Birth and history.

This historiographical essay analyzes the feminist challenge, dating from the 1970s, to the accepted view of childbirth which equated technologicaland male intervention with progress and consigned traditional midwifery to the dark ages. The challenge has come from two groups: feminists whose primary concerns are present-day issues and historians whose objective is a ''social history of childbirth''. The former offer valuable insights into the loss of feminine control over this essentially feminine event, but by simplistically portraying doctors as villains and midwives as heroines. they have equated technology with masculinity and naturalism with femininity. The second group takes a more balanced position: medical technology may have been a masculine monopoly in the past, but it belongs to all of us, and should be shaped and directed by all of us.