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Chapter 4 examines the earliest representations of Mary in childbirth in writings dating from the second and early third centuries, including Odes of Solomon, Ascension of Isaiah, Protevangelium of James, and works by Tertullian. In a period in which Mary is not yet canonized as a uniquely sinless Eve, her virginity is interpreted in multiple and complex ways. Mary’s childbearing body is located in the context of both ancient and modern discourses about childbirth. Drawing theoretically on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as feminist philosophers including Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigiray, and Julia Kristeva, chapter 4 considers the parturient body—Mary’s body and, by extension, the bodies of other childbearing women—as a site of corporal knowledge. Corporal knowing begins in the womb.

This chapter analyses the rise of incidence in childbearing outside marriage. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the percentage of births outside marriage rose from 9% in 1975 to 40% in 2000. This chapter shows that the major factor accounting for this change is the dramatic rise of cohabitation among young people. It then analyses why there has been widespread substitution of cohabiting unions for direct marriage in Britain. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the implications for changes in family life.

Armed conflicts in recent decades have been more deadly for civilians in general and children in particular than in many earlier wars. The impact of conflict on children eludes simple explanation, for it is neither uniform nor arbitrary, but differs in both manner and degree due to age, gender, region, class, and the attributes of individual children. In Rwanda, mass and public rape was employed as an instrument of terror. When social networks are disrupted, and ways of life altered or shattered, informal and subsistence economic activities increase. In addition, during wartime children are often required to assume greater responsibility, taking on the roles of adults who have been killed, are fighting, or are otherwise absent. Changes in the demographic structure of households can also lead to the collapse of informal mechanisms for shared childcare, deterioration in intra-familial relations, and changes in the age thresholds for marriage, childbearing, work, and decision making.

This chapter briefly summarizes the debate on separate spheres by relating the concept to the lives of the Clapham sect. It is argued that though the men lived public lives, they spent their private time in the company of their wives and children rather than in the masculine world of clubs. The chapter shows that Barbara Wilberforce, Selina Macaulay, and Marianne (Sykes) Thornton (Mrs Henry Thornton) did not become close friends and had different views on wifely responsibilities, with Marianne Thornton the most actively engaged in her husband’s public career. The passing of the abolition act in 1807 and Wilberforce’s Yorkshire election campaign of that year are discussed mainly from her point of view. The chapter ends with a discussion of the childbearing histories of the three women.

Unlike the male-dominated marriages of the 18th century, Calvin Stowe and Harriet Beecher Stowe's union was a “companionate marriage” —increasingly the middle-class norm. The marital concept of intellectual companionship, prevalent in the advice literature of the period, was strongly enforced by the teaching of Sarah Pierce at the Litchfield school. The gains for women in the new, companionate ideal were clear, but there were costs as well. Companionate marriages gave rise to more conflict, for the expectations and roles were less defined. A greater stress on their marriage than their contrasting temperaments was the strain of closely spaced childbearing. In both the difficulties and joys of young motherhood Harriet was supported by her help, Anna Smith, a recently arrived English immigrant whom Harriet treated more as a sister than a domestic servant.

This chapter examines the experience of the mother and her child immediately following birth in Tudor and Stuart England. The midwife was responsible for checking the health condition of the newborn infant and in cutting the umbilical cord. The child's navel, especially those of the first born, was traditionally inspected by childbed assistants to predict the mother's future childbearing. The babies were often wrapped tightly in linen bands before being laid in a cradle. The responsibility of providing refreshment and ointment to the new mother was taken by those other childbed assistants including a nurse, relatives, or neighbours.

This chapter examines teenage pregnancy and its place in recent welfare reform proposals and legislation. It discusses the consequences of teenage childbearing, its social costs, and labor market opportunities. The chapter also presents theoretical perspectives on the link between teenage childbearing and socioeconomic disadvantage.

Gestational choriocarcinoma is an extremely rare cancer that occurs in women of childbearing age. The malignancy arises from the trophoblastic epithelium of the placenta, which is formed from embryonic tissue. This chapter reviews the epidemiology of gestational choriocarcinoma. Topics covered include classification, demographic patterns, environmental factors, host factors, pathogenesis, and preventive measures.

This chapter looks at the cultural assumptions that childbearing requires specialised medical knowledge in the United States, where expectant parents usually receive advice on all aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care from multiple medical experts. This guidance divides the care of mothers and infants under the supervision of separate medical experts, and further fragments various aspects of infant care, including feeding and sleep. The chapter uses historical and ethnographic research to explore the origins of these assumptions and their consequences for American parents who embark on breastfeeding. It suggests that severing the links between these evolutionarily and physiologically connected domains has had a significant detrimental impact on night-time infant care. Parents have been left without adequate community cultural knowledge about the interaction of breastfeeding and sleep, and assume that these processes are separate. As a result, they are frequently surprised by infants' night-time behaviour and have difficulties navigating night-time breastfeeding and sleep. These challenges constitute an important element of an already formidable set of barriers to breastfeeding in the United States, where structural support is extremely limited and breastfeeding remains a controversial practice.

Among the social origins of the Social Support and Pregnancy Outcome study, as described in Chapter 1, was the idea that social support is good for health. This chapter attempts to draw together ideas, insights, and problems from disparate areas of sociology, psychology, psychiatry, history, epidemiology, and medicine to address the question: why, in the first place, should anyone suppose that social support can be helpful to childbearing women and their families? The discussions cover the health outcomes influenced by social support; the link between social support and reproduction; how social support works; and the research challenge posed by the certain hostility of modern medicine towards the role of social factors in influencing patterns of health and illness.

This chapter discusses the cries and alarms of contemporary commentators worried about the shrinking birthrate in Japan. The need to ensure the futures of offspring makes demands on family economics and time, through greater investment in children's educational supports, longer years of co-residence with children who usually make little or no financial contribution to the household. There is an “our baby” image of co-parenting where the parents carefully share responsibility for home care, transport to day care, and other functions. This requires flexible work accommodation, difficult in most full-time work, and a decidedly organized attitude with which to confront the disbelief or perhaps dismay of employers and relatives. Childbearing choices are further constrained by the high cost of raising a successful child, and the standard definition of success is hard for parents to ignore. Having babies, when it is hard to have even one, let alone the multiple births advocated by commentators and officials, makes for complicated strategies of parenting.

This chapter describes the individual paradigm shift and the options that this shift has created for the women. This “birth model that works” is a replicable model of simplicity: a doctor, a midwife, and a doula attending births in a setting of the woman's choice. The chapter discusses the initiation into the humanization of childbirth that occurred in 1986 when an event in the emergency room of the hospital directed the attention toward the critical questioning of medical assistance at birth. The scars of the contemporary technocratic paradigm related to health care can be seen in the aseptic and cold manner that people these days manage birth in hospitals. It hopes to discover a key that could open the energies which were put to sleep by the imposition of rules, protocols, and prohibitions, most of them favoring institutions and the work of doctors, and not helping childbearing women.

This chapter is based on the premise that understanding the forces underlying marriage and cohabitation in the United States today is facilitated by knowledge of the historical roots of family life. Many features of the institutions of marriage and family in America today can be traced back hundreds and even thousands of years to the northwestern European past—and frequently appear in remarkably similar form. Other features of personal and family life in America today have changed dramatically over the centuries—often in surprising and little understood ways. The chapter provides an overview of the American Revolution and the establishment of the new republic at the end of the 1700s and beginning of the 1800s. It then discusses in general terms the role of families and marriage in social organization, the marriage and household system, parental involvement in courtship and marriage, sex and childbearing, and marital dissolution.

The present state of the American family is commonly interpreted as a ‘sign of the times’, a by-product of contemporary values and culture and the economic forces that shape modern life. Taking a longer view, however, reveals that many aspects of current family demography reflect patterns that have been under way since the beginning of the twentieth century, while others are newer developments. This chapter highlights the major demographic trends that have shaped family life in the United States since 1900. Some trends such as lower fertility, increases in age at marriage, and elevated divorce levels took root early on in the century, making patterns in family life ripe for change. Other developments, such as the large-scale participation of mothers with young children in the labor force, the prevalence of cohabitation, and sharp increases in out-of-wedlock childbearing, have only recently gained momentum. What is most noteworthy is that these trends have combined into a retreat from marriage in American society and the separation of childbearing from marriage.

Research studies have revealed that educational goals and academic motivation are linked to adolescents' sexual behavior and attitudes. Teenage pregnancy and early parenthood diminishes the chances that adolescents will succeed in school. This chapter aims to identify several sources of influence on the educational goals of this vulnerable student population to be able to suggest ways to increase the girls' expectancies to succeed in school, thus, creating a positive impact on their academic achievements and sexual health decisions as well. Two influences that are discussed in detail are the influence of perceived peer and parental attitudes towards early childbearing. Also, the data that examines the educational goals of low-achieving girls attending an alternative school facilitates an investigation on the intersection of the alternative school culture and home culture and its impact on adolescent childbearing attitudes and academic motivation.