This website is the result of an informal women’s history research project conducted in the late 1990s. The project collected oral histories from women in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Specifically, stories of having their babies at home, not in a hospital, from about 1920 to the mid-1940s. There are only thirty stories, so the results aren’t statistically valid. But these are stories that hadn’t ever been thought important, hadn’t ever been told, and that very much needed to be written down.

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How The Content Is Organized

Once upon a time, the content of this site was going to be a book. But writing a book requires a fair amount of uninterrupted time, and a steady source of income. I’ve had neither, but I have had bills to pay. The material has languished for way too long as I’ve raised children and earned a living, first as a freelance writer, and now as a member of the 8:00 to 4:30 paid workforce.

I would still like to see it in book format, but getting a manuscript accepted, and then published, by a traditional publisher is a lengthy back and forth process. I don’t want to wait any longer. I want to get the material in front of readers in the most immediate way possible, hyperlinked and search engine optimized.

All the commentary about the project is on the static pages of the site. The project itself–the birth stories, our thoughts along the way, some of the background reading and research–is in a blog format.

Or it all will be, eventually. If you stick with me, you’re going to see this website grow organically, in a decidedly non-linear fashion. As I work on the site, I’ll be adding to it thought by thought, story by story, revision by revision, more or less as the mood strikes me.

One last note: We have very few photographs. We asked our interview subjects if they had photos they’d allow us to use. Most didn’t have any, those that did would have had to take apart family photo albums to let us take them away and copy them. We were rookies. We didn’t have the nerve. We deliberately chose not to photograph the subjects themselves. We were already there to ask a lot of intimate, personal questions of women who grew up in a time when topics such as childbirth were not openly discussed. They were doing so willingly. We thought that was enough.

The photo of the abandoned farmhouse in the header is one I took on a prowl around a friend’s farm one summer. I’m hoping to find originals to illustrate the site with eventually but, for now, words will be doing most of the work.