Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America

Historian Moran (Governing Bodies) offers a mixed-bag account of postpartum depression’s mid-20th-century emergence as a distinct disease and the decades of advocacy for PPD awareness that followed. Moran explains that the “baby blues” first became a pop culture talking-point in the 1940s and ’50s, but that the era’s heavy reliance on psychoanalysis meant blame was placed on women’s “neuroses.” Beginning in the late 1960s and throughout the ’70s, feminists pushed to reframe postpartum distress as being caused by social ills like maternal isolation, uneven division of domestic labor, and medical sexism. The ’80s were the “decade of depression” and the disease was once again thought of as a mental illness, this time one caused by chemical imbalance; by the ’90s, therapy was routinely recommended for postpartum women. The aughts saw a wave of high-profile celebrities—such as Princess Diana—discussing their experiences with PPD, and the 2010s launched a PPD blogging boom. Moran delves deeply into the condition’s medical history—she gives a thorough blow-by-blow of PPD’s long-running difficulties getting its own DSM entry—while staying somewhat vague on the science (she mentions various biological explanations for PPD but doesn’t go into detail) and sticking to the obvious in her cultural analysis (“In the postwar era, it was not unusual for Americans with the means to seek pleasure and happiness in consumer goods”). While informative, this never quite finds its footing. (Oct.)