Storybanking project, a group of curators, early childhood experts, care specialists, doulas and lactation consultants tell the story of how motherhood has been shaped — and monetized — over the past few centuries. Often — but not always — at the expense of the mother herself.

The result is “Designing Motherhood,” a sprawling, multi-faceted project that includes first-person testimonies, photographs, artworks, essays and an array of objects including IUDs, speculums and breast pumps, many of which look like medieval torture devices without context. The project offers historical perspective behind many of these quotidian but necessary objects — for example, postpartum mesh underwear, nipple shields and the Kuddle Up, a white cotton blanket with alternating pink and blue stripes that most babies born in the last century have been wrapped in after birth. Of course, each of these objects has a design history, although we usually don’t choose to think about them. In bringing attention to their existence within the context of a museum, the project aims to bring conversation about how we can do better for mothers, and women in general, to the fore.

“There were conversations we wanted to have around motherhood that were also really grounded in reproductive justice — to have or not to have children, to be able to raise your family however you might choose to define that,” says Michelle Millar Fisher, an educator, curator and historian central to the project.

Rather than seeing motherhood as an inclusive term, the project aims to expand it to include those who don’t wish to have children, and those who have historically been excluded from it, including men who give birth. Even more importantly, it aims to elevate black, brown and indigenous voices that have been historically excluded in order to elevate white, middle-class — and let’s be honestly, historically male — perspectives on motherhood.

“Something we thought about a lot was why did we move away from indigenous practices and ancestral knowledge to a more westernized, capitalistic, patriarchal knowledge?” asks Zoë Greggs, Philadelphia-based artist involved in the project. “It’s knowledge that is there — for example, birthing furniture has been used by black, brown and indigenous peoples for centuries upon centuries — but colonialism and capitalism has erased the knowledge of the object’s benefits.”

In the project, there is a sense of mourning over what has been lost — and who has been lost — in a country where until 2008, the majority of Obstetricians were male, and where black women are still three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. But there’s also the sense that with a lot of talented, smart women — like those working on the project — putting their heads together, there may at least be better tools in the future to care for women before, during and after giving birth. That is, if we don’t get knocked out by a climate catastrophe first.

To learn more about “Designing Motherhood, visit the project’s website, or follow it on Instagram.