Looking over the books on motherhood written by Elisabeth Bing, one might be forgiven for lumping Ms. Bing in with the blossoming sorority of mother-writers currently expounding on the joys and anxieties of child rearing.

As it happens, Ms. Bing is 90 years old and was publishing books – such as “Six Practical Lessons for an Easier Childbirth” and “Moving Through Pregnancy” – when many of today’s authors were barely weaned. In the 1960s, she wrote about sex during pregnancy (it’s a good thing) and new motherhood (it’s emotionally challenging). To be sure, Elisabeth Bing is not a household name, but the program that this Upper West Sider co-founded nearly half a century ago is. From her New York City apartment, Ms. Bing launched Lamaze International, one of the first childbirth-training programs in America aimed at easing labor pains.

While pregnancy-advice books have flooded the market for centuries, Lamaze – named for Dr. Fernand Lamaze, who popularized the program in France – was innovative because it included a series of structured classes for men and women. In the 1960s, Ms. Bing became the pregnancy guru to New York’s glitterati.

Today the Lamaze approach conjures up images of big-bellied women splayed on gym floors, husbands crouched behind them, rehearsing encouraging platitudes. While many women attend a class or two out of curiosity, few expectant mothers have faith that a few sessions will transform a partner into an eager coach. Besides, who wants a cheerleader by the bedside when you can have an experienced doctor and nurse?

With a wide smile, Ms. Bing, who is accustomed to criticism, explained what she believes the Lamaze movement has achieved for women. “I feel we have changed the whole attitude toward obstetrics and pregnant women, not necessarily technical changes, but the psychological and practical approaches to pregnancy,” she said.

Ms. Bing is a petite woman with a long gray ponytail and looks like just the sort of person you would want by your side during labor and delivery. Her thick German accent is similar to that of Dr. Ruth’s, the geriatric television sex expert. But unlike her compatriot, Ms. Bing does not aim to shock.

On the other hand, she has never shied from controversy. In the 1950s, Ms. Bing and her cohorts smuggled a French film of a woman giving birth into America. Considered an educational teaching tool in Europe, the film was deemed obscene by the U.S. postal service. When Manhattan hospitals as well as the 92nd Street Y refused to show the film, calling it pornography, Ms. Bing invited about 100 expectant parents to a screening at a friend’s East Side apartment.

“Oh, we would get big crowds,” Ms. Bing said, laughing.

Ms. Bing spoke of the differences between women today and the men and women of generations past who thronged to her apartment.

Women in the 1960s and 1970s,she said, were fighting for equal rights and struggling to gain control of the birthing experience, which had, all too often, become a fog of drug-induced delirium. Many doctors, she added, were paternalistic and condescending, ruining what should have been a cherished event.

Today, she said, not all doctors have changed, but women have. “Women are not trying to prove their worth and independence, their I-can-do-it-alone attitude.” What’s more, today’s parents are too harried to attend several Lamaze classes. If they show up at all, they want a one-session crash course, a notion Ms. Bing loathes.

Ms. Bing takes pride in the fact that she and her disciples have helped change the way women face childbirth. She and her cohort of New York City women forced a wary medical establishment to allow husbands into the labor room, encouraged doctors to treat women in labor with dignity, and urged women to take part in the medical decision-making process of pregnancy.

What about the breathing method, which has been called overly rigid and outdated? Ms. Bing believes that, like talking and walking, labor should be taught. The issue is not whether the baby comes out, but how the mother experiences the birth. “I’m not a terribly rigid person,” she said. “If you are under duress, you cannot think, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ You have to automatically breathe. Some people think this is rigidity. I think it’s practical because you can’t dither at that point. You better act and react quickly.”

Ms. Bing has fought many battles to achieve her career goals. When she was denied admission to a school of physical therapy in Berlin in the early 1930s because of her Jewish ancestry, she moved in with family friends in England and completed her graduate education in physical therapy there. She eventually made her way to America in 1949 to join her sister in Illinois, who had moved there a few years earlier.

Ms. Bing’s career evolved from physical therapist to Lamaze doyenne within her first decade in the United States. One of her first jobs as a physical therapist was moving the limbs of new mothers to prevent muscle atrophy. Women, then, were required to stay in bed for at least two weeks postpartum. This experience inspired Ms. Bing to quit her physical therapy work and create her own position as labor coach. Despite a lack of formal training, she got the OK from a few obstetricians who offered her services, for an added fee, to their expectant patients. Demand for Ms. Bing blossomed.

But the real turning point came after she moved to New York City, befriended well-connected obstetricians here, and adopted the Lamaze technique. According to Ms. Bing, she read a memoir in 1959 written by Marjorie Karmel, an American woman who gave birth in France, the Lamaze way. Ms. Bing felt she’d found a soul mate in the author. The two women joined forces and, with physician support, established their own teaching center, first out of Ms. Bing’s two-bedroom apartment, and eight years later in an office off the lobby. Ms. Bing did the teaching, and her writer-friend helped with the publicity.

Ms. Bing married three times. Her first husband left her after three years of marriage right after she miscarried. Her second husband died shortly after the wedding from an asthma attack. Her third marriage lasted 34 years, until her husband, Fred, died from heart failure.

Her own experience of giving birth at the age of 40, after several miscarriages, was anything but Lamaze-like. During delivery, she went into precipitous labor and her physician gave her spinal anesthesia and nitric oxide. Yet she insists she was not a Lamaze cop-out.

“The important thing I learned from the experience of Peter’s birth was that the point of childbirth training was not to ‘make it’ through childbirth without anesthesia so much as to teach a woman to help herself as far as she can go,” she said. Prepared childbirth – the Lamaze approach – she added, is very different from natural childbirth.

These days, Ms. Bing is slowing down her pace on the lecture circuit. The Elisabeth Bing Center for Parents, the lobby office, is up for sale. After writing four books of nonfiction, Ms. Bing has taken up creative writing. Whether one agrees with her attitudes about childbirth, it is hard not to admire this nonagenarian who has been obsessed with birth and has an insatiable thirst for life.