ABOUT THIS BOOK

Sisters on a Journey is a moving collection of twenty-seven profiles-interviews and photographs-of contemporary American midwives. These extraordinary women speak with unusual frankness about what brought them to midwifery, what they see as their greatest challenges and rewards, their recollections of their fist home births, and their thoughts about the place of midwives in the American health care system.

This book celebrates midwives from very different ethnic, religious, and ideological backgrounds-in all of their richness and diversity. Chester presents a community of voices of women who share a commitment to other women and who strive together to ensure for a practice with such a long history a successful and vibrant future.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

PENFIELD CHESTER is a midwife who has a rural home birth practice in western Massachusetts. She has been attending births since 1980 and is presently the New England Regional Representative and Education Committee Chair of the Midwives' Alliance of North America.

SARAH CHESTER MCKUSICK is the mother of three daughters, all of whose home births were assisted by her sister Penfield. Over the past twenty years, she has traveled and photographed extensively in the Unites States, Asia, Europe, and Central America. She is drawn to portraiture and social landscapes.

REVIEWS

Sisters on a Journey makes these astonishing women real, in all their diversity, in all their glory.

— Barbara Katz Rothman, author of Recreating Motherhood and In Labor

Sisters on a Journey is filled with precisely the wisdom we need to nurture and sustain healthy and joyous mothers and babies. The information in this book can help us all create a healthier, more creative society.

— Christiane Northrup, M.D.FACOG, author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom

Sisters on a Journey takes its readers on a journey of their ownùinto the hearts, minds, and practices of midwives whose living voices leap from these pages.

— Robbie E. Davis-Floyd, Ph.D., author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage

A wonderful book! Intense, moving, and powerful.

— Sheila Kitzinger, author of The Complete Book of Preganancy and Childbirth

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Sisters on a Journey: Portraits of American Midwives
Common Threads
Afterword
Appendix A
Appendix B
Bibliography
Index