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During the twentieth century modern births in America came to involve mostly male physicians, hospitals, technological interventions, and quick, routine procedures. In a unique and detailed historical study, Nurse-Midwifery: The Birth of a New American Profession , Laura E. Ettinger fills a void with the first book-length documentation of the emergence of American nurse-midwifery. This occupation developed in the 1920s involving nurses who took advanced training in midwifery. In Nurse-Midwifery , Ettinger shows how nurse-midwives in New York City; eastern Kentucky; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and other places both rebelled against and served as agents of a nationwide professionalization of doctors and medicalization of childbirth. Nurse-Midwifery reveals the limitations that nurses, physicians, and nurse-midwives placed on the profession of nurse-midwifery from the outset because of the professional interests of nursing and medicine. The book argues that nurse-midwives challenged what scholars have called the "male medical model" of childbirth, but the cost of the compromises they made to survive was that nurse-midwifery did not become the kind of independent, autonomous profession it might have been.



Today, nurse-midwives have assumed a larger role in mainstream health care than before, yet they are still marginalized. As in the past, nurse-midwives' futures will depend on continuing changes in American attitudes about childbirth, health care, and women professionals as well as on their own ability to adapt to the changes. The history of the profession suggests that nurse-midwives will continue to navigate in difficult waters in a middle space between the mainstream and the margins of medicine and between the nursing profession and midwifery traditions.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• List of Illustrations(p. ix)
• Acknowledgments(p. xiii)
• Chapter 1 Conception: Nurse-Midwives and the Professionalization of Childbirth(p. 1)
• Part I Early Labor Pains, 1925-1940
• Chapter 2 Eastern Kentucky's Frontier Nursing Service: Mary Breckinridge's Mission, Survival Strategies, and Race(p. 31)
• Chapter 3 New York City's Maternity Center Association: Educational Opportunities and Urban Constraints(p. 72)
• Part II Active Labor, 1940-1960
• Chapter 4 Transitions: New Directions, New Limitations(p. 105)
• Chapter 5 Traditions: Home Birth in a High-Tech Age(p. 136)
• Chapter 6 Don't Push: Struggling to Create a Political Strategy and Professional Identity(p. 168)
• Epilogue: Afterbirth: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future(p. 186)
• Notes(p. 203)
• Bibliography(p. 249)
• Index(p. 265)

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CHOICE Review

In this meticulous and fascinating historical study, Ettinger (history, Clarkson Univ.) details the emergence of American nurse-midwifery and analyzes the trends to the present. The author argues that nurse-midwives across the country who completed advanced education in the 1920s were simultaneously in alliance with and antagonistic to the medicalization of childbirth. Early nurse-midwives served low-income people and lost astonishingly few mothers at a time when maternal mortality was high. However, when childbirth moved from the home to the hospital, nurse-midwives were forced by politics and the hospital hierarchy to accommodate physicians, and thus lost autonomy. The roadblocks that this accommodation created for nurse-midwives are recognizable barriers today. Ettinger argues that nurse-midwives have been and are currently misunderstood and ignored; they continue to face opposition. This work reflects a recurring theme in nursing history: nurses are educated and talented; nurses offer excellent patient care; nurses are not unified; and in the end, nurses remain less powerful than they could be. This well-researched, well-written book is an enjoyable read. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All levels. D. B. Hamilton Western Michigan University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Laura E. Ettinger is associate professor of history at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York.