Udodiri R. Okwandu

This project investigates how scientific and sociocultural understandings of race and motherhood informed the classification, diagnosis, and treatment of maternal mental illnesses—i.e., mental disorders associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period—in the United States from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. It argues that medical responses to maternal mental illness have perpetuated racialized visions of the ideal mother—one who is white, middle-class, and domestic—and her counterpart: a non-white, working-class, or poor woman deemed unfit for motherhood. This project traces how these logics materialized in various contexts: through legal cases involving mothers accused of violent or criminal behavior; sterilization laws targeting “degenerate” mothers; government-funded studies on the impact of maternal mental illness on children’s development; and efforts to regulate the fertility of poor, non-white mothers considered susceptible to pregnancy-related psychoses. By tracing the history of maternal mental illness through the lens of racial categorization, this project challenges historical studies that have depicted this diagnostic category as race-neutral and primarily based on gender and sex. It also illustrates how medical understandings of maternal mental illness reflected larger debates regarding race, womanhood, and US demographic futures and, ultimately, inform contemporary racial disparities in maternal mental health outcomes.