In modern pediatric practice, gender matters. From the pink-and-blue striped receiving blankets used to swaddle newborns, to the development of sex-specific nutrition plans based on societal expectations of the stature of children, a gendered culture permeates pediatrics and children’s health throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book provides a look at how gender has served as one of the frameworks for pediatric care in the U.S. since the specialty’s inception. Pink and Blue deploys gender—often in concert with class and race—as the central critical lens for understanding the function of pediatrics as a cultural and social project in modern U.S. history.
Introduction: Coming of Age Together: Gender and Pediatrics
Aimee Medeiros and Elena Conis
Part 1: Clinical Practice
Chapter 1: A Tale of Two Charts: The History of Gendering Sex-Specific Growth Assessment in Pediatrics
Aimee Medeiros
Chapter 2: “A Habit That Worries Me Very Much”: Raising Good Boys and Girls in the Postwar Era
Jessica Martucci
Chapter 3: Gender and Doctor-Parent Communication about Down Syndrome in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Hughes Evans
Chapter 4: Making Children into Boys and Girls: Gender Role in 1950s Pediatric Endocrinology
Sandra Eder
Chapter 5: Depathologizing Trans Childhood: The Role of History in the Clinic
Jules Gill-Peterson
Chapter 6: Race and Gender in the NICU: Wimpy White Boys and Strong Black Girls
Christine H. Morton, Krista Sigurdson, and Jochen Profit
Part 2: Body Politic
Chapter 7: Masculinity and the Case for a Childhood Vaccine
Elena Conis
Chapter 8: Weight, Height, and the Gendering of Nutritional Assessment
A.R. Ruis
Chapter 9: Competitive Youth Sports, Pediatricians, and Gender in the 1950s
Kathleen E. Bachynski
Chapter 10: Gender and the “New” Puberty
Heather Prescott
Chapter 11: Gender and HPV Vaccination: Responsible Boyhood or Responsible Girls and Women?
Laura Mamo and Ashley Pérez
Notes on Contributors
Index
ELENA C. CONIS, a historian specializing in the history of public health, medicine, and the public understanding of science, is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Journalism and Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization.
SANDRA EDER is an assistant professor in the history department at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches U.S. gender history and the history of medicine. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality in medicine and science, clinical practices and patient records, and the science of happiness. She is currently writing a book on the emergence of the sex/gender binary in mid-twentieth century American medicine. She has published in Gender & History, Endeavour, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
AIMEE MEDEIROS is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of Heightened Expectations: The Rise of the Human Growth Hormone Industry in America. She specializes in the history of pediatrics, gender studies, and science and technology studies.
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