ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that middle-class feminists who have urged a new vision of childbirth are out of touch with the needs of working-class women. It describes the class differences in childbirth procedures in a teaching hospital in New England. The chapter discusses birth practices in a modern hospital and the class biases implicit among medical personnel. Three traditions of research and theory on childbirth have, each for its own reason, ignored social class differences. These are: the feminist literature; the general medical sociology treatment; and studies which focus on the effects of preparation for childbirth. There is a strong relationship between social class and formal preparation for childbirth. The middle-class and working-class women studied had different attitudes towards childbirth during pregnancy, different experiences during childbirth, and different post-partum evaluations of their experiences. Not only did working-class and middle-class women have different ideas about what they wanted to happen during childbirth, they also had different experiences during the actual birth.
