Birthing the West - by Jennifer J Hill (Paperback)

About the Book

Birthing the West shows how mothers and midwives created an informal but dynamic health care system in the Rockies and Plains between 1860 and 1940. Over time, public health entities usurped their power, with lasting impacts for women, families, and American identity.

Book Synopsis

Reading the West Longlist for Nonfiction

Childbirth defines families, communities, and nations. In Birthing the West, Jennifer J. Hill fills the silences around historical reproduction with copious new evidence and an enticing narrative, describing a process of settlement in the American West that depended on the nurturing connections of reproductive caregivers and the authority of mothers over birth.

Economic and cultural development depended on childbirth. Hill's expanded vision suggests that the mantra of cattle drives and military campaigns leaves out essential events and falls far short of an accurate representation of American expansion. The picture that emerges in Birthing the West presents a more complete understanding of the American West: no less moving or engaging than the typical stories of extraction and exploration but concurrently intriguing and complex.

Birthing the West unearths the woman-centric practice of childbirth across Montana, the Dakotas, and Wyoming, a region known as a death zone for pregnant women and their infants. As public health entities struggled to establish authority over its isolated inhabitants, they collaborated with physicians, eroding the power and control of mothers and midwives. The transition from home to hospital and from midwife to doctor created a dramatic shift in the intimately personal act of birth.

Review Quotes

"This book is a compelling addition to the historiography of the American West and the history of medicine. Further, it would serve as an excellent supplement to any U.S. West survey course, providing a compelling narrative to restructure how we understand the history of westward expansion, midwifery, and women's labor."--Gianna May Sanchez, South Dakota History

"Birthing the West conveys how power in intimate spaces was negotiated by women and, later, men as the northern plains region of the West became increasingly incorporated into centralized power structures."--Meg Frisbee, Kansas History

"While the book is of immediate interest to scholars of women's and reproductive history, all historians of the US West and Plains would be wise to include childbirth in their accounts of the region's transformations. Childbirth is a major event in the private lives of men and women but remains at the periphery of academic history. As Jennifer J. Hill demonstrates, both the act of childbirth and its attendant cultural meanings was a central plank in the territorial expansion of the United States."--Rachel Miller, Nebraska History Magazine

"An important and engaging read."--Meg Eppel Gudgeirsson, Journal of Arizona History

"Hill provides a clear picture of the difficulties faced by pregnant women and the fundamentally important role that female community members--especially midwives--played in the settlement of the West."--Hannah Haksgaard, Montana: The Magazine of Western History

"Jennifer Hill puts women in the forefront of western history and shows the equal importance of women's worlds in the settling of the West. She writes clearly, thoughtfully, and, in places, lyrically. Hill projects images wonderfully and makes her points well."--Todd L. Savitt, author of Race and Medicine in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century America

"This is an excellent resource book about a subject seldom in the forefront of Western literature."--Candy Moulton, True West

"Hill's work is very important to the historiography of the northern Great Plains states. Looking through the lens of childbirth provides unique perspectives on family formation, regional professionalization, and Great Plains settler colonialism. One of the exciting elements of this book is how women create community and 'reproduce' the state. There are good local stories here to enjoy."--Molly P. Rozum, author of Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies

About the Author

Jennifer J. Hill is an assistant teaching professor of American studies at Montana State University. She serves as the executive director of the Women's Reproductive History Alliance, a digital museum dedicated to educating the public on reproductive history.