Amy Kaler - Baby Trouble in the Last Best West: Making New People in Alberta, 1905-1939

What would it mean for social history to take reproduction seriously? More precisely, what would it mean to put the reproduction of human beings at the centre of our stories about individual and collective continuity and change? In this book, I propose to do exactly that, by examining the making of new people in the first few decades of Albertas existence, from 1905 to the beginning of the Second World War in 1939. I focus on baby trouble: the complexities, anxieties, and difficulties that have characterized the social relations surrounding Albertan womens childbearing. Baby trouble incorporates the babies who were born under difficult or socially awkward circumstances; the women whose mothering made them into inconvenient subjects for the state; the men who took or did not take responsibility for these women and children; and the collective fears and strategies that were mustered up in response to the endless conundrums posed by human reproduction.

This book proceeds as a series of episodes, each examining a different facet of baby trouble. These episodes are organized thematically rather than strictly chronologically. In this introductory chapter, I bring in the ideas that have shaped my work, in particular, the concept of an imaginative economy of reproduction. The second chapter lays the groundwork regarding the social organization of reproduction by discussing the history of childbirth as an institutionalized phenomenon in Alberta that is, the physical, material conditions under which new people came into being. In the third chapter, we move into reproduction as troubled terrain as I discuss the issue of illegitimacy and the management of reproduction outside the normative framework of marriage through a case study of the principal home for unmarried mothers in Alberta.

The fourth chapter takes on the notorious Sexual Sterilization Act of 1927 by examining the parallel discursive streams of what I call high and low eugenics. The issue at hand was whether certain individuals or classes of people should be prohibited from reproduction. Racism and colonialism figured prominently in this debate, in that they animated fears about the wrong sort of people having babies.

The fifth chapter addresses the ways in which reproduction serves as a basis for claims-making and arguments about entitlement. I move beyond the events surrounding the biological creation of children to examine the controversies over whether lone mothers were entitled to allowances for raising children. Through these allowances, some womens reproductive actions were legitimized (i.e., if the women were widowed or had been deserted by a legal husband, or if their behaviour fell within socially approved bounds) while other types of actions were declared undesirable.

Finally, in the sixth chapter I discuss the ultimate form of troubled reproduction: infant mortality, the deaths of babies who had only just come into being. In framing infant mortality as a political problem, not simply a collection of individual tragedies, we see the imaginative economy of reproduction extended to encompass not only the making but also the unmaking of new people in Alberta.

The books overall trajectory thus moves from the concrete and corporeal to the speculative and abstract. We begin by discussing the physical details of how babies got themselves born, then move through the social meanings attached to babies (and their mothers) as they embraced or strayed from idealized notions of proper reproduction, until we arrive, finally, at a consideration of babies who were never more than babies, the importance of whose lives to Alberta will never be known because they died soon after birth. In each chapter, I tell the story of a particular episode of baby trouble, but I also examine these episodes in the context of broader questions about reproduction in social theory. These questions differ by chapter: Is childbirth a political act (or a political duty)? Does welfare substitute for men in the lives of husbandless mothers? Is infant death a public tragedy? What political space can be claimed by the invocation of motherhood?