In this book, a team of international contributors examine bodies, leakage and boundaries, illuminating the contradictions and dilemmas in women’s healthcare.
Using the concept of pollution, this book highlights how women and health issues are categorised, and health workers and women are confined to roles and places defined as socially appropriate. The book explores in-depth current and historical practices, such as:
- childbirth and midwifery practice
- policies and social practices around breastfeeding
- gynaecological nursing, female incontinence and sexually transmitted infections
- miscarriages and termination of pregnancy.
Addressing things out of place, from the idea of ‘dirty work’ to feeling ‘dirty’, from diagnoses that disrupt our self-image to beliefs and practices which undermine health service provision, this book uses the contradictions in our thinking around pollution and power to stimulate thinking around women’s health.
Chapter 1: Language and Status: the disappearing and reappearing ‘midwife’ - Lesley Barclay, Charles Darwin University, Australia
Chapter 2: Genetic traits as pollution: the case of 'White English' carriers of sickle cell/thalassaemia traits - Simon Dyson, Director of TASC Unit, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
Chapter 3: Midwives: defiling women! - Kuldip Bharj, Head of Division of Midwifery, University of Leeds, UK
SECTION 2: Leakage and Labelling
Chapter 4: Containing the leaking body: female incontinence and formal health care - Joanne Jordan, Lecturer, Queen’s University, Belfast
Chapter 5: Leaky bodies and boundaries: Older women and early miscarriage - Julia Frost, University of Bristol, UK
Chapter 6: "I just felt really dirty": women’s responses to a diagnosis of chlamydial infection - Hilary Piercy, Nurse Lecturer, University of Sheffield
SECTION 3: BREASTFEEDING AS POLLUTION
Chapter 7: ‘Resisting the gaze’: The subversive nature of breastfeeding - Fiona Dykes, Reader in Maternal and Infant Health, University of Central Lancashire
Chapter 8: The pollution of objective scientific practice by anecdotal stories of personal, vicarious or cultural experience: the denial of embodied knowledge - Mary Smale, Breastfeeding Counsellor and Tutor, National Childbirth Trust
Chapter 9: Not in public please: Breastfeeding as dirty work - Susan Battersby, Lecturer, University of Sheffield, UK
Chapter 10: "Milk for Africa and the neighbourhood" but socially isolated - Cheryl Benn, Associate Professor, Massey University, New Zealand
Chapter 11: Breastfeeding: a time for caution - Alison Spiro, Health Visitor, UK
SECTION 4: Midwives and Dirt
Chapter 12: Birth Dirt - Helen Callaghan, Freelance Midwifery Researcher, Australia
Chapter 13: Pollution and Safety – controls of a secular world - Trudy Stevens, Lecturer in Midwifery, Anglia Polytechnic University
Chapter 14: Drained and dumped on: the generation and accumulation of emotional toxic waste in community midwifery - Ruth Deery, Senior Lecturer, University of Huddersfield and Mavis Kirkham, Professor of Midwifery, University of Sheffield
SECTION 5: History: Containing Birth Pollution
Chapter 15: A clean front passage: Dirt, douches and disinfectants at St Helen’s Hospital, Wellington, New Zealand, 1907-1922 - Pamela Wood, Associate Professor, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and Maralyn Foureur , Clinical Professor of Midwifery, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Chapter 16: The Thanksgiving of women after childbirth: a blessing in disguise? - Rachel Newell, Lecturer in Midwifery, University of Dundee
section 6: Dais
Chapter 17: Rethinking ‘pollution’—Understanding ‘narak’ - Janet Chawla, Director, MATRIKA, New Delhi, India
Chapter 18: Dais’ Work in Gujarat, India - Subadhra Rai, recent PhD graduate from University of Alberta, Canada
Chapter 19: The dirt has to come away - Margaret Chesney, Senior Lecturer/Director of Midwifery Education, University of Salford
CHAPTER 20: Pollution and women in sickness, health, birth and work - Mavis Kirkham, Professor of Midwifery, University of Sheffield
Biography
Mavis Kirkham is Professor of Midwifery at the University of Sheffield. Here current research interests are in why midwives leave the service, and why some of them stay. She has edited three other books in the field.
