Included in the Mütter Museum’s “Designing Motherhood” exhibition are objects and ideas including the menstrual cup, speculum, sterilization abuse, baby showers, Kegel exercises, and the experience of masculine birth as a transgender birthing person.
A New Exhibition in Philadelphia Examines the Hidden Histories of Reproduction
When I returned to work after having my first child, I had 20 minutes between patients to pump milk. Accessing the designated pumping rooms, however, required a 10-minute walk and waiting in line; so I pumped in my exam room instead, between wound dressings, STD checks, and tearful conversations about new HIV diagnoses. It took time to meticulously disinfect the space before and after. I weighed the etiquette of storing human milk near my coworkers’ lunches (opting instead to lug a cooler in each day). I tracked the output: A suboptimal session from stress, dehydration, or malfunctioning pump parts could compromise nursing. And another several minutes were spent cleaning those numerous parts and their tubing. If something was broken or lost, it would mean hand-pumping, excruciating pain, and sometimes mastitis. The math did not work out. I fell behind schedule, finishing clinic notes after work hours, usually while nursing my infant.
It was an isolating, miserable part of my life juxtaposed with the joy of having a new child. My head spun navigating the daily logistics of motherhood and work responsibilities. As a physician, I regularly discussed sickness, death, and sex with my patients while decrying stigma. But I defaulted to treating my own bodily experiences as impolite and furtive. I had enormous privileges —maternity leave, childcare, a supportive partner and colleagues—and still I was drowning. I did not have words at that time for the bewilderment of getting through each day.
Since meeting at a baby shower in 2017, the design historians Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick have tried to elevate the narratives and history around fertility, childbirth, parenting, menstruation, and similar experiences through the lens of design. In 2015, Fisher had been a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she proposed adding a midcentury breast pump to the collection. (The device had significantly improved on the discomfort and noise from the previous adapted dairy farm equipment.) She argued that this breast pump model, like celebrated household appliances and other “humble masterpieces,” had advanced a design that meaningfully bettered the lives of women. This was worth canonizing, she said. Yet the museum politely disagreed.
“These designs often live in very embedded ways in our memories and our bodies,” Fisher and Winick write in a new book, Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births. “We don’t just remember our first period, but also the technologies that first collected that blood. We don’t just remember the way babies arrive, but also what they were wrapped in when they finally reached our arms.”
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Dharushana Muthulingam
