What was is like to have a baby in Duluth before World War II? When and how did birth move into the hospitals in Duluth, and how did hospitals approach births in those years? How were young mothers supported or taught about birth and babies? What can today’s practitioners learn from these stories?
These were all questions the Duluth Birth Oral History project set out to answer. The project was managed by Birthing Ways – Doula Connection and was financed in part with funds provided by the State of Minnesota from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the Minnesota Historical Society. Gina Temple-Rhodes, Cedar Story Services "The Story Saver", completed the interviewing, transcribing, archiving and publishing of the stories.
Twelve narrators were identified who had given birth in the Duluth area in the 1930’s and 40’s, or were somehow involved in the history of birth in Duluth. Overall, the stories provide a specific look at Duluth’s birth culture while corroborating the nation-wide trends that have been discussed by other historians. Birth had moved into the hospitals by the 1930’s; St. Luke’s, St. Mary’s and Webber Hospital in West Duluth were the locations of all but one of the births described by the local narrators.
The narrators' own birthplaces were most often a home, not a hospital. One narrator, Enid Ehle, was born in 1922 at home, and had her first child in Duluth in 1944. Her mother almost died of an infection after giving birth to her, but later had one more child at home. When it came time for Enid to have her baby, she was living with her mother because her husband was overseas in the war. She gave birth at St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth; there was no thought that she would give birth at home. She remembered that people didn’t give birth at home “very often, unless it happened that [the baby] came a lot faster than expected.”
