Race, culture and the making of ‘natural’ childbirth between colonial India and Europe

Abstract

Kathleen Olga Vaughan was a British medical doctor and obstetrician who worked for around two decades in colonial India, from 1903 to the early 1920s. Unlike the great majority of medical doctors and obstetricians of her time, Vaughan was convinced that an easy and healthy childbirth was not connected with the width of the female pelvis – a characteristic that was strongly racialised – but with active living that involved exercises that contributed maintaining the pelvic anatomy healthy and functional. In her views, it was in the squatting position assumed by the ‘native’ labouring classes in India during their daily activities that pelvic development was perfect and childbirth easy. Based on these observations, Vaughan embarked on a lifelong career of propounding in medical journals as well as through her medical practice back in Europe the need of ‘civilised’ women to ‘go native’ and adopt habits from supposedly ‘less civilised’ peoples. In doing so, she offered pre-natal physical training courses aimed at making the pelvis flexible according to what she saw in India and became involved in the rising medical movement that criticised the heavy medicalisation of childbirth. This paper analyses Vaughan’s work to investigate how the ‘colonial’ influenced meanings, practices and ideologies of natural childbirth in the West.