The Proposed 'Professor of Maternity'
A state legislator introduces a bill to create a 'Chair of Maternity' at the University of Washington, aiming to instruct female students in the 'duties of motherhood.'
Representative Rader desires to make maternity to order in the educational institutions of the state, to make maternity a science instead of a natural function, and to have her known hereafter as Prof. Mamma instead of the good old mother of New England type. Rader's bill is number 589, and provides for a chair of maternity in the state university and normal schools. It requires the proper authorities to secure a competent female of experience as a mother for each of these institutions who is versed in all that pertains to the birth and culture of children, who possesses a general education, who is qualified as a physician and who has an intimate knowledge of hygiene and all that pertains thereto, and who has made prenatal influences a special study, and who shall be known as professor of maternity. Once established it shall be the duty of Prof. Mamma to give the female pupils instruction in the duties of motherhood, with special reference to the influences upon the unborn generations.
“Representative Rader desires to make maternity to order in the educational institutions of the state, to make maternity a science instead of a natural function.”
This 1895 proposal reflects the era's intense, often paternalistic, focus on 'scientific motherhood' and eugenics-adjacent theories of prenatal influence. It serves as a stark reminder of how public policy once sought to codify and control the domestic lives of women under the guise of academic instruction.
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