Lamaze: An International History

Abstract

Over the last 100 years, childbirth has become increasingly synonymous with the hospital.Around 1900, hospital births were the exception; within less than three generations, it was almost unheard of for women in most industrialised countries to have their babies anywhere else.The same period saw a trend towards the professionalisation of maternity care, with state regulators across Europe and North America coming to define who was and who was not qualified to attend birthing women.Touching vast numbers of women and their families, these shifts have profoundly shaped attitudes to and expectations of health services, medical technology and professional power.A wealth of recent historical scholarship has documented how decisionmaking in birth both defined and was defined by gender, class and race, as well as identities as mothers, fathers and professionals.In her superb history of the Lamaze -or more accurately, the psychoprophylactic -technique, Paula Michaels shows how transformations in the management of childbirth also mediated the international and domestic rivalries of Cold War politics.

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