Katrina Ackerman and Whitney Wood
Statue of Dutch athlete Fanny Blankers- Koen. Source: Ruud Zwart, CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons
High-level athletes who exercise or compete in a sport while pregnant constantly gain media attention. When Serena Williams recently announced that she was 20 weeks pregnant, people quickly crunched the numbers and discovered that she won the Australian Open while seven to eight weeks pregnant. Williams was celebrated for challenging the notion that the pregnant body is fragile and weak. At the same time, however, athletes in other sports and the fitness industry often confront the long-held belief that pregnant bodies should not exercise. CrossFit competitor Miranda Chivers Oldroyd faces a litany of unsolicited advice and criticism on Instagram because she posts images and videos of her doing CrossFit workouts while pregnant, such as a video of her doing muscle-ups at 16 weeks. Despite consulting with physicians about the safety of the movements as well as their individual abilities, athletic women like Oldroyd often experience public backlash for physically challenging their bodies when pregnant. In an effort to refute the negative association between competitive exercise and pregnancy, CrossFit released two videos earlier this year, Pregnant, Not Dead and A CrossFit Pregnancy: Healthy Mother, Healthy Child, which brought further awareness to the public shaming of athletic, pregnant bodies.
These modern anxieties surrounding women’s conduct during pregnancy have deep historical roots. Culturally-specific pregnancy taboos have existed throughout history. During the professionalization of obstetrics in nineteenth-century North America, however, a growing number of medical “experts” transformed these taboos into increasingly strict medical proscriptions against certain behaviours. Pregnant women increasingly came under the surveillance of medical professionals, and gradually, the public.[1] These prohibitions were readily and regularly entrenched in a growing body of medical advice literature that was directed at white, middle-class, young wives and expectant mothers in the Victorian years.
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Canadian physicians increasingly spoke out against what they saw as the unprecedented pressures of modern life and the negative effects these pressures had on the human body. “Modern” women, most often cast as urban-dwelling members of the white, middle, and upper classes, were described as living “unnatural” lives that contributed to ill health and a host of “female complaints” that reached new heights during pregnancy. Their bodies and birth experiences were readily contrasted with the more “natural” deliveries of Indigenous women, who were thought – due to what many Canadians described as a more “primitive” mode of living – to experience easier pregnancies and deliveries than their white counterparts. As these “New Women” and “modern girls” became increasingly mobile and partook in many of the technological changes and possibilities of the early twentieth century, physicians singled out new behaviours as causes for concern. In the face of these pressures, and aiming to promote healthful pregnancies and shore up birth rates among Anglo-Canadians in particular, Canadian doctors recommended what they saw as “appropriate” (but very limited) exercise for their white, well-to-do patients during pregnancy. Continue reading
