Wise Birth

Penny Armstrong has delivered over 1,800 babies and enjoyed a 25 year career in nurse-midwifery including teaching and practice in home, hospital and birth centres.She and her husband Rich currently live and work in their home state of Maine where she counsels people on living healthy lifestyles.Sheryl Feldman is a writer, teacher, and not-for-profit communications manager. She also co-founded Hedgebrook, a retreat for women writers and is the initiator of its community residency project Women Writers of the Arab World.Apart from A Wise Birth and A Midwife's Story, she also wrote Bangkok Zigzag, a documentary on motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok. Passionate for international travel and crossing cultures, she lives in Seattle and has two sons and two granddaughters.Sheila Kitzinger M.B.E, M.Litt was a social anthropologist of birth and author of 25 books published internationally, most on the emotional journey through this major life experience. At Oxford in the 50s she discovered that the social anthropology of that time was almost entirely about men. She decided she would do research to discover what was important in women's lives, and focused on pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding.Her five children were all born at home. She lectured widely in different countries and has learned from mothers and midwives in the USA and Canada, the Caribbean, Eastern and Western Europe, Israel, Australia and New Zealand, Latin America, South Africa and Japan, and from women in prison and those who have had a traumatic birth experience.She died April 11, 2015.Her website is www.sheilakitzinger.com

• 1 The Nature of Birth 2 Discouraging Birth 3 Remembering: What Mother Told Us 4 Remembering: The Inner Legacy 5 The Obstetrician's Culture 6 The Midwife's Culture 7 The Visibility Tale 8 Reconciliations 9 Unmothered Mothers 10 The Giving in Birth

"Penny Armstrong is a symbol of the revival of midwifery." -Michael Odent, obstetrician and author"