BOOK REVIEWS
COMING HOME
“Kline has written an engaging history of how midwives accomplished this feat in light of the reach and power of institutionalized medicine. Anyone interested in learning where and how babies were born will want to read this book... Kline's book will undoubtedly convince readers that midwives should be at the center of delivering these better outcomes.” – Elizabeth Reis, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
“Coming Home belongs on the shelves of those teaching medical history, gender history, and postwar United States history. It also deserves a place in the classroom, thanks to its richly detailed and wonderfully accessible narrative. Its is rich with accounts of birthing women and midwives who rejected medically controlled hospital births. It is equally rich in data, including statistical analyses showing the safety of midwife-supported births.”
– Janet Golden, American Historical Review
"Kline offers a rich and complicated history of direct entry midwifery and the twentieth-century American homebirth movement. . . At the core of Kline's thesis is that in each locale where women were called into midwifery, they collaborated with physicians. These women saw childbirth as requiring much more than medical technology, yet they recognized it had its place, and thus sought out or welcomed unsolicited supportive medical advisers and teachers." - Jennifer Block, Midwifery Today