Excerpted from Birth as an American Rite of Passage
Replacement of Clothes with Hospital Gown
Description and Official Rationale
The official rationale for requiring women in labor to wear a standard hospital gown, which ties at the neck and is open in the back, has to do with the idea that hospital gowns are cleaner than a woman's own nightgown and more practical as well, allowing as they do easy access to her genital area for cervical exams and for delivery of the baby, and to her back for the administration of epidural or caudal anesthesia. Should they become soiled, they are also very easy to change.
Women's Responses
None of the women in my study liked the way they felt in the gown. However, some saw it as entirely practical and appropriate, whereas others found the degree of exposure of their private areas which "those ugly gowns" entailed to be decidedly distasteful.
Ritual Purposes
A woman's clothes are her markers of individual identity; removing them effectively communicates the message that she is no longer autonomous, but dependent on the institution. Like the identical uniforms of Marine basic trainees, the hospital gown indicates the woman's liminal status:
Liminal entities, such as neophytes in initiation or puberty rites, may be represented as possessing nothing. They may...wear only a strip of clothing, or even go naked, to demonstrate that as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role...Their behavior is normally passive or humble; they must obey their instructors implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without complaint. It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew. Turner 1969:95
The gown begins a powerful process of the symbolic inversion of the most private region of the woman's body to the most public. Its openness intensifies the message of the woman's loss of autonomy: not only does it expose intimate body parts to institutional handling and control, it also prevents her from simply walking out the door anytime she chooses. Like a prison inmate, she is now marked in society's eyes as belonging to a total institution--the hospital (Goffman 1961).
© Robbie Davis-Floyd PhD, Used with Permission
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