| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Nurse-Midwifery: The Birth of a New American Profession. By Laura E. Ettinger. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. xvi, 269 pp. Cloth, $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8142-1023-9. Paper, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8142-5150-8.)
Since 1980, the historical scholarship on American childbirth has increased impressively, having grown from virtually nothing. Yet a great deal remains unknown. Its complicated history involved the medicalization of childbirth, the lessening numbers of home-births as women took birth to the hospital, and the diminishing numbers of immigrant midwives as immigration ground to a halt with American involvement in World War I. Unique laws in the early twentieth century targeted midwives and home-births. A newly defined practice of midwifery that was associated with medicine appeared in the twenties—nurse-midwifery.	1
Laura E. Ettinger's book focuses on the development of a professional niche for nurse-midwives. Many have heard of Mary Breckinridge's Frontier Nursing Service (fns), established in 1925 in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky, as the basic history of nurse-midwives. Ettinger argues from new evidence that over the course of her career, Breckinridge implanted a significant racial bias into the fns. Unique among nurse-midwives from the twenties forward, those in Breckinridge's organization favored an elite clientele, carefully selected for its purported racial purity, following the lines of eugenics. Her leadership tainted the fns with racism as late as the 1950s, helping create divisions among the several professional groups of nurse-midwives and preventing unity.	. . .

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