Margaret Charles Smith, a ninety-one-year-old Alabama midwife, has thousands of birthing stories to tell. Sifting through nearly five decades of providing care for women in rural Greene County, she relates the tales that capture the life-and-death struggle of the birthing experience and the traditions, pharmacopeia, and spiritual attitudes that influenced her practice. She debunks images of the complacent southern “granny” midwife and honors the determination, talent, and complexity of midwifery.

Fascinating to read, this book is part of the new genre of writing that recognizes the credibility of midwives who have emerged from their own communities and were educated through apprenticeship and personal experience. Past descriptions of southern black midwives have tended to denigrate their work in comparison with professional established medicine. Believed to be the oldest living (though retired) traditional African American midwife in Alabama, Smith is one of the few who can recount old-time birthing ways. Despite claims that midwives contributed to high infant mortality rates, Smith’s story emphasizes midwives' successes in facing medical challenges and emergencies.

In England in the seventeenth century, childbirth was the province of women. The midwife ran the birth, helped by female "gossips"; men, including the doctors of the day, were excluded both from the delivery and from the subsequent month of lying-in.

But in the eighteenth century there emerged a new practitioner: the "man-midwife" who acted in lieu of a midwife and delivered normal births. By the late eighteenth century, men-midwives had achieved a permanent place in the management of childbirth, especially in the most lucrative spheres of practice.

Why did women desert the traditional midwife? How was it that a domain of female control and collective solidarity became instead a region of male medical practice? What had broken down the barrier that had formerly excluded the male practitioner from the management of birth?

This confident and authoritative work explores and explains a remarkable transformation--a shift not just in medical practices but in gender relations. Exploring the sociocultural dimensions of childbirth, Wilson argues with great skill that it was not the desires of medical men but the choices of mothers that summoned man-midwifery into being.

Responding to the growing need for tried-and-trusted solutions to the reproductive health care issues confronting millions of women worldwide, Obstetrics and Gynecology in Low-Resource Settings provides practical guidelines for ensuring the delivery of quality OB/GYN care to women in resource-poor countries. Including contributions from leading clinicians and researchers in the field, this welcome overview fills an important gap in existing medical literature on women’s health care and will be an invaluable resource for doctors, clinicians, and medical students at all stages of their careers who work in the global health arena.

The reproductive health risks that all women face are greatly exacerbated when health care facilities are inadequate, equipment and medications are in short supply, and well-trained medical staff are few and far away. Often in these settings, the sole doctor or medical professional on hand has expertise in some areas of women’s reproductive care but needs a refresher course in others.

This informative guide features hands-on, step-by-step instruction for the most pertinent OB/GYN conditions—both acute and chronic—that health care workers in the field confront. The authors examine a wide range of topics, including: strategies to reduce maternal mortality and stillbirths; infectious and sexually transmitted diseases, including malaria and HIV; cervical cancer; contraception; prenatal, delivery, and newborn care; and complications arising from gender-based violence and female genital cutting. Published in a convenient format with a durable binding, this reference will be an essential companion to health care providers throughout the world.

A Ms. Magazine “Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2023”

After a less-than-positive experience giving birth as a Black woman in the 1970s, Linda Janet Holmes launched a lifetime of work as an activist dedicated to learning about and honoring alternative birth traditions and the Black women behind them. Safe in a Midwife’s Hands brings together what Holmes has gleaned from the countless midwives who have shared with her their experiences, at a time when their knowledge and holistic approaches are essential counterbalances to a medical system that routinely fails Black mothers and babies. Building on work she began in the 1980s, when she interviewed traditional Black midwives in Alabama and Virginia, Holmes traveled to Ghana, Ethiopia, and Kenya to visit midwives there. In detailing their work, from massage to the uses of medicinal plants to naming ceremonies, she links their voices to those of midwives and doulas in the US. She thus illuminates parallels between birthing traditions that have survived hundreds of years of colonialism, enslavement, Jim Crow, and ongoing medical racism to persist as vital cultural practices that promote healthy outcomes for mothers and babies during pregnancy, birth, and beyond.