This Is What Being Pregnant Was Actually Like In The 1950s

Many parents in the 21st century believe that “breast is best.” It helps build up a baby’s immune system and supports their development. That idea, however, is a relatively new one. In the 1950s, breastfeeding was discouraged by many doctors. Despite being the natural way to provide nourishment to a baby and being practiced for millennia, someone suddenly decided it was a bit, well, icky.

Today, it’s understood that babies can feel and hear things in the womb as early as 18 weeks into their development. Rubbing a pregnant belly, then, is believed to help form a bond with a baby. And can even be soothing when it’s unsettled.

The important thing to know is that a parent isn’t giving in to unreasonable demands by comforting their crying infant. However, in bygone times, some believed young lungs needed regular exercise to fully develop. Author Mrs Sydney Frankenburg made this quite clear in her 1946 book, Common Sense In The Nursery.

Someone giving birth in the 21st century will likely have their partner by their side (and maybe even a photographer and a videographer, too!). In years past, though, the person giving birth was probably on their own. Sure, there were a handful of nurses and a midwife to assist in the delivery, but the traditional father was to keep his distance until a few hours after the baby arrived.

There have long been theories about actions a parent can take to hasten the baby’s arrival at the end of a pregnancy. However, despite what you might have heard, taking a drive along a bumpy road isn’t one of them. In the ’50s, due and overdue parents-to-be would convince their partners to drive them on bumpy roads. Many believed that the bouncing motion would speed up labor.

Tennis player Serena Williams scored won the Australian Open while two months pregnant in 2017. But there was a time when doing something as innocuous as reaching up and grabbing something from the top shelf was considered "overdoing it" for a pregnant woman. Yup, during the ’50s, raising your arms above shoulder level when pregnant was thought to cause harm to unborn babies.

Today, moderate exercise is actively encouraged during pregnancy. For instance, a brisk 30-minute walk every day could do wonders for a pregnant person. But in the 1950s, exercise was actively discouraged for someone expecting. They were instructed to get as much rest as possible and avoid doing anything too… well, anything at all, really.

The negative atmosphere of a domestic feud can be stressful. And avoiding stress is a good idea for expectant people, whatever the cause. In the 1950s, however, it was believed to have serious consequences. Back then, doctors advised pregnant people to avoid getting involved in family arguments.

Baths were also off the agenda for expectant parents in the 1950s. It was once thought that bathing could cause harm to a fetus. Doctors thought it was possible for water to seep into the uterus and damage the growing baby. It sounds unreasonable these days, and we bet some pregnant women enjoyed a warm bath now and then back in the '50s.

Some believe that eating spicy food can induce an overdue labor. Yet although consuming a hot curry might have some effect on those who have shown the first signs of labor, there’s no solid evidence to back up that idea. But for past generations, spicy meals were off the menu entirely.

It’s not recommended to “eat for two” if you’re expecting a child. The extra pounds can cause complications such as pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes. But there was another reason previous generations were encouraged to keep their weight down. An issue of McCall’s Magazine published in 1956 recommended a stringent diet for pregnant people to promote a slender figure.

We now know that some things that physicians recommended back in the 1950s can actually cause harm to a developing fetus. Believe it or not, smoking and drinking alcohol were actively encouraged during pregnancy. Expectant parents were sometimes even offered a drink during routine checkups.

People were particularly discouraged from having haircuts while pregnant in the 1950s. It was thought that even a trim might harm the baby’s eyesight. Worse still, some believed a child’s life would be shortened or they’d suffer developmental problems. It sounds ridiculous now and, indeed, there’s no risk whatsoever to someone having a haircut during their pregnancy.

Parents-to-be were also advised against attending sporting events even as passive observers. Sports events can be the source of extreme emotions, both high and low, of course. And perhaps it was felt this was not right for those expecting.

If you thought 1950s pregnancy advice couldn’t get any weirder, you’re in for a shock. Woe betide any expectant parent if they happen to cross paths with an animal. Why? Because simply looking at it was thought to bring dire consequences.

Expectant parents were not advised to to go funerals in the 1950s. Now, attending this most solemn of gatherings is surely something no one wants to do, but the reasoning is, well, odd. Some thought that pregnant people attending funerals opened themselves up to bad luck.

Previous generations were actively discouraged from reading while pregnant. As with attending sporting events, any sudden plot twists or over-stimulating storylines in a novel might cause too much excitement or anguish, thus causing harm to the baby.

The Moon can have a powerful influence on what happens on Earth. But there was a time when people believed there was a lunar influence over when a baby was born.

In the 1950s, it might have been tempting for an expectant person not to tell anyone they were pregnant at all. The words “pregnant” and “pregnancy” were taboo, too, so it was a tricky subject to broach.

Giving birth is never fun, and although pain relief medications have advanced over the decades, it’s unlikely that a person in labor will feel nothing at all. But in the 1950s, there was a novel way to, shall we say, cut labor time.

Nowadays, if someone thinks they might be pregnant, they can just run down to the drugstore and pick up a test. But this is a pretty recent development in human history. While pregnancy tests as we know them have only been around for a few decades, the people of yesteryear had their own ways of figuring out if they were expecting.

Humans have been using urine to learn about pregnancy for much longer than you might think. In fact, we know that even the ancient Egyptians had some knowledge of this, though their methods are somewhat... strange. Records show that people in ancient Egypt would encourage a woman who might be pregnant to pee on some barley and wheat seeds. What good would that do, you ask?

Amazingly, there seems to have been some validity to this ancient test. Modern scientists in the 1960s actually investigated it, and the results proved very interesting. When a pregnant woman’s urine was added to the seeds, it encouraged sprouting 70 percent of the time! The urine of men and of women who weren’t pregnant was also added to similar seeds, and that didn’t result in growth.

Though the ancient Egyptians had some pretty solid thoughts about pregnancy and urine, they also had some other, well, less scientifically sound ideas. In both ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, people favored a rather peculiar practise involving potentially pregnant women and vegetables. According to some Egyptian texts and writings from the pioneering Greek medical practitioner Hippocrates, to tell if a woman is pregnant, an onion should be inserted into her vagina.

The following morning would be key in determining whether or not the woman with the onion inside her was pregnant. Her breath would be checked to see what it smelled like; if it had a whiff of onions, this meant she wasn’t pregnant. If her breath smelled as it normally would, then she was with child. But how on Earth did they reach such a strange conclusion?

The ancient Greeks and Egyptians were far from the only people in history to have some interesting ideas about pregnancy testing. Let’s fast-forward a little to the Middle Ages. For anyone who knows anything about medieval people, it won’t come as a surprise that they had some pretty off-the-wall theories in this department. Throughout the medieval period in Europe, the study of urine became extremely popular.

The Pisse-Prophets — or urine fortune tellers — would take a look at a person’s pee and claim to be able to diagnose a variety of conditions based on its color. The urine of pregnant women, for instance, was said to be a “clear pale-lemon color leaning toward off-white, having a cloud on its surface,” as one text from 1552 put it.

Perhaps the weirdest medieval pregnancy test is described in a 15th-century collection of French writings about women’s health, titled The Distaff Gospels. The text reads, “My friends, if you want to know if a woman is pregnant, you must ask her to pee in a basin and then put a latch or a key in it, but it is better to use a latch — leave this latch in the basin with the urine for three or four hours.

In the 16th century, a French doctor by the name of Jacques Guillemeau had developed his own ideas about how to detect pregnancy. According to him, it was all in the eyes! By examining a woman’s eyes, he believed he could tell if she was carrying a child or not.

Now, the specifics of Guillemeau’s theory might have been off the mark: we don’t see all pregnant women going around with deep-set eyes, tiny pupils, and sagging eyelids. That said, there might have been something to his idea in a broader sense: eyes do sometimes change as a result of a pregnancy.

Fast-forward to the 19th century, and modern science as we know it was really beginning to take shape. A lot of new theories were beginning to be formulated, including ones about how we might detect pregnancy. Urine, as in the ancient past, was understood to be central to getting to the bottom of things.

Without a surefire way to test for pregnancy being developed by the 19th century, a woman’s best bet was to pay attention to her own physiology. Was she experiencing morning sickness? Had her body changed in some discernible way? On that latter point, a more novel physical indication of pregnancy was mooted throughout this period.

Half a century passed before this observation was given an official name: Chadwick’s sign. That happened after a doctor named James Read Chadwick spoke about it during an American Gynecological Society gathering. It should be noted, though, that Chadwick’s sign is by no means a certain sign that someone is carrying a child. There are other factors besides pregnancy that might result in a woman’s genitalia changing color in this way.

By the final decade of the 19th century, the chemistry of the human body was beginning to be understood in a more comprehensive way. “Internal secretions” of chemicals from organs within the body, it was noted, are vital to how people function. Ernest Starling coined the term “hormones” to describe these chemical secretions.

As the link between hormones and pregnancy began to become clearer to scientists in the 20th century, the methods of testing remained pretty rudimentary. And the grim consequence of that fact is that some animals were put through awful ordeals. Creatures such as mice, rats, and rabbits were experimented on in terrible ways.

Aschheim and Zondek realized the pee of a pregnant person contains a specific hormone associated with the growth of ovaries. Today, we call this hormone “human chorionic gonadotropin,” or “hCG” for short. It was a pivotal finding, but it was achieved by undoubtedly unscrupulous means.

That’s already a terrible thought, but it gets even worse! Not only were the poor animals subjected to this terrible experiment, which would result in their ovaries developing bulges, but then they’d be purposely slain!

Regardless of whether or not the urine injected into the animals had come from a pregnant person, the end result for them was pretty much always the same: they were killed. This twisted method of pregnancy-testing actually gave rise to a euphemism for when a woman was with child: “the rabbit died.” The fact that the rabbit always died during these tests, even if the person wasn’t actually pregnant, seems not to have mattered to the phrase taking root.

Throughout the 1930s researchers started to develop a greater range of “bioassays” to help determine pregnancy in humans. A bioassay, incidentally, is a test that involves the use of living things in order to discern one thing or another. When it came to such tests to detect human pregnancy, animals such as frogs and toads were also brought into the grim fold, in addition to the mice, rabbits, and rats that were already being used.

By the end of the ’40s the use of toads and frogs in pregnancy tests was no longer necessarily resulting in the deaths of those animals. On the face of it, that might seem like progress — no more needless death, right?

Human progress has an undoubtedly dark side, but progress it was. The 1930s was a significant decade in the development of hormone studies. A particular milestone here is surely the First International Conference of Standardization of Sex Hormones, which took place in London in ’32.

By the advent of the 1960s new methods of pregnancy testing were starting to be devised. That year L. Wide and C.A. Gemzell created their hemagglutination inhibition test, which was quicker and less expensive than the old bioassay tests. On the other hand, it wasn’t much of an improvement when it came to accuracy.

As the ’60s drew on, more and more research was beginning to shed light on hormones and other workings of the human body. These broader developments and discoveries were soon applied specifically to the study of reproductive hormones such as hCG. This work, ultimately, laid the groundwork for the eventual development of the modern pregnancy test.

In an interview in 2003 the late Dr. Vaitukaitis spoke about how difficult her line of work had been back when she was starting out. She said, “There were very few places that were doing reproductive endocrinology research [in the late 1960s and early 1970s] because they didn’t have purified hormones, and there were just some very tedious ways of doing things.

Dr. Vaitukaitis and her colleagues could sometimes find themselves going to strange lengths in order to undertake their work. They needed a lot of pee for the purposes of their hormone research, but where could they source urine in such high quantities? Well, it turns out, they got it from a bunch of nuns!

When it came to understanding pregnancy hormones specifically, Dr. Vaitukaitis was really moving things along during the first couple of years of the ’70s. Alongside colleagues Griff Ross and Glenn Braunstein, she was revolutionizing the field. It wasn’t necessarily easy for them, but their work was vital.

As the 1970s drew on Western society started to change dramatically. The sexual revolution was taking root, while at the same time the quality of prenatal care was advancing and the legality of abortion was spreading. These last two points meant there was an increased incentive to detect pregnancies as early as possible.

Physicians in this period could utilize something called Wampole’s two-hour pregnancy test in order to ascertain whether or not a woman was bearing a child. This could be effective after as little as four days after the patient’s missed period. But to be clear, this wasn’t a test a person could administer themselves.

In 1973 a book called Our Bodies, Ourselves was published that informed women about the accuracy of the pregnancy test available to them at the time. The text claimed the test worked best a fortnight after a woman’s missed period, while it also claimed it was a simple process. Looking back from our perspective today, we might not agree with that last bit.

Meanwhile, the work of Dr. Vaitukaitis and her colleagues rumbled on. The test they had developed wasn’t easy for people to access yet, but they did what they could to help its spread. In 2003 the academic reflected, “We were doing assays for people all over the place.

In 1976 the next leap forward in the history of pregnancy testing was taken. The company Warner-Chilcott sought approval for its Early Pregnancy Test, which was later called the Error Proof Test. Approval was granted and it soon hit the market as the world’s first home pregnancy test.

Yet even though FDA approval had been granted for the Early Pregnancy Test, it still took a while for it to become genuinely easy for a person to get their hands on one. After all, there generally tends to be a bit of a gap between approval of a given product and its availability to the wider public.

By ’78 the Early Pregnancy Test was being advertised in the leading women’s magazines of the day. These included publications such as Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, Family Circle, and McCall’s. The message about the test, in other words, was really getting out there.

The test would take a couple of hours to complete, and weirdly it was more accurate when a woman was actually pregnant. If she was, the test would confirm that fact correctly 97 percent of the time. If she wasn’t, though, it would only correctly come up with a negative result 80 percent of the time.

The test wasn’t perfect and it didn’t provide the correct answer every single time. But it was more accurate than not, and it empowered women in a new way. They had a degree of autonomy over their own healthcare that simply hadn’t existed before.

New types of tests were developed throughout the ’90s, including ones that used graphics to denote a positive or negative result. Such graphics included a smiling baby in at least one instance, a round, pregnant belly in another, and even a depiction of a sperm in yet another.

As the designer of one particular ’90s pregnancy test remarked in 2012 to The New York Times, the images these tests deployed could be rather loaded. After all, a positive test might not always be a welcome result in all circumstances.

Over time the weird graphics were phased out and replaced by the much more neutral and palatable appearance of a thin blue line to denote a pregnancy. This, in fairness, was definitely less charged, but even that came to disappear over time.

By 2003 the scientific community was beginning to take stock of the recent developments in pregnancy-testing technology. With the new generation of pregnancy tests available, even than it was clear that we’d come a long way from peeing on seeds or having quack doctors look at pee for color: significant strides had certainly been made.

For as long as humankind has existed, whether or not a woman is pregnant has been one of the most pressing questions any woman — or her partner — can face. That’s perfectly clear just from considering the lengths that people once went to in order to find out the answer.