People Will Talk, Frogs, and Vintage Pregnancy Books

 As many of you may know, I really love to analyze both printed texts and films for what they have to say about changing societal contexts. (Heck, I love it so much that it's essentially what I got my first post-undergrad degree in!) 

Well, as I've officially hit third trimester, I've decided it's a good time to do a dive into some movies, both older and newer, that feature pregnancy. 

I was inspired to choose People Will Talk, a film from 1951 starring Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain, as my first movie because I also managed to find a vintage pregnancy book from the era a few months ago at a local used bookstore. The book, The Story of Human Birth by Dr. Alan Frank Guttmacher, was first published under its title in 1947, and I think together these texts say a lot about pregnancy and norms from the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The interesting thing about the actual medical recommendations surrounding birth in this time period is that they are not too far off from today's. Many of the tips for and signs of first trimester, recommendations on exercise, and the basic understanding of how the trimesters progress are all similar to what one can find in pregnancy books in the 2020s. 

One notable exception is how one confirms a pregnancy. In the 1951 film People Will Talk, after Jeanne Crain's character, Deborah, insists that a test to show whether she's pregnant should take weeks, Cary Grant's dashing doctor replies: 

"Not any more! Nowadays we find out about everything a lot more quickly than we used to... 

They used to use a little pink rabbit for the pregnancy test. Now they use a frog. Not really as cute, but it's a lot faster. About two hours."

This is a reference to what is known as the “Hogben test.” This once-widely-used test is described in an article from The Atlantic thusly:

The “Hogben test” was simple. Collect a woman’s urine and inject it, fresh and untreated, under the skin of a female Xenopus [frog species]. Then, wait. If the woman is pregnant, between five and 12 hours later, the frog will produce a cluster of millimeter-sized, black-and-white spheres. The results were reliable. One researcher reported that after injecting 150 frogs, he never got any false positives and only missed three actual pregnancies... And so it was that tens of thousands of frogs were infused with human urine between the 1940s and 1960s.

This actually was a huge advancement in pregnancy technology. As Cary Grant's fictional doctor explains, the new "frog test" was a lot faster (though not quite the two hours the movie claimed), and it was also a boon for animal activists (and people who just generally didn't want animals dying because of a pregnancy test). The rabbit test involved dissection to inspect how a woman's urine affected the size of a rabbit's ovaries, which led to the bloody death of a bunny every time a test was completed. On the other hand, the frogs of the Hogben test could be reused for future tests after they laid their eggs, and it actually led to the exponential growth of the specifies through medical farms.

Still, it feels quite different and less clinical than the plastic stick one pees on today. Heck, the test that confirmed my pregnancy even had a little computer screen to make the read-out that much clearer.

But it's worth noting that even the rabbit and frog tests were huge advancements over previous eras. An earlier 1922 pregnancy book, Getting Ready to be a Mother, doesn't contain any possible tests for pregnancy. Instead, doctors and parents-to-be alike had to rely on "possible," "probable," and finally "positive" signs that one was pregnant, including a missed period, some "enlargement of the abdomen... noticed about the third month," and finally hearing the baby's heart beat at "the eighteenth or twentieth week" (34-36). Before the heartbeat, any signs of pregnancy were taken as "fair, but not positive, evidence [of] a baby" (35).

By the time Deborah is tested in People will Talk and Dr. Guttmacher wrote The Story of Human Birth, however, these miraculous animal tests were available and, according to one study cited by Dr. Guttmacher, "98 percent accurate" (31). Still, Guttmacher dreamed of a day when a more advanced test would be available:

[Today,] scientists are searching earnestly for a simple chemical method of diagnosing pregnancy. The ideal is to find some chemical which will always cause, say, a red color when added to the pregnant urine and a green color when added to a non-pregnant urine.

To date, this has not been found. (32)

Oh, how the times have changed!

Frogs aside, another main area of difference between the 1940s and '50s and now is the focus on emotional as well as physical well-being. In People Will Talk, Deborah finds herself tearfully wiping her eyes at one point and saying to Cary Grant's character: 

"Noah? Does it seem to you that I cry a lot...? I never used to cry at all, you know. Oh, if I bumped my head or something like that. But now the littlest thing makes me start to bawl. Why do you suppose it is?"

Dr. Noah Praetorious doesn't have a medical answer for Deborah, but he lightly teases her and does admit that it is a common side-effect of pregnancy. 

This scene is made notably more disturbing and complicated, though, by one simple fact: Cary Grant's doctor character knows more about the status of Deborah's pregnancy than she does herself! As both a doctor and later her husband, much of the plot of their love-story involves Grant's character having intimate knowledge about Deborah's medical status that she doesn't understand or have herself. She is less able to make informed choices about her life and her health, and it is framed as romantic that Cary Grant's doctor takes on the caretaking responsibility for her, leaving her in the dark about her own pregnancy status for most of the film! 

Guttmacher's book, thankfully, is intentionally an attempt to allow both "prospective parents" in the 1940s to be more informed about both pregnancy and the birthing process. He explicitly tells readers what happens in a pregnant woman's body, not dissimilar from books like What to Expect When You're Expecting or the Mayo Clinic's modern pregnancy guides. 

However, Dr. Guttmacher also doesn't have an answer to Deborah's question, "Why do you suppose that is?" Emotional responses to pregnancy and birth are never discussed in his book; only the physical changes, progression, and risks are fully explored. 

Today, however, the "baby blues" are discussed frequently and considered completely normal in contemporary pregnancy resources, with full postpartum depression affecting as many as 10-13% of pregnant people and postpartum anxiety affecting even more. Many doctors also screen for anxiety and depression during pregnancy, and all of my maternity books (published in the last couple decades) highlight both the physical changes during pregnancy along with the potentially complicated emotional responses. 

In the 1940s and '50s, though, no one really had an answer for what might cause either depression during pregnancy or any kind of intense emotional response. They acknowledged that it happened, but most doctors seemed as confused as the fictional Deborah as to why. It wasn't until the 1970s and 1980s that any kind of relationship was seriously explored or understood between estrogen, the implanted egg, and other hormone responses. 

To end this reflection on a lighter note, though, there was one more detail of People Will Talk and the norms of the 1940s and '50s that I'd like to discuss: pregnancy clothing! 

Sadly, the film's story ends before Deborah is fully four months pregnant, so we really don't get to see how she adjusts to her growing baby-bump. In fact, the movie's framing and costuming gives absolutely no sign that she looks pregnant at all. Jeanne Crain spends the whole movie looking both slim and refined in her clothing; by the later-half of the film, that hourglass silhouette is on full display while she's dressed appropriately as a doctor's wife in finery and lace. 

Even if Deborah isn't supposed to be much past her first trimester yet, goodness knows that I went the comfy leggings and baggy shirts route as soon as I could! But the social pressures and clothing options for a woman in the late-1940s and early '50s were significantly different than today. 

In fashion magazines of the time, "it was difficult to tell which styles were intended for pregnant women [as] many catalogs and fashion plates did not depict pregnant women... and generally showcased designs through slim illustrations." Wrap dresses that helped disguise the growing waist became popular in the 1940s as well, though Dr. Guttmacher expressed concern in his book that women feeling such societal pressure would possibly try to "disguise the pregnant silhouette" in a way that was too constricting or dangerous (67). He encouraged pregnant women to not worry too much about fashion and instead invest in "a properly fitting maternity corset" by the twentieth week of pregnancy, one that would not hide pregnancy growth but would instead "relieve the strain on the back muscles, diminishing back ache" (67).

It's hard not to get caught up in the glamour of old Hollywood movies, especially ones starring Cary Grant. With this one, though, I could only find myself relieved that I live in a time of home pregnancy tests, access to all of my own medical records, and medical care and awareness of the emotional effects of pregnancy. 

Oh, and a lack of judgement over wearing really comfy maternity leggings.