Changing Maternal ‘Busyness’ and Declines in Child Mortality in the Past and in the Present

Alaka Basu, Cornell University

In contrast to the preoccupation with gender in the literature on child mortality in developing countries, in the historical demography of the West, women are barely mentioned in debates on falling child mortality; the focus is largely on the relative roles of economic development and progress in medicine. However, the historical literature on social change has much to say about the changing ‘ideology’ of the family and especially on the rising domestic demands on women’s time and attention. These changes must have contributed to improvements in health and mortality if one extrapolates from the literature on women’s roles in contemporary child mortality. I combine the literature on maternal roles and child mortality in the developing world with that on ideological changes around maternity in the past to suggest that good child health outcomes often depend on new rules of intensive mothering rather than an expansion of the autonomy of women. We thus need supportive public health policies to lessen rather than increase maternal responsibility for child health if we really care about women’s empowerment.

Keywords: Gender Dynamics, Children, Adolescents, and Youth, Historical Demography, Comparative methods

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