i-iv -- Contents -- Series Preface -- Introduction -- Women’s Bodies: Health and Childbirth -- “On the Importance of the Obstetrick Art”: Changing Customs of Childbirth in America, 1760 to 1825 -- Women, Menstruation, and Nineteenth-Century Medicine -- The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America -- “The Fashionable Diseases”: Women’s Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America -- Women as Victims of Medical Experimentation: J. Marion Sims’ Surgery on Slave Women, 1845–1850 -- The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in 19thcentury America -- Smothered Slave Infants: Were Slave Mothers at Fault? -- Making Women Modern: Middle Class Women and Health Reform in 19th Century America -- From Maidenhood to Menopause: Sex Education for Women in Victorian America -- Birthing and Anesthesia: The Debate over Twilight Sleep -- Voluntary Motherhood: The Beginnings of Feminist Birth Control Ideas in the United States -- Chlorotic Girls, 1870–1920: A Historical Perspective on Female Adolescence -- Under the Shadow of Maternity: American Women's Responses to Death and Debility Fears in Nineteenth-Century Childbirth -- The American Midwife Controversy: A Crisis of Professionalization -- Forgotten Women: American Midwives at the Turn of the Twentieth Century -- The Immigrant Midwives of Lawrence: The Conflict between Law and Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Massachusetts -- “Science” Enters the Birthing Room: Obstetrics in America since the Eighteenth Century -- Feminine Hygiene, Fashion, and the Emancipation of American Women -- Using Oral History to Chart the Course of Illegal Abortions in Montana -- Copyright Information -- Index