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Pregnant with the Stars
Watching and Wanting the Celebrity Baby Bump
By Renée Ann Cramer STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9674-3
CHAPTER 1
LAW, POPULAR CULTURE, AND PREGNANCY IN AMERICA
IN 1991, Vanity Fair magazine broke ground by placing an image of a nude and pregnant Demi Moore on its cover. The resulting media firestorm was intense, and the controversy helped the cover become iconic. The magazine broke records, selling more than one million copies (in contrast to a regular distribution at the time of around 800,000) and receiving voluminous correspondence, both in support of and angry about the cover.
The Vanity Fair cover and the attention given it helped to change how pregnancy was seen and represented in the contemporary press. In the last twenty-five years, in large part because of celebrity openness about their pregnant physiques in the wake of the Demi Moore cover, the pregnant body has mostly lost its reputation as repulsive and embarrassing. Now, pregnant women are encouraged to enjoy the physicality of their pregnancy — in fact, to embrace the beauty of pregnancy by dressing (and undressing) to show off "the bump."
This is a sea change.
Histories of mothering situated in the Western world highlight the strange mix of horror, fascination, and reverence with which pregnancy has long been treated in the popular culture of each period. Such histories also almost uniformly stress that, at least for white and middle- to upper-middle-class women, motherhood was constructed as part of the realm of the domestic, the private. If they were to be seen out in public, pregnant women were expected to be "demure and modest." Francus notes that in British fiction of the eighteenth century, women who were not able to be appropriately domestic and maternal were vilified and suspect. Popular literature from the period abounds with tales of infanticide, evil stepmothers, and self-centered women — clearly the antitheses of mothers who met the norms of domestic and modest, nurturing and self-abdicating. Such women were idealized, and domesticity and motherhood were seen as the pinnacle of a white woman's potential development. These women were also relegated to the private realm — the home — outside of the gaze of the public sphere. In some regards, their proper domesticity and maternity depended upon women's invisibility.
These attitudes travelled easily to the United States and very much informed the sociocultural politics surrounding motherhood in the colonial period and well beyond. While women of color and lower-class white women were indeed in the labor force, white women of the mercantile class in the United States were relegated to private life. These mothering women were expected to manage the private sphere and remain outside of the public one; their pregnancies were self-managed and self-regulated, with the help of other women in secret. Pregnancy, an indicator that sex has taken place, was simply considered too risqué for polite company. Contemporary media coverage of female celebrities who highlight their pregnancy in form-fitting dresses on the red carpet at awards shows could not have been imagined a century ago, when "a concern with physical appearance during pregnancy [was seen as] incongruent with the image of the ideal mother figure."
Nor could contemporary representations of celebrity pregnancy have been imagined even as recently as 1950, when Lucille Ball was the first woman to be acknowledged to "be expecting" on television, though the Federal Communications Commission considered the word "pregnant" lewd enough to censor. And they could not have been imagined even in 1970, when Cleveland junior high school teacher Jo Carol LaFleur was placed on mandatory leave in her second trimester, because school administrators worried that her pregnant body would alternately disgust, concern, fascinate, and embarrass her students.
Yet now, twenty-five years after the Demi Moore cover, more than a hundred years of cultural norms seem to have shifted. Some women's pregnant bodies can be seen as acceptable, even desirable. In the years from 1970 to 2000, popular culture became more open to performances of pregnancy; once kept secret and articulated as private, pregnancy became "public." At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court reached decisions that had the potential to give women a greater measure of control over their reproductive capacity, both while pregnant and while seeking to avoid pregnancy, by articulating a tenuous right to privacy. This is an interesting juxtaposition: women have sought and gained rights to privacy in reproduction, just as they have also sought and received the freedom to be public with their pregnancies.
Popular culture and jurisprudence have facilitated steps toward equality and freedom for women, to be sure. However, the relationship between popular culture and jurisprudence in the period is an interesting and complex one; it is a history of openings and closings, steps forward and back. While part of the story is progressive, a second narrative emerges; it is a neoliberal story in which popular culture and jurisprudence work together to make women more responsible for their pregnancies and the general public more invested in these performances of pregnancy.
The contemporary history of reproductive rights in the United States, from both feminist and legal standpoints and especially as it covers the formative years leading up to and after Roe v. Wade, is well told and well known. Much of that history has focused on the momentous Supreme Court decisions and cultural shifts permitting women access to contraception and abortion — the growing right, in other words, to be private in one's decision making surrounding reproduction and to make choices to avoid and terminate pregnancy. There is also a well-established body of scholarship illuminating the legal holdings, regulatory practices, and forms of cultural production that enabled women to be public with reproductive decision making and to make choices in support of their pregnancies: to retain employment, access benefits, and claim public space, even while sporting a "bump." This chapter draws on these sources to identify key moments between 1970 and 2000 — it brings us right up to the era of the baby bump's media dominance — and provides analytical snapshots of the jurisprudence and popular culture of women's reproductive lives in the United States, to help us understand and contextualize the contemporary mania for the baby bump as a sociolegal moment.
The existing scholarship on state control of women's reproductive capacity illustrates that governance serves multiple purposes in the politics of state formation. Rhetorics surrounding motherhood and policies attempting to control women's reproduction served the purposes of nation building in colonialism, into industrialization, and through the contemporary period. In all of its manifestations, those who governed women and their behavior agreed that one of femininity's main functions was to produce citizens and workers. Solinger writes, "In the struggle over who controls women's reproductive capacity, the state has created laws and policies that use female fertility to solve social problems and to sustain traditional roles for women." In a project of nation building and social control via reproduction, the state has had to decide who is "fit" to reproduce, and slavery, genocide, and eugenics all offered ways to determine just who was, indeed, fit to birth and parent.
The history of reproductive politics in the United States has been a history of state and social control over all women's reproductive capacity. Though reproduction was private, it was obstructed, incentivized, and forced in ways that served the purported public interest. The reasons for state control over women's reproduction have shifted over time, and from actor to actor, as have the techniques of this control. And the relationships between hiding — or keeping private — and using — or making public — women's bodies are constitutive and interrelated. Women's reproduction has been constructed as both private and requiring secrecy, as well as public and requiring regulation; such construction has often been inconsistent and in tension with other state goals and needs. For example, the argument that women's pregnancies are private was used to disempower women in many realms in the early period of this country's history, by keeping some women out of the paid workforce. The same argument, that women's pregnancies are private, has more recently been used by feminists and progressives to secure some measure of reproductive autonomy for some women. The idea that women are breeders was used by Progressives in the early 1900s to enact far-reaching worker protection laws for women; it was used by slave owners, however, a mere fifty years prior, to justify the rape and forced breeding of women held in slavery.
Yet understanding these relationships sheds light on the popularity of contemporary press coverage of celebrity baby bumps and helps us understand the limitations of, and problems associated with, such coverage. Popular culture, legal, medical, and psychological representations of motherhood, Bassin writes, "tap and shape our complex feelings about motherhood." We must go a step further and see that representations of pregnancy and motherhood in these arenas not only shape personal feeling about and understandings of motherhood, they constitute each other — public policy, medicine, and doctrine are shaped by public representations of what is possible and appropriate in pregnancy. We cannot untangle the complex web of doctrine, legislation, and representation surrounding pregnancy and mothering since 1970, so much as make the strands of that web more readily visible. The 1970s were perhaps the most influential decade, jurisprudentially, for women's reproductive lives. They set the stage for openness to the bump, and pregnancy, that we have today; they also set the stage for the increased surveillance of pregnant women overall and demands for increased self-discipline of their pregnancies.
That 70s Show: Path-Breaking Jurisprudence on Pregnancy
In the 1970s, as women claimed more sexual freedom for themselves and were mothers and were wage earners, many insisted that the meaning of pregnancy itself had to be legally challenged. — Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power
Jo Carol LaFleur and Ann Elizabeth Nelson taught junior high in Cleveland, Ohio, and both were pregnant during 1970–1971 academic year. The Cleveland Board of Education had a policy dating from 1952 that required women to take unpaid maternity leave beginning in the fourth month of pregnancy and to remain out from work "until the beginning of the first semester falling at least three months after they had given birth, and then only with written approval from a physician." The policy in essence required mothers to take a minimum of eight months unpaid leave. Depending on the timing of the pregnancy and birth, this mandated, unpaid leave could be as long as thirteen months, if a woman gave birth at the beginning of December and remained ineligible to reenter the classroom until fall semester, or September. The board's policy was predicated on many traditional and stereotypical beliefs about pregnancy and motherhood. The board's policy also likely seemed pretty safe jurisprudentially.
The Supreme Court had previously affirmed the idea that motherhood and paid employment did not, or should not, mix. One of the most famous examples of these cases came from a challenge to Oregon's 1903 protective legislation focusing on women working in laundries. The Oregon law mandated that laundry owners could not force women to work more than ten hours per day, six days per week. Employer Muller challenged the law on substantive due process grounds, arguing that women should have the right to freely contract and determine their own terms of employment. Attorney Louis Brandeis argued on behalf of the state that in order to be healthy mothers who bore vigorous offspring, women must have their work hours constrained by the state. Brandeis was certain: the state needed to protect women, as they are "at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence" when pregnant and mothering.
In reviewing and approving the law, the Court adopted the attitude of positive eugenicists who argued for the state's role in encouraging and creating "better babies and fitter families." Oregon had a legitimate state interest in women's reproduction, the Court concluded, not because workers needed protection from capital exploitation, but rather because of the importance of healthy women for "breeding" healthy future citizens. In fact, the Court wrote, such legislation was vital "to the future well-being of the race." Muller's rendering of women's rights contextualized in a reproductive role enabled the decision to be consonant with previous rulings that closed aspects of the workforce to women, like the one in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), where the Court justified Bradwell's exclusion from the legal profession on the grounds that, as a woman, her paramount destiny was as a wife and a mother.
As a direct result of Muller, states passed and maintained protective legislation for women working in a range of fields. In addition, these laws constructed many areas of employment as ill suited for women at all, and pregnant women in general were barred from several places of employment. By the early 1950s, every state defined pregnant women as unable to work and as ineligible for unemployment benefits. The denial of these benefits makes sense only if we assume that women are not the primary breadwinners in the home, or if we assume at the least that women's income is not essential to the household budget. Women were thought to work only for "pin money," the money they would save up to buy small baubles and luxuries. If they worked to support a family, the Cleveland Board of Education might well have wondered how the teachers in that city could afford eight to thirteen months of unpaid leave.
Before the Court, lawyers for the Cleveland Board of Education argued that pregnant women were "less fit to handle the rigors of teaching and disciplining urban high school students" and, returning to ground trod in Muller v. Oregon, stressed the "delicate" nature of pregnant women. In the brief they submitted on behalf of their policy, the Board of Education's lawyers wrote that high school students, "nurtured, as the evidence shows, by the violence of television programs and their reactions to the world around them, must be taught by able-bodied, vigorous teachers."
The Board of Education's brief goes on to elaborate its view that pregnant women are not able bodied or vigorous; rather, they are "delicate" and "fearful." A pregnant schoolteacher, according to the Board: "experiences the three classic fears of pregnancy: miscarriage, agony in labor, and a deformed child. Her pregnancy in the environment in which she finds herself, full of active, demanding, disrespectful and, indeed, sometimes jeering young people, affects her ability to teach.... She is no longer able-bodied in the classroom."
The mandatory leave policy was defended further on grounds more specific to the "state" of pregnancy itself and in ways that render "the baby bump" as a grotesquery. The board relied on cultural discomfort with pregnancy — the taboo against "showing" — that students would bring to the classrooms, to claim that students would mock LaFleur, make her a laughingstock, and refute her claims to authority — all because she had visible proof of her pregnancy.
The Supreme Court disagreed, and in his ruling for a seven-member majority, Justice Potter Stewart declared the board's policy a violation of due process guarantees. However, rather than take the school board to task for its archaic and Victorian views of pregnancy, Stewart's opinion stressed that the bright lines drawn by the policy were overly broad and restrictive, as "the ability of any particular pregnant woman to continue at work past any fixed time in her pregnancy is very much an individual matter." Justice Douglas's concurrence does hint, though, at his personal distaste for the board's reasoning. He wrote:
The record ... suggest[s] that the maternity leave regulations may have originally been inspired by other, less weighty, considerations. For example, Dr. Mark C. Schinnerer, who served as Superintendent of Schools in Cleveland at the time the leave rule was adopted, testified in the District Court that the rule had been adopted in part to save pregnant teachers from embarrassment at the hands of giggling schoolchildren; the cutoff date at the end of the fourth month was chosen because this was when the teacher "began to show."
Similarly, at least several members of the Chesterfield County School Board thought a mandatory leave rule was justified in order to insulate schoolchildren from the sight of conspicuously pregnant women. One member of the school board thought that it was "not good for the school system" for students to view pregnant teachers, "because some of the kids say, my teacher swallowed a watermelon, things like that."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pregnant with the Stars by Renée Ann Cramer. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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