Conflict in the Balance

Abstract

impact on women's experience of birth. Martin points out that women's ability to resist medical treatment during birth is also obviously affected by their race and their class. The Woman in the Body is a very different book than In Search of Parenthood. It sets an ideological context for women's experiences. It does not accept at face value the medical constructions of that experience, and it analyzes rather thanjust repeats women's quotations, so that the thoughts and constructions women put on their own lives are reconstructed for us in the text. Martin leaves us with a powerful set of images relating to the medical profession and to women's lived experience; a strong faith in women's resistance; and an uneasy anticipation of the future for women and birth as technology takes more and more control.