Silvia, Adam M. \u201cModern Mothers for Third World Nations: Population Control, Western Medical Imperialism, and Cold War Politics in Haiti.\u201d Social history of Medicine<\/em> 27, no. 2 (March 2014): 260-280.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>In \u201cModern Mothers for Third World Nations\u201d, Adam Silvia examines American Unitarian Universalist missionaries who were avowed anti-imperialists. They wanted to remove Third World dependency from imperial powers like the United States. However, in these attempts they became cultural imperialists when they \u201cempowered a Haitian physician named Ary Bordes to promote Western medicine and contraception in a peasant community in Haiti in the 1960s.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n For Silvia, a key part in understanding how this cultural imperialism happened lies in neo-Malthusian discourse that \u201cbound nation building to motherhood and a rhetoric of women\u2019s empowerment.\u201d[2]<\/a> He breaks his article into four parts. First, he examines how American missionaries and Haitian physicians came to think of Western medical culture, especially female contraception. They believed that birth control would unburden an overpopulated nation and free overburdened mothers. Neo-Malthusian thought reveals how women were seen as nation bearers and how their excess reproduction and backwards customs would keep Haiti, and nations like it, in poverty. The Unitarian Universalist missionaries and Bordes wanted to turn peasant Haitian women into \u201cmodern\u201d mothers: \u201ca responsible nation bearer\u201d, a mother who will work and use Western medicine to keep her children alive.<\/p>\n In the second part of the article, Silvia analyzes the relationship between Borders, the Unitarian Universalist missionaries, and American contraceptive suppliers \u2013 who viewed the missionaries as imperialists. Silvia dives into a long history of how the United States used missionaries as pawns in a war on overpopulation, \u201ca struggle to make sure that overburdened nations would not turn to communism\u201d, like China.[3]<\/a> Silvia links these two section using an oxymoron, calling the Unitarian Universalists \u201cimperial anti-imperialists.\u201d In the third part, Silvia shows how the missionaries\u2019 doctrine proved anti-imperialists, but the use of medicine belongs into a long history of American Imperialism. The Unitarian Universalists became medical imperialists when they opened clinics with Bordes in Haiti.<\/p>\n The last section shows how a \u201cWestern medical empire\u201d tried to modernize the peasant mother.[4]<\/a> Bordes and the missionaries tried to teach Haitian mothers how to mother. The clinic opened became a chapter in the long history of policies in Latin American that tried to modernize women\u2019s work, as mothers and in the home.<\/p>\n Silvia utilizes many secondary readings and government documents. Given the limited scope of the article, Silvia does an excellent job at highlighting these sources. However, the period he analyzes is the 1960s. Given the he could have used interviews and other personal sources to really drive home his point on how the Unitarian Universalist doctrine and how that fit with them being imperial anti-imperialists. He places this in the context of the Cold War, but issues arise when solely analyzing government documents during this time. The United States government proved extremely anti-communist and that could play into the creation of the sources Silvia utilizes.<\/p>\n Warwick Anderson\u2019s Colonial Pathologies <\/em>discusses similar themes that \u201cModern Mothers for Third World Nations\u201d does. Both create a sense that medicine became an agent of imperialism, though not deliberately. Anderson describes how imperial officers saw their \u201cnew colony as a laboratory of hygiene and modernity, American medical officers were indulging in a form of magical thinking, creating sympathetic associations in the hope of changing the world.\u201d[5]<\/a> The key words that link the article and the book together are modernity and medicine. How did the Unitarian Universalist missionaries and the American medical officers use medicine in an unintentional attempt to modernize other parts of the word?<\/p>\n Both Silvia and Anderson give off the idea that their subjects \u2013 the Unitarian Universalist missionaries and the medical officers respectively \u2013 had this burden to modernize Haiti and the Philippines. For Silvia, the idea of the mother in Haiti needed to change in order for the country to thrive and grow. The Haitian mother mentality contributed to the overpopulation of the country. For Anderson, the amount of disease and hygiene issues in the Philippines created a sense that the United States could come in and modernize the nation. Medicine, whether for birth control or hygiene, become the agent for modernization.<\/p>\n Both studies discuss the separation and differentiation of the public and private spheres. In \u201cModern Mothers\u201d, Silvia highlights how western medicine attempted to create a role for women inside and outside of the home. However, this idea only solidified the idea that women should be in the home. Allowing women to have control over their body and their children firmly placed them in the private sphere and the realm of the home. Colonial Pathologies <\/em>speaks to how the idea of citizenship became part of who was clean and who was not. Cleanliness became associated with whiteness, and if the native Filipinos could become clean, they could obtain a certain level of citizenship.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n One thing lacking from either study is the voice of the \u201cmodernized.\u201d Anderson and Silvia include little to no sources on how Filipinos and Haitians felt about the modernizing process. Maybe the authors saw that these voices remained outside the scope of their respective studies. The inclusion of such sources would allow the readers to view the study more holistically.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Adam Silvia, \u201cModern Mothers for Third World Nations: Population Control, Western Medical Imperialism, and Cold War Politics in Haiti,\u201d Social History in Medicine<\/em> 27, no. 2 (March 2014): 260.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Silvia, 261.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Silvia, 262.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Silvia, 264.<\/p>\n