For well over a century now, families have sported rows of rictus grins for the camera, but the subgenre of family portraiture (and, later, video clips) dedicated to conception, gestation, and birth is very much a product of the social media age. Pregnancy announcements, “bump” portraiture, and gender reveals are all visual conventions that were born with social media.Article continues after advertisement
Part of this is coincidental; cultural norms and infant survival rates changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. Pregnancy announcements perhaps would have been popular during the early days of still photography, but because of the persistently high rates of pregnancy loss and infant mortality well into the middle of the century, it wasn’t customary to turn reproduction into a public spectacle. There was simply too much risk involved. Grief was too bound up with reproduction to allow for much celebration until an infant was safely past their vulnerable first few months on earth.
Attitudes about women’s bodies also conspired to keep pregnancies shrouded behind modest, tentlike maternity wear. Women’s bodies and the fetuses they carried were not entirely their own; they belonged to husbands, and a family’s respectability depended on the maintenance of a strict boundary between public and private. Showing off a bump was hardly fashionable until the early ’90s. When Demi Moore appeared naked and seven months pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, the public was not ready. Many newsstands censored the issue’s cover, as though it were pornography.
