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In this work, the author's detailed readings of birth stories - both literary and medical - reveal deeply embedded assumptions about how women are viewed and view ourselves. The current debates about natural childbirth as advocated by Sheila Kitzinger, Grantly Read Dick and others, are examined alongside key literary works by writers such as Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Fay Weldon and Toni Morrison.
Covers issues and events in women's history that were previously unpublished, misplaced, or forgotten, and provides new perspectives on each event.
Despite today's historically low maternal and infant mortality rates in the United States, labor continues to evoke fear among American women. Rather than embrace the natural childbirth methods promoted in the 1970s, most women welcome epidural anesthesia and even Cesarean deliveries. In Deliver Me from Pain, Jacqueline H. Wolf asks how a treatment such as obstetric anesthesia, even when it historically posed serious risk to mothers and newborns, paradoxically came to assuage women's anxiety about birth. Each chapter begins with the story of a birth, dramatically illustrating the unique practices of the era being examined. Deliver Me from Pain covers the development and use of anesthesia fro...
"Journalist Rebecca Grant provides us with a never-before-seen look at the changing landscape of pregnancy and childbirth in America, and the rise of midwifery, told through the eyes of three women who all pass through the doors of the same birth center in Portland, Oregon"--
A journalist “explores the way childbirth has changed, from pre-history to the present” in this “fascinating, funny and occasionally shocking” historical survey (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). From midwives to the epidural and beyond, mother and former Boston Globe editor Tina Cassidy presents an intelligent, enlightening, and impeccably researched cultural history of how we handle the process of childbirth. Why is it that every culture and generation seems to have its own ideas about the best way to give birth? Touching on peculiar practices from across the globe as well as the very different experiences of mothers in her own family, Cassidy explores the physical, anthropological,...
In the early twentieth century, Americans often waxed lyrical about “Mother Love,” signaling a conception of motherhood as an all-encompassing identity, rooted in self-sacrifice and infused with social and political meaning. By the 1940s, the idealization of motherhood had waned, and the nation’s mothers found themselves blamed for a host of societal and psychological ills. In Mom, Rebecca Jo Plant traces this important shift by exploring the evolution of maternalist politics, changing perceptions of the mother-child bond, and the rise of new approaches to childbirth pain and suffering. Plant argues that the assault on sentimental motherhood came from numerous quarters. Male critics who railed against female moral authority, psychological experts who hoped to expand their influence, and women who strove to be more than wives and mothers—all for their own distinct reasons—sought to discredit the longstanding maternal ideal. By showing how motherhood ultimately came to be redefined as a more private and partial component of female identity, Plant illuminates a major reorientation in American civic, social, and familial life that still reverberates today.
A history of the re-emergence of midwifery in America.
Throughout the 1970s & 1980s, women argued that unless they gained information about their own bodies, there would be no equality. Wendy Kline considers the ways in which ordinary women worked to position the female body at the centre of women's liberation.
Advocated as the oldest, most natural method of childbirth, Lamaze is a practice involving breathing techniques that help a woman work through contractions (psychoprophylaxis). It has been omnipresent in American culture since the 1970s, advocated by the medical community and mothers alike. While it would seem that it emerged from the back-to-the-earth culture of the 1960s and 1970s, Paula Michaels in this book reveals a shocking history: the Lamaze method was actually invented in the Cold War Soviet Union. Michaels discovers that a French obstetrician, Fernand Lamaze, saw the technique being used in Russia in the 1950s and brought it back to his maternity ward in Paris. In order to make the method more appealing to Americans, early U.S. advocates hid its Soviet origins and were able to spread it as a grassroots movement. This work involving multiple languages and archives in a range of nations promises to be eye-opening for scholars, the medical community, and general readers alike. In setting the practice of Lamaze into its context, it will shed light on the history of medicine, the history of feminism, and Cold War history.