Motherhood, medicine and magazines in interwar Vienna: the case of Die Mutter (The Mother, 1924-1926).

Abstract

In an era long before 'Doctor Google', the question of how people accessed information about their bodies and their health is significant. This article investigates how medical knowledge about motherhood was disseminated in the pages of an entirely neglected and short-lived, yet important interwar Viennese periodical, Die Mutter: Halbmonatsschrift für alle Fragen der Schwangerschaft, Säuglingshygiene und Kindererziehung (The Mother: A Biweekly Magazine for All Questions about Pregnancy, Infant Hygiene and Child-Rearing). The magazine's founder, editor and champion was Gina Kaus, a bestselling, prize-winning author and screenplay writer. Die Mutter was part of a wider interwar Viennese press landscape of publications dedicated to mothers and motherhood, many of them produced by women for women. I suggest that periodicals about motherhood constituted an important alternative public sphere, one coming in part from the grassroots, rather than from a top-down municipal approach to public health-even in a city where mothers' bodies were already a focal point for left-of-center politics and public health initiatives in the wake of World War I.