In 1961, Ingeborg Cully chronicled her experience giving birth in an iron lung in an article entitled “I Am an ‘Iron-Lung’ Mother.” Cully had previously made headlines as one of New York’s “polio mothers of the year,” a title that local March of Dimes chapters bestowed upon dozens of mothers across the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Mothers’ March on Polio, sponsored by the March of Dimes, has traditionally been framed as a social movement driven by non-disabled mothers marching on behalf of their polio-stricken children. My paper instead tells the story of the campaign against polio from the perspective of polio mothers like Cully, who showed off their iron lungs and wheelchairs in newspapers, helped organize Mothers’ Marches, and represented their communities on national television shows. I argue that the election of polio mothers served as a conversative form of reproductive activism that reinforced polio mothers’ belonging within the status quo of the white, upper-middle-class nuclear family. It reified gender roles, sustained an ableist dichotomy dependent on one’s ability to perform traditional maternal duties, and perpetuated racial limits on citizenship. But polio mothers also called attention to the sexual lives and reproductive needs of polio survivors at a time when women with disabilities were widely deemed to be unfit wives and mothers and when forced sterilizations were routinely being performed on other women labeled as disabled. Reframing polio mothers as activists with demands and reproductive beings with needs enhances historians’ understandings of American reproductive activism.

This paper explores the intricate ways in which work conditions in the late Soviet Union impacted human reproductive health, a subject nested at the confluence of environmental, medical, gender, and political history (Buckley, 1989; Ashwin 2000; Berridge and Gorski, 2012; Nakachi 2021). Drawing upon archival materials from the Research Institute of Occupational Health and Occupational Diseases of the Russian Ministry of Health, oral history interviews, and “for official use” (DSP) publications dedicated to "female occupational hygiene" produced during the late Soviet period, the presentation will shed light on how scientific research of the time addressed these issues. It aims to historicize the connection between gendered bodies and medical knowledge by revealing how occupational health and disease were intertwined with broader socio-political issues and highlighting how scientific studies both reflected the existing gender norms within the Soviet society and contributed to their destabilization.

Key findings point to a substantial body of research highlighting the adverse effects of work environments and related conditions on the reproductive system, particularly of young women and adolescent girls. The study further posits that late Soviet investigations into how work conditions detrimentally affected women’s bodies might have indirectly justified a "return" of women to domestic sphere during the Perestroika era. This investigation contributes to a richer understanding of the dynamics between gender, health, and labor in the late Soviet Union, highlighting the ways in which state policies intersect with biological and social realities and inviting comparisons with contemporary global concerns regarding occupational health policies and gender equality.

In 1895, French obstetrician Adolphe Pinard used the term “puériculture”, which he later defined as the science related to “the research of knowledge relevant to the reproduction, conservation, and improvement of the human species”. Its scope was divided into three parts: puericulture before procreation, intrauterine puericulture and puericulture after birth. Puericulture was conceived as a medical science of childhood, from procreation to the end of adolescence, at a time when children were the object of growing scientific, occupational and political interest. After the First World War, a higher education institution, the École de Puériculture de la Faculté de Médecine de Paris, was created to train puericulture physicians and nurses. This paper focuses on the medical students and physicians who studied at this institution, and their role in the transnational circulation of medical ideas and practices concerning childhood during the interwar period. During this period, more than half of the students were foreigners who travelled from all continents to study puericulture before introducing or developing it in their respective countries. Moreover, they organized themselves to promote, not only their diploma, but also their specific expertise and approach to childhood. I argue that the École de Puériculture was a site for the transnational circulation of medical ideas, concerning the notion of “normal development” of the child, and of practices linked to preventing care.