The pioneering natural childbirth activist Sheila Kitzinger was born March 29, 1929 in Taunton, Somerset. It’s an appropriate setting. In Somerset was ‘a nest of suffragettes’[i], at a time when there was silence about ways of birthing and much ignorance about women’s bodies and reproductive rights.
Certainly suffragettes’ successors – new mothers in the 1970s and 1980s Women’s Liberation Movement – valued her books on childbirth and pregnancy. I remember very clearly that two books were seminal at that time, as women began to think about their rights to knowledge and choices: Our Bodies, Our Selves (1978) and Sheila’s The Good Birth Guide (1983). Although not a midwife herself, Sheila was part of a climate that produced the Association of Radical Midwives [ii]. It began in the 1976, as a means to support women in choosing to find better ways to give birth than having their labour induced by artificial rupture of membranes.
Sheila Kitzinger was the guru and indispensible guide for hundreds of my friends as they sought a self-respectful and new way to have babies. Her book was on every shelf, and it was one of the most popular works in the bookshop where I worked.
The social anthropologist still teaches – at Thames Valley University, the Wolfson School of Health Sciences and at various workshops. Aged 81 today, she said recently that far from yearning for more grandchildren, “I just want my daughters to be creative and to put a lot into life. We argue and discuss the major issues, especially feminism, supposedly outmoded, but we still consider ourselves feminists. Uwe [her husband] is the amused onlooker.”
As a creative person myself, who tries to do art as well as activism, I also particularly appreciate her batiks of conception and birth. You can see some on her website.
Jo Stanley is a feminist historian whose attitudes to health, information and dignity were totally changed by being part of the Women’s Liberation Movement. An expert on gender and the sea, she is working on a new book, Risk! Women on the Wartime Seas, Yale University Press. See her website and her blog.
[i] B. M. Willmott Dobbie, A Nest of Suffragettes in Somerset. Eagle House, Batheaston, (Batheaston, 1979).
[ii] See also an interesting history of MIDIRS, the midwives information resource service.