Scissors, Surveys, And Psycho-Prophylactics: Prenatal Health Care Campaigns And State Building In China, 1949–1954

This paper examines how the Chinese state's prenatal health care campaigns of the early 1950s attempted to redefine women's social and political roles. The replacement of local midwifing practices with a uniform birthing method in order to radically reduce infant and mother mortality entailed complex ramifications regarding the relationship of women vis-a-vis the state. Campaigns involved demonizing "traditional" midwifing, promoting a statistical vision of female reproductivity and children as national resources, and the isolation of individual mothers as directly responsible to the state for managing reproduction for the national interest. In sum, a physiological definition of gender was used to open women's bodies to state management. Utopic visions of painless childbirth and of the socialist nation as a giant new family were used to promote participation in grassroots campaigns, but the sources also point to forms of local resistance to the micro-level reorganization of power these campaigns intended.