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9780190232511

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This is a magnificent and nuanced history of home birth and midwifery over the past half century. Kline not only depicts with great care and precision just how resistance to unnecessarily medicalized birth developed in communities across the United States, she traces the development of a complex social movement that continues to have an impact on public policies that affect birthing experiences in all settings. The personal narratives of so many extraordinary midwives will certainly inspire generations of younger people who will be following in their footsteps. --Judy Norsigian and Jane Pincus, co-authors and co-founders of Our Bodies Ourselves Wendy Kline provides a valuable and much-needed contribution to the social and medical history of childbirth in America. The vivid and moving stories of midwives and home births leap off the pages as Kline takes us from Chicago to California to Washington, DC, Tennessee, Texas, and Seattle. She compellingly analyzes and explains why some women came to prefer midwife-attended home births over physician-attended hospital deliveries. This well-written book about twentieth century women's home-delivery experiences is exceptionally readable and historically meaningful and important. --Judith Walzer Leavitt, author of Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950 In Coming Home, Wendy Kline weaves a series of individual stories into a compelling narrative of the home birth movement in the United States in the past century and places into context a long neglected chapter of American medical history. --Eugene Declercq, Founder, Birth by the Numbers website The profession of midwifery was deliberately and systematically obliterated by jealous physicians at the turn of the twentieth century. Kline's dogged research chronicles the rebirth of our hallowed profession in the 1970-80s. --Carol Leonard, co-founder of the Midwives Alliance of North America

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Wendy Kline is professor and Dema G. Seelye Chair in the History of Medicine in the Department of History at Purdue University. She is the author of Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom and Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women's Health in the Second Wave.

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