A book that I found very enlightening and interesting is A Midwife’s Tale, compiled by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich from a diary of a Maine midwife in the eighteenth century. Several things emerge from her detailing of her job, including that women generally make it through birth fine (though some babies don’t, sadly), that women found breastfeeding as hard if not harder then than now (lots of visits to “break” a breast that has a horrible mastitis, many women who can’t nurse and some who just can’t stand it) … also the fact that premarital sex & babies was far from invented in the twentieth century.