Mexican Women's Pelves and Obstetrical Procedures: Interventions with Forceps in Late 19th-Century Medicine

Abstract

This essay is an inquiry into the socio-cultural history of the use of forceps in 19th-century Mexico. It argues that the knowledge and practices that the use of such instruments implied were related to complex and controversial issues of the time regarding gender, race and national identity. In my study of operations involving forceps, I found that the adoption of medical instruments depended not only upon their supposedly greater operative efficiency but also upon the political and medical meanings attributed to the pelves of Mexican women. Early 19th-century obstetrics conceived the womb as an example of ‘living nature’ whose qualities assured that births were ‘normally happy events’ making the use of forceps and other instruments unnecessary. However, by mid-century, in the aftermath of independence, Mexico was desperately attempting to forge its identity as a nation. Due to European theories of race, Mexican women came to be characterized as having pathologically deformed pelves that evidenced possible defects of racial formation. The analysis of operative practices involving forceps reveals just how strongly such medical instruments became charged with a complex political definition of the ‘mestizo race’, which was seen to hold political promise for the future. In this context, forceps ceased to symbolize the threat of death, with which they had been associated since colonial times, and became artefacts that helped to assure the safe delivery of newborn mestizos by overcoming the problems of Mexican women's pathological pelves; although by the same token, the status of women as biologically inferior beings in need of medical assistance was reconfirmed.

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“…Gender and nation were linked in notions of this emerging social body. For instance, physicians’ expectations that mestiza women's pelvises would reach an ideal midpoint between too‐narrow European and too‐wide indigenous structures reflected stereotypes about each group's femininity and the kind of womanhood that would enable national progress (Cházaro ). The flip side of this valorization of homogeneity through mixing was the fear that individual failures to assimilate, or the Mexican populace's failure to evolve toward modernity, would thwart national advancement.…”