It might seem rather obvious to foreground the discussions of women, and their families, when talking about birth. However, up until now much historical research has focused on male-authored medical literature. In bringing women to the fore Fox's book reframes our understanding of this key life-cycle event. It counters the tendency to think about the moment of delivery as ‘birth’. Instead, it is shown here that birth was a series of interconnected events and experiences: a ‘process’ that brought together formed and reformed kinship groups and communities in transient and imagined spaces. Fox's use of family letters and surviving personal documents vividly evokes the physical and emotional experience of birth for women in an era of shifting social and demographic change and of changing medical theories.

Chapter One explores the physicality of birth. Placing women's voices at the centre of her analysis Fox expands our knowledge of labour significantly. The chapter substantiates what might in retrospect seem obvious that, for example, women diverged from medical authors who used the abstract term ‘travail’ derived from old French to describe birth. Women relied instead on ‘groaning’ and ‘grumbling’, descriptions that accentuated both the physical and audible nature of birth. Groaning signalled the progress and nature of the birth to those within and beyond the birthing chamber. Yet while most women understood labour was a painful experience, they did not emphasise this in their descriptions. Rather, women discussed the size of the infant and the duration of labour as factors that could affect birth and recovery. Fox also demonstrates that despite supposedly ‘dominating’ the eighteenth-century birth room, accoucheurs were in a precarious position. Subject to the judgement of the midwife and the gossips, they were bound by the traditional authority of women within the space.

The temporary and material nature of the birth space is examined in Chapter Two. Fox argues that, despite their importance, the materialities and spaces of birth were transient. The birth room reclaimed after labour as those who had been required to work, live, and sleep elsewhere returned (often by necessity) to the space. Drawing on geographical and ethnographical ideas the chapter offers a fresh understanding of how the birthing space was carved out of quotidian domestic space, therefore each space was recognisable but inherently new each time. Fox carefully considers the ways in which such complexities played out in different social strata, noting that those without multiple rooms at their command might see the birthing room shrink during lying-in to encompass only the bed. The objects within the space, she shows, generated, and reinforced, bodily experiences and helped articulate the specific function the space served. The chapter emphasises women's agency – their ability to command spaces within the home for the duration of their lying in.

Chapter Three draws on recipe books and folklore collections to examine the food provided for the mother, infant and birth attendants. It demonstrates that ‘caudle’ a key substance in birth traditions, was not recorded in recipe collections but instead women learned how to make the warming and strengthening drink inside the birthing room. Nourishment for the infant was, Fox demonstrates, more contentious. Medical writers and man-midwives disagreed with birth attendants about feeding newborn infants. The chapter underlines that both the medical and lay population had a sound understanding that the mother's diet affected the nature of breastmilk and so the health of the child. Adherence to a ‘good’ and simple diet by new mothers was thus a means of conveying maternal devotion. The chapter also highlights the ways in which food defined, redefined, and mapped community relationships, through customs like the eating of a groaning cake.

Chapter Four scrutinises the birth family, nominally the parturient woman's husband, mother, and sister. The chapter complicates existing narratives about the later eighteenth-century transition to the nuclear family, by emphasising that birth necessitated the creation of transient family configurations which disrupted existing kin structures. Birth families represented distinct emotional communities bound by expressions of love for the newborn infant, mother, and family. Considering the prayers said during and after birth, Fox reveals the core bond between husband and wife. He was duty bound to lead the family and gathered attendants in prayer, not for the newborn child, but giving thanks for the safe passage of the newly delivered mother. Thus, while men may have been excluded from the birthing chamber itself, they were integral to birth and infant care, at all levels of the social spectrum. The chapter uncovers how those excluded from the birth family, notably paternal grandmothers, inserted themselves into the birth space through letters to be read to the child and by buying furniture for the newborn that reflected their own tastes and personality. These embodied objects conveyed the absentee into the heart of the birthing space and allowed them to work through their own emotional responses to the birth.

The final chapter deepens our understanding of community and neighbourly interactions. It demonstrates evocatively the reciprocal nature of the relationship between birth and the community. Birth required the support and input of the community, whilst simultaneously childbirth provided a space in which to conduct community business and worked to define the boundaries of neighbourly obligation. The chapter dismantles long-held assumptions that illegitimate births were marked by hostile neighbourly interactions by demonstrating the ways in which single women were integrated into the community and how the new mother and infant were attended by women who cared for the child. In particular it does this by illustrating the importance of informal birth gatherings beyond the ceremony of churching and the moment of birth itself. The chapter then emphasises the ways in which communities cemented newborn infants into communal knowledge and memory situating them geographically and through connections to the parents, in both legitimate and illegitimate births.

Giving Birth draws together personal literature, folklore collections, and court records to masterfully articulate that childbirth opens a window onto the everyday family and community interactions, obligations, and bonds of later eighteenth-century society. The book significantly nuances and updates the existing historiography on the topic of birthing rituals in the early modern era. Fox is to be commended on producing a book that is engaging and accessible, one that will appeal to students whilst becoming a cornerstone of research on the social history of reproduction.