ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the rise of that "birth experience." The phrase is intended to convey the spontaneous joy in yet another positive aspect of their womanhood which many women discover in giving birth. A number of ominous problems continued to frustrate the demand for a new kind of birth experience, and only in the first quarter of the twentieth century were most of these overcome. In traditional Europe women looked with alarm upon male birth attendants, necessary though it may have been to engage them in emergencies. Another indication of women's desire for gentler, more sentimental births was the shift to the bed, from the birthing stool and the straw pallet. The shift of middle-class women to hospitals for delivery is perhaps the most important development in our story during the 1920s and 1930s. That underlying factor was women's heightened expectations, in the early twentieth century, of safe delivery.
