Profound changes have occurred in the demography and sociology of Italian fertility since Napoleonic times. Using the statistical system instituted in 1861 with national unification, Massimo Livi-Bacci provides a systematic and detailed analysis of fertility trends in Italy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He brings to light the main features of the secular decline: its rapid occurrence in the northern and central areas; the widening urban-rural gap; the shaping of social and economic differences; and the late, slow downward trend in the South. Multivariate statistical analysis enables the author to measure the changing relationship between fertility and social or economic phenomena. Historical evidence illustrates the effect on fertility of mass emigration and Fascist policy as well as of social changes such as those in agrarian structure, mobility, and communications. An altered attitude toward procreation is evident in some parts of Italy in the early nineteenth century. The decline becomes apparent in certain northern and central regions in the 1870s and 1880s and it appears at the aggregate national level in the 1890s. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The second phase of a long-term study in American fertility. Tables, interview forms. Originally published in 1963. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Fertility in Belgium declined early and remained low compared with that in other European countries. For this reason, and because of the nation's heterogeneity, study of its demographic transition illuminates the relationship between fertility behavior and socioeconomic development. Professor Lesthaeghe first describes the Belgian experience in a way that permits direct comparison with that of other European nations. He then tests the several explanatory hypotheses for the European fertility decline against his data. Belgium's heterogeneity in the nineteenth-century and in the first half of the twentieth was economic, social, and cultural. Some areas of the country underwent industrialization as early as 1800-1830, while others shifted away from agriculture and artisanal modes of production only between 1880 and 1910. Between 1890 and 1900, regional fertility levels differed drastically, as did regional infant mortality rates and life expectancies at birth. In addition, wide variation occurred in the process of secularization, linguistic characteristics, demographic trends, and other cultural indicators. By describing and analyzing these data in relation to Belgium's fertility decline, Professor Lesthaeghe makes a major contribution to the theory of the demographic transition that occurred throughout Europe. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Having a baby is surely one of the pinnacle events of a woman's life, full of joy, serenity, and contentment--or so society tells a new mother, who thus finds herself ill-prepared for the exhaustion, boredom, and isolation that can follow childbirth. The resulting depression--how it is experienced, and how it might be relieved--is the subject of Natasha Mauthner's insightful and compassionate book, which recounts the stories of new mothers caught between a cultural ideal and a far more complex reality.

In Mauthner's interviews with thirty-five new mothers in Britain and America, we see how women contend with images of motherhood as a state of bliss for everyone but themselves. The British women tend to view their depression as a personal failure of strength; American women, as a result of hormonal fluctuation. But all vividly describe a similar state of paralysis and loneliness, with alternating love, resentment, and guilt toward their babies.

Most usefully, these women reveal the positive impact that other new mothers had on their depression. Far more important than their own family's support or understanding, the sense of not being alone in their trials emerges as a key source of strength and healing for women struggling with postpartum depression.

Deftly bridging literary conventions, this compelling work exposes the cultural origins of a quiet revolution that occurred over the course of the twentieth century. Elizabeth Krause combines novelistic and ethnographic techniques to illuminate population dynamics that have raised alarm across Europe and the United States, and manifested, for example, in Italy's extremely low birthrate. But what actually motivates people to have fewer children? Krause turns to the evocative story of one woman, Emilia Raugei, who was born in a Tuscan hill town in 1920 and worked as a straw weaver in a rapidly globalizing economy, to better understand this question. Based on extensive fieldwork, including indepth conversations with Emilia herself, Krause draws on her rich and unconventional memories to create an engaging portrait of life in a rural village during Mussolini's rise to power - it is a tale of migration, love and loss, political turmoil, and the struggle to make a living during hard times. Giving voice to a largely silent history that is at once local and global, "Unraveled: A Weaver's Tale of Life Gone Modern" will challenge us to find innovative approaches to understanding the transformative shift to a modern way of life.

Trauma and the exposure to traumatic events is part of life, making the need for current and informed social work research and training in this area essential. Trauma, Spirituality, and Posttraumatic Growth in Clinical Social Work Practice highlights unique and diverse circumstances throughout a client's lifecycle where trauma is experienced, how one's spirituality is awakened or activated, and how this experience can intersect with interventions toward posttraumatic growth (PTG). More than just a primer on trauma effects, the book offers social workers insights into how to properly assess current resources and individual levels of distress. It also provides practical strategies on how spirituality and spiritual practices can be integrated into psychotherapeutic interventions at various levels of social work practice. Addressing the impact of trauma-related events and emphasizing the importance of spirituality, the book will inspire and provide transferable knowledge that social workers can use to meet the unique needs of the clients, families, and communities they serve.

As her little boy plays at a day care center across the street, Michelle, an unmarried teenager, is in algebra class, hoping to be the first member of her family to graduate from high school. Will motherhood make this young woman poorer? Will it make the United States poorer as a nation? That's what the voices raised against "babies having babies" would have us think, and what many Americans seem inclined to believe. This powerful book takes us behind the stereotypes, the inflamed rhetoric, and the flip media sound bites to show us the complex reality and troubling truths of teenage mothers in America today. Would it surprise you to learn that Michelle is more likely to be white than African American? That she is most likely eighteen or nineteen--a legal adult? That teenage mothers are no more common today than in 1900? That two-thirds of them have been impregnated by men older than twenty? Kristin Luker, author of the acclaimed Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, puts to rest once and for all some very popular misconceptions about unwed mothers from colonial times to the present. She traces the way popular attitudes came to demonize young mothers and examines the profound social and economic changes that have influenced debate on the issue, especially since the 1970s. In the early twentieth century, reformers focused people's attention on the social ills that led unmarried teenagers to become pregnant; today, society has come almost full circle, pinning social ills on sexually irresponsible teens. Dubious Conceptions introduces us to the young women who are the object of so much opprobrium. In these pages we hear teenage mothers from across the country talk about their lives, their trials, and their attempts to find meaning in motherhood. The book also gives a human face to those who criticize them, and shows us why public anger has settled on one of society's most vulnerable groups. Sensitive to the fears and confusion that fuel this anger, and to the troubled future that teenage mothers and their children face, Luker makes very clear what we as a nation risk by not recognizing teenage pregnancy for what it is: a symptom, not a cause, of poverty.

In 1997, when the author began research in Peru, she observed a profound disconnect between the birth care desires of health personnel and those of indigenous women. Midwives and doctors would plead with her as the anthropologist to ""educate women about the dangerous inadequacy of their traditions."" They failed to see how their aim of achieving low rates of maternal mortality clashed with the experiences of local women, who often feared public health centers, where they could experience discrimination and verbal or physical abuse. Mainly, the women and their families sought a ""good"" birth, which was normally a home birth that corresponded with Andean perceptions of health as a balance of bodily humors. Peru's Intercultural Birthing Policy of 2005 was intended to solve these longstanding issues by recognizing indigenous cultural values and making biomedical care more accessible and desirable for indigenous women. Yet many difficulties remain. Guerra-Reyes also gives ethnographic attention to health care workers. She explains the class and educational backgrounds of traditional birth attendants and midwives, interviews doctors and health care administrators, and describes their interactions with local families. Interviews with national policy makers put the program in context.

On 5 February 2014, world-renowned scientist Tim Noakes fired off a tweet allegedly dispensing dietary advice to a young mother into a highly volatile media space; the fallout threatened to destroy his career. This is the untold backstory.

Veteran journalist and writer Daryl Ilbury unveils, layer by layer, a combustible mix of scientific ignorance, academic jealousy, the collapse of media ethics, and the interests of a world-renowned scientist in highlighting the intricacies of human nutrition and exposing those he believes have vested interests in regulating it.

Featuring interviews with people who have worked closely with Noakes, including former Springbok coach Jake White and polar swimmer Lewis Gordon Pugh, as well as award-winning journalists and fellow scientists and academics, some of whom now consider Noakes dangerous and out of control, this book is bound to be as controversial as the man himself.

Despite the fact that, statistically, women of low socioeconomic status (SES) experience greater difficulty conceiving children, infertility is generally understood to be a wealthy, white woman's issue. In" Misconception," Ann V. Bell overturns such historically ingrained notions of infertility by examining the experiences of poor women and women of color. These women, so the stereotype would have it, are simply too fertile. The fertility of affluent and of poor women is perceived differently, and these perceptions have political and social consequences, as social policies have entrenched these ideas throughout U.S. history. Through fifty-eight in-depth interviews with women of both high and low SES, Bell begins to break down the stereotypes of infertility and show how such depictions consequently shape women's infertility experiences. Prior studies have relied solely on participants recruited from medical clinics--a sampling process that inherently skews the participant base toward wealthier white women with health insurance. In comparing class experiences, "Misconception "goes beyond examining medical experiences of infertility to expose the often overlooked economic and classist underpinnings of reproduction, family, motherhood, and health in contemporary America.

A "Washington Post" Best of 2012 pick
"Delightful . . . a book that brings a corner of modern China alive."--"The Wall Street Journal"
When Wenguang Huang was nine years old, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she extracted from her family the promise to bury her after she died. This was in Xian, a city in central China, in the 1970s, when a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices, including burials, was strictly enforced. But Huang's grandmother was persistent, and two years later, his father built her a coffin. He also appointed his older son, Wenguang, as coffin keeper, a distinction that meant, among other things, sleeping next to the coffin at night.
Over the next fifteen years, the whole family was consumed with planning Grandma's burial, a regular source of friction and contention, with the constant risk of being caught by the authorities. Many years after her death, the family's memories of her coffin still loom large. Huang, now living and working in America, has come to realize how much the concern over the coffin has affected his upbringing and shaped the lives of everyone in the family. Lyrical and poignant, funny and heartrending, "The Little Red Guard" is the powerful tale of an ordinary family finding their way through turbulence and transition.

Assisted reproduction, with its test tubes, injections, and gamete donors, raises concerns about the nature of life and kinship. Yet these concerns do not take the same shape around the world. In this innovative ethnography of in vitro fertilization in Ecuador, Elizabeth F.S. Roberts explores how reproduction by way of biotechnological assistance is not only accepted but embraced despite widespread poverty and condemnation from the Catholic Church. RobertsOCO intimate portrait of IVF practitioners and their patients reveals how technological intervention is folded into an Andean understanding of reproduction as always assisted, whether through kin or God. She argues that the Ecuadorian incarnation of reproductive technology is less about a national desire for modernity than it is a product of colonial racial history, Catholic practice, and kinship configurations. GodOCOs Laboratory offers a grounded introduction to critical debates in medical anthropology and science studies, as well as a nuanced ethnography of the interplay between science, religion, race and history in the formation of Andean families."

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, thirty years have been added to the normal human life expectancy. In "September Songs," the follow-up to her bestselling "Intimate Partners," Maggie Scarf investigates the surprising and profound evolution marriage has undergone in these "bonus years." In a series of intimate and provocative interviews, she delves into the lives of couples married for more than two decades and uncovers the welcome news that most couples are more satisfied in their marriages today than in their early years together. By giving voice to both their struggles and their triumphs, these husbands and wives reveal how they've balanced their emotional and physical needs with those of their partner's, and how the lessons they've learned over time have helped them find new opportunities to love, cherish, and live alongside each other in the extra years they have together.

The Gift of the Other brings together a philosophical analysis of time, embodiment, and ethical responsibility with a feminist critique of the way women's reproductive capacity has been theorized and represented in Western culture. Author Lisa Guenther develops the ethical and temporal implications of understanding birth as the gift of the Other, a gift which makes existence possible, and already orients this existence toward a radical responsibility for Others. Through an engagement with the work of Levinas, Beauvoir, Arendt, Irigaray, and Kristeva, the author outlines an ethics of maternity based on the givenness of existence and a feminist politics of motherhood which critiques the exploitation of maternal generosity.

Margaret Sanger (1883-1966) was a leading figure in the American birth control movement. Trained as a nurse, she moved to New York City to work among the poor. Having witnessed firsthand the travails of mothers in the city's poorest neighborhoods, she felt the need to provide them with information on reproduction and contraception. She abandoned her nursing career and devoted the rest of her life to disseminating information on women's reproduction and contraception, publishing books and articles and founding birth control clinics.

In Motherhood in Bondage, first published in 1928, Sanger reproduced letters written to her from women and sometimes men from all over the country, in both urban and rural areas, who were seeking advice on reproductive matters and marital relations, but mostly imploring her to help them find ways to avoid more pregnancies. The letters are grouped by theme into sixteen chapters, and Sanger wrote an introduction to each chapter.

" Not until the eighteenth century was the image of the tender, full-time mother invented. This image retains its power today. Inventing Maternity demonstrates that, despite its association with an increasingly standardized set of values, motherhood remained contested terrain. Drawing on feminist, cultural, and postcolonial theory, Inventing Maternity surveys a wide range of sources- medical texts, political tracts, religious doctrine, poems, novels, slave narratives, conduct books, and cookbooks. The first half of the volume, covering the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, considers central debates about fetal development, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and childbearing. The second half, covering the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, charts a historical shift to the regulation of reproduction as maternity is increasingly associated with infanticide, population control, poverty, and colonial, national, and racial instability. In her introduction, Greenfield provides a historical overview of early modern interpretations of maternity. She concludes with a consideration of their impact on current debates about reproductive rights and technologies, child custody, and the cycles of poverty.

Abrahamson focuses on the dramatic increase in out-of-wedlock births that occurred in the United States during the last half of the 20th century. He provides the most current demographic data, and summarizes the findings in a nontechnical manner made more meaningful by references to the lives of actual people.

He also includes detailed case studies of how out-of-wedlock births increased in rural Essex, England around 1600, in Madrid, Spain around 1800, and in Jamaica in the mid-20th century. A theoretical overview summarizes the patterns exhibited in the case studies and in the contemporary United States. He concludes with an examination of the role of welfare in the United States and the prospects for current welfare reform efforts to succeed in decreasing out-of-wedlock births. This survey will be of interest to scholars, students of sociology, anthropology, and social work, and readers interested in current social issues.

Through interviews with 120 pregnant, or recently delivered, drug-using women, this book examines how pregnant drug addicts make choices about drug use, pregnancy and pre-natal care. To combat the stereotype of the negligent, uncaring and even abusive pregnant drug user, the authors seek to understand the feelings and motivations of the women themselves. How do they decide whether or not to terminate their pregnancy? What are their parents' and family members' attitudes toward their pregnancy? What options are available to them if they choose to keep the baby but kick the habit? The authors present the demographics of their study population and a description of their lives: their childhoods, drug use patterns, relationships and experiences of violence. They delineate women's efforts to manage their pregnancies and reduce the potential harms of drug use during pregnancy. They detail what they call the ""final showdown"" of birth and delivery when months of ambivalence, fear and harm reduction efforts culminate in the glaring light of an institutional setting. Finally, they address the policy implications of their findings.

Sally G. McMillen has written an enthralling historical account of the childbearing and -rearing responsibilities that consumed, often literally, the lives of women in the Old South. She explores the social, political, and medical influences of the time, which led women to assume fervently the full responsibility for their ""sacred occupation,"", and examines how a woman's maternal role ensured her value within the family and the greater society. Along with intimate details that authenticate her study. McMillen provides telling statistics on the number of women who died in childbirth, the rate of infant mortality, and the incidence of other causes of death to mothers and their children during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Stories of women who mother are central to this book. The women come to mothering through birth and adoption, as birth mothers, placing mothers, adopting mothers and teen mothers. Woven between the women's narratives, the author offers reflective commentary intended to show the mothering experience in its complexity--bodily, culturally, and as the rootbed of relationship. Using phenomenological research, Bergum brings the mothering experience to light--as it is lived--exploring themes of love and pain, responsibility, belonging, choice, transformation, and quickening of the moral impulse to attend to the child. BerguM's intent is to encourage thoughtful reflection about what is learned through mothering--by women and by society--in order to create and sustain a society that is good for children and the women who mother them.

2021 Honorable Mention for the Association for Feminist Anthropology's Rosaldo Book Prize Maternal health outcomes are a key focus of global health initiatives. In Delivering Health, author Lydia Z. Dixon uncovers the ways such outcomes have been shaped by broader historical, political, and social factors in Mexico, through the perspectives of those who are at the front lines fighting for change: midwives. Midwives have long been marginalized in Mexico as remnants of the country's precolonial past, yet Dixon shows how they are now strategically positioning themselves as agents of modernity and development. Midwifery education programs have popped up across Mexico, each with their own critique of the health care system and vision for how midwifery can help. Delivering Health ethnographically examines three such schools with very different educational approaches and professional goals. From San Miguel de Allende to Oaxaca to MichoacAn and points between, Dixon takes us into the classrooms, clinics, and conferences where questions of what it means to provide good reproductive health care are being taught, challenged, and implemented. Through interviews, observational data, and even student artwork, we are shown how underlying inequality manifests in poor care for many Mexican women. The midwives in this book argue that they can improve care while also addressing this inequality. Ultimately, Delivering Health asks us to consider the possibility that marginalized actors like midwives may hold the solution to widespread concerns in health.

Highly detailed and clearly written, this book is the first full-length study of the complex system of practices, beliefs and taboos which surrounded conception and childbirth in early modern Europe.
In a rich and scholarly study, Jacques Gelis reconstructs the activities and attitudes of the midwives and mothers, and the sufferings they had to endure. He continues with an examination of the role of the Church, the herbalist and the mineral world (touchstones and talisman) in the explanation of the mysteries of procreation.

"Scholars already saturated with moral commentary on new reproductive arrangements are in for a stimulating surprise. For, this volume breaks new ground, scrutinizing their impact at a more penetrating level and challenging the terms of the dominant debate.... It should set a standard for further work and receive the attention of mainstream thinkers and policy makers that it so richly deserves." Human Studies

..". a valuable contribution to the literature in an important and rapidly evolving area of law and applied ethics." Ethics

..". virtually every essay is thought-provoking and well-informed, and together they address just the topics you d want to see covered as well as a few you might not have thought of." Medical Humanities Review

..". extremely interesting reading for all those who are involved in, or wish to know more about, the moral, social and policy consequences of new reproductive technologies." Biosocial Science

"This thought-provoking collection of essays addresses moral and legal questions revolving around modern human reproduction.... an invaluable resource for any family law practitioner." The Women s Advocate

"Editor Callahan presents a fascinating look at the facts, facets, and legal effects of modern technology on reproduction.... A work that provides insight on all issues concerning reproduction." Choice

" The book] is a valuable contribution to the literature in an important evolving area of law and applied ethics." Ethics

..". displays the richness of feminist scholarship. It points the way for a fuller appreciation of the varied voices of feminist analyses in many other areas." Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law

..". a comprehensive, compelling and carefully researched volume. This is applied feminist ethics at its very impressive best." Journal of Medical Ethics

Essays address moral and legal quandaries related to human reproduction, adding to the feminist dimension of the public discussion of these issues, including: new complexities in contraception and abortion technologies; frozen embryos, unwed fathers, and the legal definition of parenthood; and the use of fetal tissue."

This volume provides an investigation of the dynamics of reproduction. In a broad spectrum of essays, a group of feminist scholars and activists explore the complexity of contemporary sexual politics around the globe. Using reproduction as an entry point in the study of social life and placing it at the centre of social theory, the authors examine how cultures are produced, contested, and transformed as people imagine their collective future in the creation of the next generation. The studies encompass a wide variety of subjects, from the impact of AIDS on reproduction in the United States to the after-effects of Chernobyl on the Sami people in Russia and the impact of totalitarian abortion and birth control policies in Romania and China. The contributors use historical and comparative perspectives to illuminate the multiple and intersecting forms of power and resistance through which reproduction is given cultural weight and social form. They discuss the ways that seemingly distant influences shape and constrain local reproductive experiences such as the international flows of adoptive babies and childcare workers and the Victorian and imperial legacy of eugenics and family planni

"I like it when people notice I'm having a baby. It gives me a good feeling inside and makes me feel important."-a teenage mother Teenage mothers are often poor young girls who define themselves through motherhood and who see getting pregnant as less frightening than finishing school or getting a job. In this book an expert on adolescent pregnancy discusses how psychological pressures of adolescence interact with the problems of being poor to create a situation in which early sexuality, pregnancy, and childbearing-often repeated childbearing-seem almost inevitable. Drawing on her experience as founding director of one of the nation's largest and most successful programs for teenage mothers, Judith Musick sheds new light on what is required to significantly improve the life chances of teenage mothers and their children. Frequently quoting from the diaries of teenage mothers themselves, Musick looks at the family and community problems that accompany poverty and shows how they influence the psychological development of young girls, examines the sexual socialization (and exploitation) of disadvantaged females, and analyzes the role played by mother-daughter relationships. She describes how adolescents feel about and raise their children. Musick concludes by recommending strategies for intervention programs that will help promote the developmental, psychological, and environmental conditions necessary for teenage mothers to change their lives.