Schlesinger Library: “Your Baby on Day 33”: Pregnancy Development Timelines from Nineteenth-Century Maternity Guides to Twenty-First Century Apps

Lara Freidenfelds

“Your Baby on Day 33”: Pregnancy Development Timelines

from Nineteenth-Century Maternity Guides to Twenty-First Century Apps

February 20, 2018

4-5:30 p.m.

Radcliffe Room, Schlesinger Library

Consistently over the centuries, timelines have described an ideal pregnancy and ignored the large proportion of pregnancies which do not reach fruition in full-term birth. What would a more realistic and informative description of prenatal development look like?

Lara Freidenfelds is the author of The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America. Her next book, Perfecting Pregnancy and Mourning Miscarriage: The History that Shaped Modern Childbearing, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2019. She holds an A.B. in Social Anthropology and a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University, and her research has been supported by a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wellesley College. She is a regular contributor to Nursing Clio.