Reviewed by: The Birth Certificate: An American History by Susan J. Pearson Jameson Sweet (bio) Keywords Public health, Cultural history, Race, Gender The Birth Certificate: An American History. By Susan J. Pearson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 392. Cloth, $32.95.) The birth certificate was not always the authoritative document that Americans perceive it to be today. As Susan J. Pearson chronicles in The Birth Certificate: An American History, birth registration began as a push to record statistical information in the 1840s, and birth certificates did not become universal until well into the twentieth century. Today the birth certificate is used as proof of age, identity, and citizenship, and is crucial in registering children for public school, tribal enrollment, and acquiring a job. But as Pearson notes, state and local governments frequently used them for more nefarious purposes, such as keeping African Americans from the ballot box, enforcing anti-miscegenation laws, or, in other words, upholding white supremacy. Today state governments increasingly employ them as tools of transphobia, using the sex listed on birth certificates against people who do not hold the same gender identity. "This book details how a once locally and unevenly practiced form of record keeping," Pearson argues, "became the most essential mechanism for recording and establishing individual identity" (6). Along the way, The Birth Certificate reveals histories of public health, midwifery, American bureaucracy, the hardening of racial categories, the movement against child labor, the military draft, illegitimacy, American labor practices, and civil rights activism. This sweeping narrative reveals the role birth certificates and the practice of birth registration have had in shaping American history and culture. The book is split into three parts. Part 1 reveals the nineteenth-century rationale for birth registration and the decades of work to build birth-registration systems across state and local governments and convincing those responsible for recording births, such as midwives, physicians, and local registrars, to take birth registration seriously. Lemuel Shattuck was one of the most influential Americans in the push for birth registration. He was behind the push for vital registration (births, deaths, and marriages) in Massachusetts in the 1840s, arguing that good government required that the state have statistical information about its population. Over time other states and municipalities followed suit, but the implementation of birth registration was dramatically uneven across the country. Even when local governments implemented birth-registration laws, there were numerous [End Page 668] reasons why midwives and doctors failed to register births. It was not until the 1910s, with the intensive campaign by the newly created U.S. Children's Bureau, that birth registrations started to become commonplace. In Part 2, Pearson reveals how the federal government and state governments used birth certificates to carry out policies to prevent infant mortality and comply with child-labor laws, as well as to enforce Jim Crow laws and race-based federal Indian policies. These chapters also bridge the evolution of the birth certificate in Part 1, as one primarily focused on public health to the document's modern purpose as proof of identity. The most effective strategy for increasing birth registration was the tie of birth registration to public health and infant mortality. Birth and death statistics and population information permitted public health officials to identify regions and populations that had high infant mortality rates and respond accordingly. Later, birth certificates became crucial in administering child-labor laws by ensuring workers were of legal age. A consequence of registration was that the state used racial information to reinforce white supremacy. Pearson analyzes how Walter Plecker, the state registrar in Virginia, effectively used birth registration to erase the Native American population of the state and to administer Jim Crow laws to limit the rights of African Americans. Part 3 examines how activists sought to remove the category of legitimate or illegitimate birth and racial information from birth certificates so that the information could not be used against them. With the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935 and U.S. entry into World War II six years later, many adults, whose births had never been recorded, required proof of age to take advantage of social security benefits or join the...
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Jan 1, 2023
Jeffrey Garrett 
