Brought to Bed Childbearing in America, 1750-1950 [Paperback]

Based on personal accounts by birthing women and their medical attendants,Brought to Bedreveals how childbirth has changed from colonial times to the present.
Judith Walzer Leavitt's study focuses on the traditional woman-centered home-birthing practices, their replacement by male doctors, and the movement from the home to the hospital. She explains that childbearing women and their physicians gradually changed birth places because they believed the increased medicalization would make giving birth safer and more comfortable. Ironically, because of infection, infant and maternal mortality did not immediately decline. She concludes that birthing women held considerable power in determining labor and delivery events as long as childbirth remained in the home. The move to the hospital in the twentieth century gave the medical profession the upper hand. Leavitt also discusses recent events in American obstetrics that illustrate how women have attempted to retrieve some of the traditional women--and family--centered aspects of childbirth.

Certainly the most authoritative medical historical text on the subject in America at this time. --W. R. Penman, M.D. and D. I. Lansing, M.D.,Obstetrics Society of Philadelphia

In this groundbreaking study...Leavitt has given the history of childbirth back to women. An elegant, sensitive, and fascinating book! --Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez,University of California, Los Angeles

A superb book for anyone interested in birthing, obstetrics, or even just the history of women in the United States. --Journal of the American Medical Women's Association

A strong and sensitive contribution to understanding the (supine) position of today's childbearing woman. --Newsday

An absorbing, richly-documented and well-argued explanation of how childbirth moved from the home to the hospital....[Its] broad conception, its balance, and its basic commitml£Ã