Includes "writings of more than a hundred women" who experienced the "trip across the continent." Revised edition includes material on "young girls ... between eight and sixteen for whom the monumental crossing was a lark."

This lively history of childbirth begins with colonial days, when childbirth was a social event, and moves on to the gradual medicalization of childbirth in America as doctors forced midwives out of business and to the home birth movement of the 1980s. Widely praised when it was first published in 1977, the book has now been expanded to bring the story up to date. In a new chapter and epilogue, Richard and Dorothy Wertz discuss the recent focus on...