Brought to Bed by Judith Leavitt

Two Hundred years of American history of childbirth has been fairly, thoroughly and sensitively examined by Leavitt. The main argument she focuses on in the book is the shrewd common commencement of giving birth to a child. This phenomenon is not only a natural event but an important part in the common description of womanhood. In the Past, natural differences have been preserved in the sexual dissection of labor. The communal globe resolutely given to men, being a mother is the center of women’s survival with giving birth to a baby her most appreciated work.

The emphasis of Leavitt is on the childbearing centrality to women living her life which guides her to center on the altering personality of giving birth and the relationship a women has to it. The story of Leavitt clarifies from the viewpoint of women giving birth and also of the medical occupation. Cautiously and creatively, she discloses the attractive interaction between the different damage of common and medical changes have affected the lives of women usually and in particular childbirth.

The dialectical association between society and medicine is lit up in the discussion of Leavitt of the entry of a physician into the room where children are born and the means by which women on their own resolute the limit of medical contribution in this customarily area of women. Distant from extension unreceptive losses of their own ecology, for the better part of the era women who gave birth got the emotional power from the normal female’s support systems.

In the 1930s childbirth moved permanently to the hospitals, before those women themselves who gave birth were the liveliest causes of alteration in the history of American Childbirth. The preservation of determination of women and traditions of females to form events in their own rooms of childbirth imitated a basic feminist desire. Even though giving birth is the sign of customary womanhood, it was the focal point of the arrangement women constructed to conquer the restrictions of custom and eventually to extend the sphere of females.

The use of Leavitt’s confidential writings of women of America maintain her analysis that women had the control in the child birth room and only gave up this authority to the medical occupation after cautious thought of the options. Leavitt’s argument is realistic that medical experts did not come in without an invitation nor they forced their knowledge, their pincers, asepsis or anesthesia on their miserable patients. The middle and upper class American women would comprise the first line of the fresh medical and social development.

Therefore they were active in changing birth of a child from a conventional concern of females into a medical occupation where attention is needed of the experts and eventually the patient is hospitalized. The women who gave birth knew about the options they had with respect to medical intrusion and male attendance. Nothing was forced upon them. The feminist viewpoint of this book does not mean to bash a doctor. The author points that physicians in America were largely male and they were very alert of their proposition in the mortality rates and maternal morbidity.

They struggled to enhance the technique and training of obstetric for the well being of the infant and mother. As a result the occupation has keenly known a better path which is safe and it allows nature to do its work and unwarranted medical intrusion. The result of any intense was often a tragedy for the family. Regardless of the substantial influence that women had for a long time in the room which children were born, by early 1950s they had given their authority and their support system for birth of a child only amongst strangers. As the author challenges the medical side of child birth involved some decisive achievement and losses.

By the middle of the 20th century, childbirth was as safe like never before. For the women of America, the individual cost was a isolation from their own experience of childbirth and a callous of the bonds which had conventionally combined them with all the other mothers. Now the pendulum had turned from a customary childbirth to childbirth as a problem of medical experts. The study of Leavitt confirms that physicians and women should divide the liability for the development of childbirth like we are now used too. According to Leavitt, if more changes are made this will allow women to regain the familiarity.

The two hundred years covered by Leavitt and her efforts to believe childbirth from the viewpoint of the medical profession as well as women, the book is amazingly logical. As normally the case is the approach loans itself to recurrence of arguments, instances and also quotes but these are small arguments. More significantly, like all the other ground breaking analyses, this one raises a bit of debatable questions. One can be that, given the undividable life of infant and maternal transience, a bit more thought of the childbirth impact on its final creation would have been valuable.

As many women faced the tragedy of losing a child either during or after birth, some would face this tragedy more than once in her life; this seems to be one of the emotional sides of childbirth which requires more expansion. The accessibility of different basis has also prohibited any but transient thought to the familiarity to the women in the working class, who had a lesser choices when giving birth. How can these sorts of women sense the rising violation of medication in the childbirth room? Do they have the same kind of luxury network that upper and middle class women have?

Did they eagerly pursue their luckier sister to the hospital? Even though the author cannot be held responsible for setting up limits on her complete study, these questions can make up an exciting follow to her book. However Brought to Bed is an astonishing donation to the women history and also of medicines. It does really tell about the transfer from a self done childbirth to a childbirth done medically. Reference page • Judith Walzer Leavitt (1988) Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950. Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA