Whitney Wood & Danielle Cossey-Sutton

Whitney Wood & Danielle Cossey-Sutton, “High-Tech Obstetrics, Colonialism, and Childbirth Choice in Late Twentieth-Century Canada“. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2025; 99(1) : 156-184.

Wood and Cossey-Sutton reveal how the electronic fetal monitor, intended to increase birth safety, led to an increasingly medicalized childbirth in which women were more likely to experience pregnancy complications including caesarean sections. They clearly map how the lack of obstetric technology in the North led to the withdrawal of obstetric care. The authors deftly question the relationship between technology and progress, especially when new technologies were inequitably distributed and embedded in an ongoing history of settler colonialism. Relying on international and Canadian sources, written by medical researchers, activists and journalists, it significantly expands our knowledge of childbirth in the late 20^th century, the women’s health movement, and the experience and activism of Indigenous women who fought against these practices.

HONOURABLE MENTION:

Amanda Ricci, “Feminists Confront the Neoliberal Turn: The Third United Nations World Conference on Women, Nairobi, 1985“. Canadian Historical Review 2025; 106(1), 31-56.

Ricci’s article situates Canadian feminists at the center of transnational debates and policy-making projects connected to the UN World Conference on Women held in Nairobi in 1985. Ricci proposes an important counter-narrative to the argument that, by pursuing a politics of recognition rather than redistribution, second-wave feminism ultimately capitulated to neoliberalism. Her research shows that although the Canadian delegation in Nairobi was ultimately complicit in protecting the power of the Global North, delegates returned to Canada empowered with new language and analytical frameworks to challenge neoliberal agendas domestically. The Conference’s emphasis on macroeconomic forces and solidarity politics helped feminists tie traditional women’s issues like family, social policy, and violence to national and transnational political and economic systems, which led to a “genuinely oppositional” countercurrent to the neoliberal turn. Ricci’s article poses a significant challenge to historians to reconsider the relationship between the late-20^th century women’s movement and neoliberalism.