The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution

Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born

Tina Cassidy · 312 pages

"Starting with a lively, personal introduction in which Tina Cassidy describes her grandmother's, her mother's, and her own experiences of giving birth, readers are taken on an astounding journey into the history of childbirth. From evolution to the epidural and beyond, Tina Cassidy presents an intelligent, enlightening, and impeccably researched cultural history of how and why we are born the way

This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor

Susan Wicklund, Alan Kesselheim · 281 pages

A female physician describes her dedication to helping women through the abortion experience, the dangers she faced as an abortion provider, and her thoughts on the abortion debate.

Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

Willie Parker · 217 pages

An outspoken, Christian reproductive justice advocate and abortion provider--one of the few doctors to provide such services to women in Mississippi and Alabama--pulls from his personal and professional journeys as well as the scientific training he received as a doctor to reveal how he came to believe that helping women in need, without judgment, is precisely the Christian thing to do.

Birth Matters: A Midwife's Manifesta

Ina May Gaskin · 276 pages

Renowned for her practice's exemplary results and low intervention rates, Ina May Gaskin has gained international notoriety for promoting natural birth. She is a much-beloved leader of a movement that seeks to stop the hyper-medicalization of birth--which has lead to nearly a third of hospital births in America to be cesarean sections--and renew confidence in a woman's natural ability to birth. Up

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

Ann Fessler · 358 pages

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler bril

Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You're Taking, The Sleep You're Missing, The Sex You're Not Having, and What's Really Making You Crazy

Julie Holland · 449 pages

"A groundbreaking guide for women of all ages that shows women's inherent moodiness is a strength, not a weakness"--

The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction

Rachel P. Maines · 181 pages

The author explores hysteria in Western medicine throughout the ages and examines the characterization of female sexuality as a disease requiring treatment. Medical authorities, she writes, were able to defend and justify the clinical production of orgasm in women as necessary to maintain the dominant view of sexuality, which defined sex as penetration to male orgasm - a practice that consistently

Midwives

Chris Bohjalian · 312 pages

Sibyl is a respected midwife, accused of murder after she performs a caesarian on a mother whom she believes to have died of a stroke during a long and difficult labour. A trial ensues to decide whether Sibyl has committed murder. The story is told from Sibyl's daughter's viewpoint.

The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times

Jennifer Worth · 471 pages

An unforgettable story of the joy of motherhood, the bravery of a community, and the hope of one extraordinary womanAt the age of twenty-two, Jennifer Worth leaves her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in post war London's East End slums. The colorful characters she meets while delivering babies all over London—from the plucky, warm-hearted nuns with whom she lives to th

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

Gail Collins · 471 pages

Tells how American women got from there to here, in politics, fashion, economics, sex, families and work in the past five decades.

The New Perimenopause: An Evidence-Based Guide to Surviving the Zone of Chaos and Feeling Like Yourself Again

Mary Claire Haver

**The #1 *New York Times* bestselling author of *The New Menopause* explains everything a woman needs to know to thrive during the often-misdiagnosed and medically ignored perimenopausal years** *I’m just not feeling like myself!* This is the battle cry of the perimenopausal woman. Though menstrual cycle changes and the emotional rollercoaster that accompanies them are the hallmarks of the t

For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women

Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English · 369 pages

From the Publisher: A provocative new perspective on female history, the history of American medicine and psychology, and the history of child-rearing unlike any other.

What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir

Alice Eve Cohen · 194 pages

A personal and medical odyssey beyond anything most women would believe possibleAt age forty-four, Alice Eve Cohen was happy for the first time in years. After a difficult divorce, she was engaged to an inspiring man, joyfully raising her adopted daughter, and her career was blossoming. Alice tells her fiance that shes never been happier. And then the stomach pains begin. In her unflinchingly hone

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Silvia Federici · 285 pages

The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

Belle Boggs · 242 pages

"A brilliant exploration of the natural, medical, psychological, and political facets of fertility"--Back cover.

Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story

Peter Bagge · 72 pages

Portrays the life of Margaret Sanger, a birth control activist and advocate for female reproductive rights, in graphic novel format. Includes an 18 page section at the back ("Who's who and what's what" with photographs of those concerned).

Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case

Debbie Nathan · 297 pages

The true story of the three women behind Sybil, the famous multiple-personality case.

Heart and Hands: A Midwife's Guide to Pregnancy and Birth

Elizabeth Davis · 287 pages

This manual for lay midwives includes chapters on prenatal care; problems in pregnancy, labor, and birth; and postpartum care.

A Woman's Guide to Natural Hormones

Christine Conrad · 228 pages

More doctors are recommending natural (also called bio-identical) hormones-because they offer all the advantages of synthetic hormone replacement therapy (HRT) without the negative side effects or long-term health risks. Unlike synthetic HRT, natural hormones are bio-identical: they match a woman's own hormones exactly and don't interfere with the body's normal hormone production. They are safer a

Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa

Joan Jacobs Brumberg · 370 pages

"When Fasting Girls first appeared in 1988, anorexia nervosa was widely considered a new disease. In fact, most people thought it would go away. Joan Jacobs Brumberg's book changed that perception by demonstrating when and where anorexia nervosa originated and why it has become so "popular" in our time. A classic work that is both a biography of the disease and a sustained inquiry into the cultura

Childbirth without Fear: The Principles and Practice of Natural Childbirth

Grantly Dick-Read · 352 pages

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

Kate Moore · 480 pages

As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were conside

What to Expect When You're Expecting

Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi E. Murkoff, Sandee E. Hathaway · 616 pages

We're expecting again! Announcing the completely revised and updated third edition of America's best-selling pregnancy book, What to Expect When You're Expecting. Two years in the making, it's a cover-to-cover, chapter-by-chapter, line-by-line revision and update. Everything that the original did-which, at just shy of 10 million copies in print, it did extraordinarily well-the third edition does,

The Birth Partner: A Complete Guide to Childbirth for Dads, Doulas, and Other Labor Companions

Penny Simkin · 337 pages