"Everyone who cares about the question of regulating lay-midwifery should consider the author's premise." -"Journal of Nurse-Midwifery" "Making Midwives Legal" explores what happens when midwifery and medicine are brought together by legal regulation. Combining historical data on the regulation of midwifery in Europe and the Unites States with a field study of the regulation of midwifery in Texas, Arizona, and California, Raymond G. DeVries uncovers the subtle ways legislation alters the profession-demonstrating both beneficial and detrimental consequences. This new edition includes an...

This collection of essays brings together some of the most exciting recent scholarship on mothers and motherhood. Motherhood is a significant experience for the overwhelming majority of American women, and the work of mothering-in individual families and in communities-has shaped the lives of all Americans. But it is only recently that historians have begun to examine mothers and motherhood as a phenomenon distinct from, yet deeply intertwined with, family history and women's history. Rima D. Apple is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, School of Human Ecology and...

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...