Book Review: Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births
Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births, MIT Press, $44.95, 344 pp, September 2021
If any book could actually hold all the experiences encapsulated by the word “motherhood,” Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births might be it. Conceived, largely written, and designed by Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, Designing Motherhood is a huge feminist encyclopedia that documents the myriad ways design has shaped the experience of giving birth and being born. With Covid-19 making irrefutably clear what many have been arguing for quite some time—that motherhood entails trying to meet almost impossible demands that so many of us dismiss or ignore—Designing Motherhood couldn’t be more timely or pertinent. And yet, the book’s commitment is not limited to making the work of motherhood visible (as valuable as that is). Its capacious vision invites readers to reflect on the reproductive body as itself an object of design. Addressing their readers in the introduction, Millar Fisher and Winick write: “You will most likely find in these pages designs you have used: the tampons you unwrap every month, the abortion you underwent, or the pill blister pack you consulted before you popped and swallowed, perhaps. These designs often live in very embedded ways in our memories and bodies” (17). It is hard to imagine anyone reading Designing Motherhood and not reflecting on bodies as living archives of design.
Presenting a kaleidoscopic array of images, objects, and practices, Millar Fisher and Winick make a significant intervention: they place reproduction at the center of design history. To show how necessary this intervention is, they look to MoMA and the role the institution has played in design history: “Nowhere in the nearly nine decades during which MoMA has been collecting and displaying design in its most innovative forms have any designs related to human reproduction, pregnancy, or birth from the perspectives of women-identifying or trans people been included” (19). To counter this absence, Designing Motherhood foregrounds “subject matter, designs, and ideas that rarely if ever get airtime in cultural institutions, yet are to be found everywhere in daily life” (18). Their focus on reproduction creates this reorientation. As they explain, the book “reposition[s] women-identifying people as the locus of design—as creators and users—elevating their concerns as relevant and necessary” (18). Defying the dismissal of the domestic sphere, Designing Motherhood features the objects that emblematize motherhood—cribs, baby blankets, strollers, and maternity dresses—and the writers tell their histories so they become strange and fascinating, rich with idiosyncratic detail (10). But the collection also presents histories of designed objects that are not as pretty and attest to aspects of reproduction, pregnancy, and childbirth that are harder to see: the home pregnancy test, cesarean birth curtains, forceps, breast pumps, menstrual cups, postpartum mesh underwear, sonograms, the perineal repair simulator, and stirrups. Reflecting on these designs from generous feminist perspectives, Designing Motherhood makes real strides toward dispelling what the editors describe as “the cultural consensus that [reproduction is] too unsavory for public consumption” (14).
“Presenting a kaleidoscopic array of images, objects, and practices, Millar Fisher and Winick make a significant intervention: they place reproduction at the center of design history.”
Reading through the book’s four sections—“Reproduction,” “Pregnancy,” “Birth,” and “Postpartum”—it becomes clear that Millar Fisher and Winick take a wide view of reproduction. Within each of these categories, they are attentive to the radically different material conditions in which people live their reproductive lives. For example, “Reproduction” includes an entry on “Sterilization Abuse,” which focuses on the most pernicious iteration of design—eugenics. At the end of “Birth” is an essay on “Thalidomide,” a drug prescribed for morning sickness that caused disabilities in developing fetuses and provoked enormous guilt in mothers. There is an entry on “Hidden Mothers” in the “Postpartum” section that displays nineteenth-century photographs in which women draped in cloth would hold babies before the eye of the camera. This “hiding” obscures the fact that some of these partly visible bodies framing children for the honor of visibility were “enslaved women denied the opportunity to mother their own children in the same way” (289). These documents of disappearance underscore that reproduction cannot be separated from inequity, loss, risk, and death.
Designing Motherhood is itself a thoughtfully designed object. The cover is a soft pink of textured fabric and looks a little like a blanket or a homemade album. The title appears in a warm maroon red and each of the o’s in “motherhood” have a different circular shape, echoing the typographic play of children’s books as well as the changing shape of the rounded pregnant body. Most of the pages on the inside of the book are also pink; they are covered with maroon text that draws out the pink’s brightness and softness. When I first flipped through Designing Motherhood, I found this choice shocking but completely refreshing, as it flies in the face of pink’s association with the silly, superficial, and annoyingly feminine. We’ve become accustomed to seeing pink as a symbol of femininity’s restrictions, but Designing Motherhood doesn’t indulge in such assessments, however well-intentioned. It asks readers to see pink as a soft haze through which we can read the designs that helped us come into being. I think this can lead readers to recognize the value of characteristics associated with maternal femininity and the role they can play in gently bringing people into the world.
“Given this emphasis on language, it makes perfect sense that Designing Motherhood is a densely written book echoing with a chorus of fifty writers. Their voices carry the book from the long history of designing birth and reproduction to the unfolding of the historical present and into its unpredictable futures.”
Except for the glossy advertisements included to show how the reproductive body has been sanitized—the advertisement for “Carefree” sanitary pads at the beginning of the entry on “Blood” is particularly hilarious—most of the images in Designing Motherhood have a soft grain and a vernacular look and feel. Many of the images look like they belong in newsletters or family albums and they manifest the book’s emphasis on tactility and touch. I found the entry on “Hospital Bags” particularly touching. The four photographs feature different hospital bags from around the world, each one a small collection of objects that mother and baby will need at the hospital. To me, these hospital bags say something about Designing Motherhood as a whole, as they highlight maternal care as an aesthetic practice of carefully arranging objects for the future.
While design is most readily associated with visual objects, I appreciated how much the collection paid attention to language. In the paragraph that opens the entry “#LISTENTOBLACKWOMEN,” the authors rightly declare: “Language designs human experience” (189), and they go on to describe this hashtag as an “umbrella that encompasses a range of experiences and practices, including to the exhortation to pay attention to Black women when they talk about their needs and intuitions around their own health” (189). What follows is an interview with Khiara Bridges, a law professor who focuses on race, class, and reproductive rights who argues that “[w]e have Black women to thank” for a view of reproductive rights that extends beyond abortion and draws attention to how “[o]ur badly designed two-tiered health system is informed by our dislike of Black and Brown people” (189, 192). Bridges translates #LISTENTOBLACKWOMEN this way: “Give them choice, give them agency, trust them to choose their reproductive experience, period” (192).
Given this emphasis on language, it makes perfect sense that Designing Motherhood is a densely written book echoing with a chorus of fifty writers. Their voices carry the book from the long history of designing birth and reproduction to the unfolding of the historical present and into its unpredictable futures. Each entry is distinctly written, composed to reflect the design object it describes and track how it has become part of people’s reproductive lives. Historical, personal, and heart-felt, many of the entries productively blur the boundaries between the insights that come out of intellectual work and the collective worlds of shared public discourse. I found them to be thoroughly engaging.
“Above all, it’s Millar Fisher’s love for her mother and her sensitive understanding of the forces designing her life—a sensitivity influenced by the work of Adrienne Rich—that has inspired her to write this “childfree” space in her life.”
Designing Motherhood is a big book that I imagine many will hold on to and read at different points in their lives. I can see people letting their changing relationship to reproduction, birth, and motherhood across the life cycle influence the aspects of the text they explore. On this initial reading, “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and “Childfree” emerged as my favorite entries, as they highlighted the feminism threaded through every aspect of the book. Our Bodies, Our Selves is an important seventies-feminist predecessor to Designing Motherhood, as the guidebook to women’s health encourages its readers to be “empowered advocates rather than passive recipients of the health care we need” (31). I loved how the writers paid attention not only to the fascinating genealogy of Our Bodies, Our Selves, but to its design, publication history, and contents. The original newsprint booklet was “[h]andwritten in a neat cursive, the first table of contents listed the course outline — from an introductory essay on the intersection of women, medicine, and capitalism through chapters on basic anatomy, sexuality, and sexually-transmitted diseases, to birth control (including abortion), pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum care” (31). As the booklet developed into a widely recognized book, “forthright illustrations and photographs” accompanied these subjects, giving women an accurate perspective on their bodies. The first-person testimonials are key to the book’s feminist argument as they “overrid[e] predominantly male doctors to place trust in women’s own embodied experiences” and promote their “bodily sovereignty” (32).
“Childfree” provides a history of the childfree movement, which attempted to dismantle the habit of perceiving women without children as “barren,” “deviant,” and “selfish” (original emphasis, 58). The entry is also Millar Fisher’s autobiographical reflection on her choice to remain “childfree.” She is breathtakingly honest about the reason why she “stifl[ed] [her] ovaries during their reproductive time” (58): watching her mother deal with domestic abuse, seeing her express herself through baking and crafts, and witnessing scenes in which she voiced maternal ambivalence. Despite her absolute devotion to her children, Millar Fisher’s mother would “from time to time, when a terrifying, unpayable utility bill arrived or her tiredness got the better of her, she would sit and sob at the kitchen table and wonder aloud what might have been if she had not had us” (60). Above all, it’s Millar Fisher’s love for her mother and her sensitive understanding of the forces designing her life—a sensitivity influenced by the work of Adrienne Rich—that has inspired her to write this “childfree” space in her life.
I don’t really have any critiques of Designing Motherhood. I think it is a fantastic book that evokes, through so many features and details, the world-making of motherhood. I’m grateful that it arrived in my mailbox. It is often too easy to criticize a feminist project for what it isn’t doing. The question “what or whom does it leave out?” is almost automatic, and in some instances, substitutes for the much harder work of describing efforts and aspirations. While questions about inclusion reflect the ethical and political questions rightly brought to feminism to examine who it represents, they also might manifest the stubborn and essentialized connections among women, motherhood, and feminism. More specifically, questions of inclusion might be part of displacing the fantasy of the all-giving woman/mother who does everything right onto feminism. I’m reluctant to participate in such a displacement. The only question or worry I had reading Designing Motherhood is this: while the authors have worked hard to be as inclusive as possible, and as a result, created a book that deftly manages to hold universality and singularity, commonalities and differences, in tension, I thought it could be helpful to acknowledge the possibility that the expectation to be all-inclusive is connected to the impossible demands placed upon mothers. With its commitment to defamiliarizing the habitual ways of seeing biological reproduction and valuing maternal care without placing it in glossy, idealized packages, I think Designing Motherhood will provoke readers to explore difficult questions that do not have ready-made answers.
