ABSTRACT

Sheila Kitzinger’s career in birth activism globally sought to explore women’s experiences to advocate for changes in how birth was managed. This chapter draws upon her autobiography, in relation to our own birth stories, to outline the possibilities for personal stories as a feminist mode of writing and thinking about the relations between individual experiences and wider societal contexts as well as to think through the relationships between different historical birth contexts. We then develop some key points of connection between birth and death which come from Kitzinger’s own advocacy for a good death: the relation between the individual, collective and social, the relationships between experiences and activism, the centrality of embodied gendered experience and the relationship of individual agency to a medicalised, neoliberal institutional context. We close the chapter by using these personal stories as a route into opening up the relational approach of the rest of book: between individual experiences and social worlds, relations between people and institutions and constructions of the natural and medical.