Brought to Bed

Based on personal accounts by birthing women and their medical attendants, Brought to Bed reveals how childbirth has changed from colonial times to the late twentieth century. Judith Walzer Leavitt's classic study focuses on the traditional woman-centered home-birthing practices, their replacement by male doctors, and the movement from the home to the hospital. Leavitt narrates the shifting power of childbearing women and their physicians, as well as changes in infant and maternal mortality. She also discusses how women have attempted to retrieve some of the traditional women--and family--centered aspects of childbirth. This 30th anniversary edition includes a new preface that reviews the burgeoning writing on the history of childbirth since its publication.


Serena Williams's childbirth experience...reminds us that even today, even privileged and healthy women must deal not only with medical problems but also with medical professionals who disregard their own bodily knowledge. Judith Walzer Leavitt's Brought to Bed, first published just over three decades ago and recently reissued as a thirtieth anniversary edition with a new preface that considers changing ideas about how to write the history of gender, reminds us that women have always faced these struggles, while showing us how they supported each other and fought for change....Leavitt uncovers details and voices that still make the book worth reading.--Fran Bigman, Times Literary Supplement

A masterful examination of the competing medical, social, and intellectual forces that shaped modern obstetric practice...A wonderful book that gives new direction to the history of women and health.-- Reviews in American History

An absorbing, richly-documented and well-argued explanation of how childbirth moved from the home to the hospital...Brought to Bed's broad conception, its balance, and its basic commitment to reconstituting the voices of women make it a classic in women's history writing.-- The Women's Review of Books

Finely crafted and elegantly argued Leavitt has restored historical agency to women and provided a sympathetic accounting of the physician's difficulties A model of scholarship on change in medical practice, the ideological function of science, and the place of childbearing in women's lives and culture. No other book to date has so successfully negotiated these politically mined historical waters with such sophistication and skill.--Science

Leavitt shows the complicated negotiation of patient and provider that shapes health care. Her history of childbirth reminds us of women's agency even in an unbalanced relationship. At the same time, Leavitt's physicians are not monolithic: she portrays the diverse practices and lively contention among physicians, and sympathetically evokes the uncertainty, at times the anguish, of doctors who understood their own limitations only too well.--Women & Health

Certainly the most authoritative medical historical text on the subject in America at this time.--W. R. Penman, M.D. and D. I. Lansing, M.D., Obstetrics Society of Philadelphia

In this groundbreaking study...Leavitt has given the history of childbirth back to women. An elegant, sensitive, and fascinating book!--Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez, University of California, Los Angeles

A superb book for anyone interested in birthing, obstetrics, or even just the history of women in the United States.--Journal of the American Medical Women's Association

A strong and sensitive contribution to understanding the (supine) position of today's childbearing woman.--Newsday

An absorbing, richly-documented and well-argued explanation of how childbirth moved from the home to the hospital...[Its] broad conception, its balance, and its basic commitment to reconstituting the voices of women make it a classic in women's history writing.--The Women's Review of Books

A book for men as well as women...Clearly written and persuasively documented.--Carl N. Degler, The New Republic

In this impressive history Judith Walzer Leavitt examines centuries of childbirth experiences and analyzes how and why changes occurred...There can be no question...about the importance of this excellent study.--Isis

A significant achievement...Certain to become a model for the new medical history, and for feminist scholarship as well.--Medical Humanities Review

Like a good chocolate dessert, Brought to Bed is rich and filling.--Journal of Nurse-Midwifery

A masterful examination of the competing medical, social, and intellectual forces that shaped modern obstetric practice...A wonderful book that gives new direction to the history of women and health.--Reviews in American History

An exceptional book that broadens our understanding of the significance of childbirth in the lives of women and deepens our knowledge of how women have been active agents of change.--American Historical Review

Brought to Bed is pleasantly readable, heavily annotated, and well organized. One closes the book wondering where the last thirty years' extreme interventionism fits into the grand scheme and what the future holds for the pregnant woman and her physician, and their mutual struggle for control of the process of labor and delivery.--Journal of the History of Medicine

This study is a major and most valuable addition to our understanding of the complex factors which have affected decision-making in obstetric care over the past two hundred years.--Medical History