Reproduction

by

Lara Freidenfelds

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0048

Introduction

While there was some scholarly interest in the histories of embryology and obstetrics in the 1950s and 1960s, the history of reproduction blossomed into a robust, diverse subfield of the history of medicine and health beginning in the 1970s. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists in the United States and the United Kingdom questioned social arrangements around childbearing and began looking to history for insight. Feminist influence in academia promoted the professional development of scholars focused on women’s history, and with it the history of reproduction. Political debates around abortion fed interest in the history of pregnancy and fertility, and the back-to-nature and women’s health movements of the 1960s and 1970s questioned the authority and role of doctors and rekindled interest in midwifery. The 1980s and 1990s saw greater attention to the intersections of race and class with sex and gender in the history of reproduction. The following decades brought further attention to dynamics of reproductive control, as well as histories of the recent past, bringing a historical perspective to how new technologies such as pregnancy tests and in vitro fertilization reshaped childbearing. This bibliography is focused on the West, with an emphasis on the United States, but English-language histories of reproduction around the globe have also emerged in recent decades and will be included in future iterations of this bibliography. Works are categorized by their main focus, but many books and articles address more than one aspect of the history of reproduction and are mentioned accordingly in section summaries. Nursing Clio, a peer-reviewed online publication focused on the history of gender and medicine, contains numerous short historical essays related to a myriad of topics in the history of reproduction.

Birth, Midwifery, and Obstetrics before the Twentieth Century

The dramatic moment of birth, and the medical and social rituals around it, has attracted much historical attention and has been central to historical discussions around women’s experiences, the medicalization (and de-medicalization) of reproduction, and relations of power in the birthing room. Park 2018 describes birth practices in medieval Europe, as midwives established themselves as professionals for normal births. Green 2008 locates the rise of male physicians’ authority in the birth room in the beginnings of physician attendance at complicated births in the Middle Ages. Wertz and Wertz 1989 describes the gradual entry of physicians and medical interventions in the birth room and the eventual move of birth into the hospital, as well as the backlash against medicalization embodied by the natural birth movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Ulrich 1990 demonstrates that a rural midwife was the most competent and trusted birth practitioner in her community in rural Maine at the turn of the nineteenth century, though doctors were beginning to encroach. Leavitt 1986 elucidates women’s experiences and describes why and how middle-class women invited doctors into the birth room while maintaining decision-making power, until birth moved to the hospital. Owens 2017 shows how doctors developed pathbreaking obstetrical repair surgeries on enslaved women and poor Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. Schwartz 2006 (cited under Pregnancy, Prenatal Care, and Postpartum) describes how enslaved women negotiated birth in circumstances where white doctors attended at the behest of white owners. Wolf 2009 examines the rise of obstetric anesthesia as a central, sometimes controversial, offering of physicians at medicalized births from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Wolf 2018 describes the rise of cesarean section as a normalized method of birth, and the only mildly successful attempts to rein it in once medical authorities acknowledged that it was dangerously overused.

• Green, Monica H. Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-modern Gynaecology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

  DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199211494.001.0001

  Demonstrates in exhaustive detail that while female midwives had a near-monopoly on routine births through the eighteenth century, male physicians developed the field of gynecology and oversaw the management of complicated childbirths during the Middle Ages.

• Leavitt, Judith Walzer. Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750–1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

  A pathbreaking history of childbirth experiences based on meticulous archival research in women’s letters and diaries, prescriptive literature, and other sources. Describes the evolution of the doctor-patient relationship in the birth room.

• Owens, Deirdre Cooper. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017.

  DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1pwt69x

  A complex examination of the interactions between the doctors who established obstetric and gynecological surgery in antebellum America and their enslaved and Irish immigrant assistants/patients/subjects.

• Park, Katherine. “Managing Childbirth and Fertility in Medieval Europe.” In Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day. Edited by Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauren Kassell, 153–166. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 2018.

  Describes fertility promotion, birth, and contraceptive and abortive practices in the high Middle Ages.

• Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

  Simultaneously a beautifully written biography of a Maine midwife and a series of historical arguments about women’s work and the history of birth. Painstaking research reveals in detail the shape of a midwife’s career and responsibilities in the rural new republic.

• Wertz, Richard W., and Dorothy C. Wertz. Lying-In, A History of Childbirth in America Expanded ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.

  A wide-ranging social history of birth from colonial times to the 1980s, tracing the medicalization of birth, including topics such as the introduction of forceps, obstetric anesthesia, managing puerperal fever, the problem of male doctors and norms of female modesty, the dehumanization of hospital birth practices, and natural childbirth as a backlash to medicalization. First edition published in 1977 (New York: Free Press).

• Wolf, Jacqueline H. Deliver Me from Pain: Anesthesia and Birth in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

  A meticulous, detailed history of medical pain relief during childbirth. Describes the evolution of obstetric practice amid persistent debates amongst doctors and patients about the benefits and harms of obstetric anesthesia from the 1840s to the present, with careful attention to the shifting landscape of power relations between doctors and birthing women in the birth room.

• Wolf, Jacqueline H. Cesarean Section: An American History of Risk, Technology, and Consequence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

  A 19th- through 21st-century history of cesarean section in the United States, examining how C-sections went from a rare and risky intervention to an entrenched and overused method of delivery, as obstetricians attempted to make birth safer via intervention and standardization.