ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the average woman of times past through a typical normal pregnancy. It begins with the "antenatal care" thrust upon her and provides with her lying in a steaming featherbed after her birth attendants have pulled out the afterbirth. While it is true that the typical birth occurred at home, and that neighbors would cluster about the bedside, it is untrue that people regarded birth as a "natural process" and abstained from intervention. Birthing pains, therefore, consisted of the fetus's efforts to break the bag of waters and to crawl through the birth canal to the outside. Constantly tugging and hauling at the mother's birth canal, at the infant's head, and at the placenta, they were captives of a folkloric view that the best midwife is the one who interferes most. The upper middle class women, whose experiences have monopolized our views of women in the past, would spend one to two weeks in bed after giving birth.
