The Birth Certificate: An American History by Susan J. Pearson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Birth Certificate: An American History by Susan J. Pearson Miranda Sachs The Birth Certificate: An American History. By Susan J. Pearson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 392 pp. Cloth $32.95, e-book $26.99. Susan Pearson's The Birth Certificate: An American History is a crucial contribution to the study of age as a category of analysis. But it is not only relevant to scholars of age. Pearson demonstrates that birth registration contributed to the growth of the modern state and to the maintenance of the Jim Crow racial order. The Birth Certificate spans over 300 years of history to show the rise of birth registration and its consequences. Pearson traces how the birth certificate became the foundation for individual identity in the United States while also contributing to the expansion of the bureaucratic, record-keeping state. In the book's eight chapters, she engages with the tension over the role of the birth certificate: Is it a form of identification or a way for the state to gather public health data? The first chapter opens by examining the haphazard nature of birth registration before the nineteenth century. White families might record significant life events in family Bibles. White slaveholders also recorded their slaves' births. In both instances, birth registration established property rights rather than individual identity. In the mid-nineteenth century, reformers began to clamor for more standardized, state-run projects for recording vital statistics. Men like Lemuel Shattuck, one of Pearson's principal actors, saw statistical information as useful to statesmen. With this knowledge, political actors could better direct resources to the populations they governed. Although most states required some kind of birth registration by the early twentieth century, chapter 2 explores why birth registration remained uneven. Rather than develop an administrative apparatus, most states relied on midwives, doctors, and local clerks. In contrast, the federal government dealt with Native Americans. Pearson shows how the registration of Native American births functioned to "individuate and assimilate" (92). After 1913, the Children's Bureau became a central player in birth registration, and chapters 3 and 4 examine its campaigns. One of the Children's Bureau's initial concerns was infant mortality. To collect reliable data on infant mortality, it needed reliable data on infant births. [End Page 168] In chapters 5 and 6, Pearson shows how the government relied on information on the birth certificate to regulate and separate Americans. In the fifth chapter, she charts the spread of chronological age. In particular, she shows that the growing number of child labor laws forced many parents to register their children's birth. In addition to age, birth certificates recorded race. As such, they provided information to uphold the Jim Crow racial order. Chapter 6 focuses on Walter Plecker, the assistant registrar at the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Virginia. Plecker, who opposed the "mixing" of races, took it upon himself to identify any and all African Americans in Virginia (200). He used genealogy to contradict individuals who identified as white or Native American on their vital documents. These chapters capture how the birth certificate helped to transform the socially constructed categories of age and race into seemingly verifiable facts. Throughout the twentieth century, Americans challenged the categories on birth certificates. As chapter 7 shows, the birth certificate established age as a normative fact—but what about people who had to file retroactively? The second half of the chapter explores the debates about whether birth certificates should include parental marital status. Public health experts claimed they needed data about children born outside of wedlock, but individuals with this information on their birth certificate were liable to suffer discrimination. Chapter 8 examines that same tension in regard to race. In both cases, this information was removed from the public birth certificate and relegated to a private section. As I read The Birth Certificate, I kept thinking about the gendering of birth registration. Initially, most reformers who advocated for birth certificates were male. By the early twentieth century, the people promoting birth registration were women. This shift occurred as male doctors were replacing female midwives in the delivery room. Did the feminization of the personnel involved...