"Blessed Events" explores how women who give birth at home use religion to make sense of their births and in turn draw on their birthing experiences to bring meaning to their lives and families. Pamela Klassen introduces a surprisingly diverse group of women, in their own words, while also setting their birth stories within wider social, political, and economic contexts. In doing so, she emerges with a study that disrupts conventional views of both childbirth and religion by blurring assumed divisions between conservative and feminist women and by taking childbirth seriously as a religious act.

Most American women who have a choice give birth in a hospital and request pain medication. Yet enough women choose and advocate unmedicated home birth--and do so for carefully articulated reasons, social resistance among them--to constitute a movement. Klassen investigates why women whose religious affiliations range from Old Order Amish to Reform Judaism to goddess-centered spirituality defy majority opinion, the medical establishment, and sometimes the law to have their babies at home. In considering their interpretations--including their critiques of the dominant medical model of childbirth and their views on labor pain--she examines the kinds of agency afforded to or denied women as they derive religious meanings from childbirth. Throughout, she identifies tensions and affinities between feminist and traditionalist appraisals of the symbolic meaning of birth and the power of women.

What does home birth--a woman-centered movement working to return birth to women's control--mean in practice for women's gender and religious identities? Is this supreme valuing of procreation and motherhood constraining, or does it open up new realms of cultural and social power for women? By asking these questions while remaining cognizant of religion's significance, "Blessed Events" challenges both feminist and traditionalist accounts of childbearing while broadening our understanding of how religion is ''lived'' in contemporary America.

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.

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.

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.

Women's experience of childbirth in the mid-twentieth century, revealed in their own words. For pregnant women in the 1930s and 1940s Dr. Grantly Dick-Read (1890-1959) proposed natural childbirth as the "normal" way to have babies, making drugs, instruments and hospitalization unnecessary. His book Childbirth withoutFear, first published in 1933, spoke of the joys of natural childbirth; women from around the world wrote long, detailed, and poignant letters in response, describing their own experiences in giving birth. This edited collection of the correspondence affords a rare look at childbirth experiences in the hospitals and birthing centers in post-war America and Britain from the perspective of the patient, as women discuss the way they were viewed bysociety, by hospitals, and by physicians and nurses, and their own feelings on childbirth; overall, the book provides an important opportunity to evaluate the treatment of women in the 1940s and 1950s, the generation who gave birth to the so-called "baby boomers." Professor MARY ALVEY THOMAS teaches at Bentley College, Waltham.

In earlier times, a woman knew she was pregnant when she experienced "quickening"--she felt movement within her. Today a woman relies on what she sees in a test result or a digital sonogram image to confirm her pregnancy. A private experience once mediated by women themselves has become a public experience interpreted and controlled by medical professionals. In "Disembodying Women" Barbara Duden takes a closer look at this contemporary transformation of women's experience of pregnancy. She suggests that advances in technology and parallel changes in public discourse have refrained pregnancy as a managed process, the mother as an ecosystem, and the fetus as an endangered species.

Drawing on extensive historical research, Duden traces the graphic techniques-from anatomists' drawings to woodcuts to X rays and ultrasound-used to "flay" the female body and turn it inside out. Emphasizing the iconic power of the visual within twentieth-century culture, Duden follows the process by which the pregnant woman's flesh has been peeled away to uncover scientific data. Lennart Nilsson's now famous photographs of the embryo published in "Life" magazine in the mid-1960s stand in stark contrast to representations of the invisible unborn in medieval iconography or sixteenth-century painting. Illumination has given way to illustration, ideogram to facsimile, the contemplative intuition of the body to a scientific analysis of its component parts.

New ways of seeing the body produce new ways of experiencing the body. Because technology allows us to penetrate that once secret enclosure of the womb, the image of the fetus, exposed to public gaze, has eclipsed that of woman in the public mind. Society, anxious about the health of the global environment, has focused on protecting "life" in the maternal ecosystem, in effect, pitting fetus against mother.

Duden's reading of the body lends a unique historical and philosophical perspective to contemporary debate over fetal rights, reproductive technologies, abortion, and the right to privacy. This provocative work should reinvigorate that debate by calling into question contemporary certainties and the policies and programs they serve to justify.

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.

How do women in Niger experience pregnancy and childbirth differently from women in the United States or Europe? Barbara M. Cooper sets out to understand childbirth in a country with the world's highest fertility rate and an alarmingly high rate of maternal and infant mortality. Cooper shows how the environment, slavery and abolition, French military rule, and the rapid expansion of Islam have all influenced childbirth and fertility in Niger from the 19th century to the present day. She sketches a landscape where fear of infertility generates intense competition between communities, ethnicities, and co-wives and creates a culture where concerns about infertility dominate concerns about overpopulation, where illegitimate children are rejected, and where the education of girls is sacrificed in the name of avoiding shame. Given a medical system poorly adapted to women's needs, a precarious economy, and a political context where it is impossible to address sexuality openly, Cooper discovers that it is little wonder that pregnancy and birth are a woman's greatest pride as well as a source of grave danger.

In this surprising landmark book, family historian Stephanie Coontz explodes every cherished assumption about marriage, starting with the notion of the traditional marriage. Forget Ozzie and Harriet. Coontz reveals that through most of history, marriage was not a relationship based on mutual love between a breadwinner husband and an at-home wife but an institution devoted to acquiring in-laws and improving the family labor force. How did marriage evolve from the loveless, arranged unions that have endured from the dawn of civilization into the sexualized, volatile relationships of today? Coontz argues that the Victorians, with their radical emphasis on marital intimacy and celebration of the individual, simultaneously made marriage more satisfying and paved the way for alternative lifestyles to thrive: divorce, gay marriage, living together, single parenting. The diminished role of heterosexual marriage in our society is not an aberration, insists Coontz, but the consequence of centuries of irrevocable social change. "Marriage, A History is an engaging narrative of astonishing scope and depth that will stand as a milestone of social history and provoke debate for years to come.

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.

This book examines the current policies and restrictions relating to U.S. family planning and population assistance abroad. Topics discussed in this book include abortion and family planning-related provisions in U.S. foreign assistance law and policy; international family planning programs; and background information on the U.N. Population Fund and U.S. funding debate.

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 Free-Market Family argues for correcting course and using policy to promote family wellbeing in a market-driven America. US families have been pushed to the wall. At the bottom of the economic ladder, poor and working-class adults aren't forming stable relationships and can't give their kids the start they need because of low wages and uncertain job prospects. Toward the top, professional parents' lives have become a grinding slog of long hours of paid work. Meanwhile their kids are overstressed by pressure to succeed and get into good colleges. In this provocative book, Maxine Eichner argues that these very different struggles might seem unconnected, but they share the same root cause: the increasingly large toll that economic inequality and insecurity are taking on families. It's government rather than families that's to blame, Eichner persuasively contends. Since the 1970s, politicians have sold families out to the wrongheaded notion that the free market alone best supports them. In five decades of "free-market family policy," they've scrapped government programs and gutted market regulations that had helped families thrive. The consequence is the steady drumbeat of bad news we hear about our country today: the opioid epidemic, skyrocketing suicide and mental illness rates, "deaths of despair," and mediocre student achievement scores. Meanwhile, politicians just keep telling families to work a little harder. The Free-Market Family documents US families' impossible plight, showing how much worse they fare than families in other countries. It then demonstrates how politicians' free-market illusions steered our nation wildly off course. Finally, it shows how, using commonsense measures, we can restructure the economy to work for families, rather than the reverse. Doing so would invest in our children's futures, increase our wellbeing, reknit our social fabric, and allow our country to reclaim the American Dream.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."