Strollers and swaddles and sound machines, oh my
Unpacking the history and anthropology of the baby shower
As of last week, I’ve officially reached the third trimester of pregnancy. So far, each trimester has had distinct themes (to say nothing of distinct aches, pains, and generally annoying physical symptoms):
1st tri: The ‘Oh shit, what have I done?’ phase. Characterized by mild panic and grief over the impending loss of my former self.
2nd tri: The ‘I’m still me!’ phase. Characterized by a manic focus on completing as many professional and personal goals as possible while I still have the time and energy.
It’s still early days, but the third tri is shaping up to be the ‘Oh shit, this child is coming soon and I’m not ready’ phase. Name? Haven’t figured out last name, let alone first. Birth plan? Um…deliver a baby. Nursery? Currently a room full of all the random boxes we haven’t gotten around to unpacking.
Recently I’ve been channeling my mounting anxiety into extensive research (are you surprised?) on cribs and car seats, bottles and bassinets, strollers and swaddles.1 Sometimes this is fun! Sincere apologies to the innocent shopper I nearly ran over while my husband and I were racing strollers down the aisles of Target.
More often, it is decidedly un-fun. I’ve always hated shopping, and I’ve long hated the idea of buying things I might not actually use, or use only for a limited time. Plus, it is objectively difficult to shop for a person you’ve never met and whose preferences you can only guess at.
Add to that the sense of urgency around getting all these items picked out for a registry that can be linked on baby shower invites, which need to go out in an Emily Post-sanctioned timeframe, and you understand why my anxiety-management strategy (control the things you can control!) has paradoxically begun spiking my angst.
My husband, who is sometimes frustratingly reasonable, has watched me start to spiral and raised several thoughtful questions: Do we really need a shower? Why does the registry have to be done so far ahead of said shower – how long does it take people to click a few buttons on Amazon? And, while we’re talking showers, why do we need a theme and why will most of the attendees be women?
My first instinct was to respond with a mix of annoyance and dismissal: That’s just how you do things; I didn’t make these rules up; please don’t be difficult.
In a calmer, more reflective moment, though, I got curious. Why do we do things this way? And that, friends, is how I found myself going down another research rabbit hole—this one much more pleasant than the shopping one—to discover the history and anthropology of the baby shower.
Here’s what I learned.2
Women have been gathering to mark and celebrate childbirth for many centuries, but the church basement shower you’re probably familiar with is largely a post-WWII thing.
Cultures throughout history—the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks, and so on—have developed rituals to celebrate new mothers and new children, or to support women in labor. My favorite example comes from colonial America, where friends gathered to eat “groaning cake” while a woman gave birth, so named to imply solidarity with her pain.3 Some sources suggest the smell of a baking cake would itself ease said pain for the laboring woman; personally I think it would piss me off to know my friends were enjoying baked goods while I suffered through another contraction. But that’s just me.
The pre-birth shower, complete with gifts and snacks and games, emerged much more recently, when maternal and infant mortality declined (making it a safer bet to celebrate and prepare earlier); consumer goods became more affordable (cue the registry…); people started giving birth in hospitals rather than at home (no more groaning cakes!); and pregnant women became more visible in society (in earlier eras, it was seen as somewhat gauche for a pregnant woman to be out and about).
Depending on who you ask, the modern baby shower is a consumerist orgy or an important social ritual that facilitates a major transition.
The consumerist part is perhaps the most obvious function of the shower, if you’ve been to one recently and watched an expectant mother unwrap a mountain of boxes. This is perhaps not an especially generous read: babies do require a whole lot of stuff (although perhaps less than the registry-industrial complex might have you believe), and many first-time parents are not in a financial position to pay for all that stuff themselves. Regardless, though, the giving and receiving of goods is inarguably central to the whole enterprise.
This was the function of showers that my admittedly cynical brain fixated on as a shower attendee. But anthropological analyses alerted me to another function: showers are a venue in which, as the scholars Eileen Fischer and Brenda Gainer put it, an expectant mom gets to “‘try out’ both the new equipment she will need to care for her baby [and] to ‘try out’ her role as a mother.”
There’s some debate in the literature about whether the shower itself qualifies as a rite of passage. Traditionally such rites are conceived as three-part rituals involving disengagement from an old role, a transitional or liminal state, and finally reintegration in a new role. Fischer and Gainer argue convincingly that based on this definition, pregnancy is the rite of passage, a sort of nine-month transition period bookended by conception and birth.
The shower, then, is a ritual that helps expectant parents pass through that liminal state and prepare for their new role. It also serves as a public acknowledgment of that role shift, much as a wedding does for a married couple.
Men have historically been excluded because they weren’t seen as undergoing a major role shift or in particular need of communal wisdom (and gear!).
A very obvious objection to the “traditional” shower is that it focuses almost exclusively on the mom-to-be and her woman friends and relatives. That’s starting to change but, at least in my experience, a mixed-gender shower is still the exception rather than the rule. I’ll be honest, this has really bugged me at times. In most cases, there are two expectant parents in need of strollers and sage advice on infant care – why not celebrate them both?
The short answer: the idea that a father would be heavily involved in caring for this tiny human is a relatively new one (at least in modern American history – if we take a longer and more global lens, it’s a somewhat different story). And if we think of the shower as, in part, a way for a community of mothers to initiate a new woman into their ranks and pass down hard-won wisdom, well, it would’ve been weird to have men sitting in.
But these days fathers are increasingly expected to perform both breadwinning and caregiving roles. Why, then, are we still doing woman-only showers? Here I’m stepping more into the realm of conjecture, but my guess is that the baby shower is a ritual of femininity that many women simply want to experience for themselves. As a few of the articles I consulted pointed out, when men are invited to a shower, it usually becomes something different: less juice, more alcohol; fewer games, more cocktail party banter. For plenty of expectant women, that’s not necessarily a good thing.
And then there’s the perspective of a friend of mine: I asked her why she’d decided not to invite men to her shower, and she told me, “I’m carrying and birthing this baby, and I want my own party, dammit!” Fair enough.
Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say that I ultimately decided a baby shower was (with some modifications) a ritual that I wanted to partake in. This has been a difficult transition for me, and a shower—in fact, a couple of showers, geared toward different communities in my life—feels like the best way to a) alert my people to my need for support, and b) reassure myself that I’ve got plenty of people in my corner and am part of a long, long history of women who have successfully made it to the other side. Gifts are, for me, secondary to community engagement—though a very nice bonus in light of the exorbitant childcare costs I’ll soon start paying. So, I’m (attempting to) ease the pressure I’ve put on myself to have a complete and optimal registry by any particular date.
Is the baby shower socially constructed and imperfect? Yes. But the point of recognizing social constructions isn’t necessarily to reject them – that’s a fast track to ending up alone, possibly in a cave. Instead, it’s about mindfully choosing which social constructions to engage with, and how. Baby bingo, here I come…
If, by chance, you find yourself in a similar position, my primary sources have been the recommendations of friends, Lucie’s List, Baby Gear Lab, and that good ol’ Millennial standby Wirecutter. Sometimes, there is miraculous consensus across these sites; more often, they come to wildly different conclusions. This can be annoying, but it’s also reassuring: no, there is no perfect stroller.
There’s not as much scholarly literature on this topic as I expected, so I’m drawing from a mix of academic and non-academic sources here, including an ethnographic study of pregnancy in the US, a qualitative study of showers specifically, and a few articles that include citations and/or appear well-researched.