The history of obstetric forceps shows the dangers of privatizing important medical know-how.

He's hailed as the "father of infection control" and the "savior of mothers," but the truth about Ignaz Semmelweis is more complicated than that.

Nestlé promoted formula in the developing world, even though they knew bottle-feeding with limited sanitation and refrigeration could be dangerous.

For the frontier women of the 19th century, the experience of childbirth was harrowing, and even just expressing fear was considered a privilege.

Murphy Brown represented a threat to “family values”—a position that inherently placed her on the side of the families of color whose single family structures supposedly threatened the white, middle-class status quo of the 1990s.

Remembering history helps us to parse the present, and it follows that women struggling to process these "decades of pent-up anger" can find apt reading material in the feminist fiction of the 1970s.

Between 1930 and 1950, advances in medicine also contributed to continuing, dramatic improvement in infants’ survival chances.

On the surface, "Mommie Dearest" is a portrait of vanity and self-obsession. Dig deeper, and it reflects society’s discomfort with mothers and single women.

The Baby Boomers have been blamed for everything from economic stagnation to America's current political situation. But where did they come from?

Noted novelist and screenwriter Marguerite Duras on how her fictional mothers are all really her own (complicated, difficult, inimitable) mother.