ABSTRACT
Pregnancy and childbirth are unique events in the lives of women. Women's subjective and collective life experiences will depend on such factors as age, ethnicity and social and economic background, and how these factors interrelate, contradict and intersect with each other. This chapter discusses the key feminist theories that have contributed to explanations of the experiences of being women. It briefly looks at the major systems and structures that underpin human society, and which have power to create and control what happens therein, reveals a very different story. The chapter also considers these major systems and structures of power in relation to women and argues that the absence of women, in the main, within such positions of power is a matter of critical concern and an astonishment in the twenty-first century. It then discusses the various 'feminisms' and comparisons made with the history of midwifery and childbirth in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
