The National Childbirth Trust (NCT) is among the most significant national organisations founded by women, for women, in post-war England. Established in 1956, it has promoted ‘natural childbirth’ and associated antenatal education practices designed by British physician Grantly Dick-Read (1890-1959) to facilitate ‘conscious’ and ‘joyful’ birth.

The view of the NCT as a ‘women’s organisation’ dominates the historical literature, while much of the discussion of fathers’ roles in twentieth-century childbirth centres on whether men’s access to hospital birth challenged or reinforced existing gender hierarchies.  I propose to complicate and destabilise these accounts by investigating interdependent gendered identities within the organisation, focusing on communication. Men and women instructed one another on behaviour during pregnancy and labour, and collaboratively recorded and recounted childbirth experiences. This is particularly evident in the 1970s and 1980s – an era of vigorous debate on the rights and responsibilities of fatherhood – when male partners became increasingly active in mediating, negotiating, and remembering births characterised by high technology obstetrics.

I will argue that closely reading accounts of those associated with the organisation yields more nuanced understandings of how women and men, in concert, made and practised natural childbirth, and how fathers claimed spaces for fathering.