Bodymakers or Birthing Fathers

Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Body Building

Author: Leslie Heywood

Women with muscles are a recent phenomenon. While generating a good deal of interest, both positive and negative, their importance to the cultural landscape has yet to be acknowledged. Leslie Heywood looks at female body building as a metaphor for how women fare in our current political and cultural climate. BODYMAKERS reveals how female bodybuilders find themselves both trapped and empowered by their sport. 14 illustrations.

Book about: Meds Money and Manners or Discretionary Time

Birthing Fathers: The Transformation of Men in American Rites of Birth

Author: Richard K Reed

In the past two decades, men have gone from being excluded from the delivery room to being admitted; then invited, and, finally, expected to participate actively in the birth of their children. No longer mere observers, fathers attend baby showers, go to birthing classes, and share in the intimate, everyday details of their partners' pregnancies.

In this unique study, Richard Reed draws on the feminist critique of professionalized medical birthing to argue that the clinical nature of medical intervention distances fathers from child delivery. he explores men's roles in childbirth and the ways in which birth transforms a man's identity and his relations with his partner, his new baby, and society. In other societies, birth is recognized as an important rite of passage for fathers. Yet, in American culture, despite the fact that fathers are admitted into delivery rooms, little attention is given to their transition to fatherhood.

The book concludes with an exploration of what men's roles in childbirth tell us about gender and American society. Reed suggests that it is no coincidence that men's participation in the birthing process developed in parallel to changing definitions of fatherhood more broadly. Over the past twenty years, it has become expected that fathers, in addition to being strong and dependable, will be empathetic and nurturing.

Well-researched, candidly written, and enriched with personal accounts of over fifty men from all parts of the world, this book is as much about the birth of fathers as it is about fathers in birth.

Table of Contents:

1	American fathers and hospital childbirth	1
2	Couvade in society and history	32
3	Standing vigil : fathers in the waiting room, 1920-1970	76
4	Birthing revolution : men to the barricades	104
5	Birthing classes : training men to birth	135
6	Men's experience of birth	161
7	Fathers, birth, and society	211