A feminist pioneer who famously championed natural childbirth in Britain has died aged 86.

Sheila Kitzinger of Standlake was an anthropologist and prolific author whose development of a “birth plan” for women during the 1960s and 1970s was seen as having transformed maternity care.

In 1962 her first book The Experience of Childbirth started a debate in which she argued childbirth had become too medicalised.

She called for an experience that was focused on mothers’ needs and said “orgasmic waves” of emotion could be felt during childbirth.

Her campaigns also encouraged partners to be present during births and helped re-established the importance of breast feeding.

In the 1980s she introduced birth plans, allowing mothers to decide what they wanted to happen during labour and after their baby was born.

Mrs Kitzinger had written more than 25 books on childbirth and women’s rights and was awarded an MBE in 1982 for services to childbirth and parent education.

The Royal College of Midwives chief executive Cathy Warwick said Mrs Kitzinger had a “inestimable influence” on modern midwifery over the last 40 years.

“She challenged the orthodoxy of a passive, over-medicalised approach to childbirth from the 1970s to today and gave women a sense of their entitlement to choice,” she said.

“She was a great friend of the midwifery profession and will be as greatly missed as her legacy will be celebrated.”

Sheila Webster was born in Somerset on March 29, 1929 to parents Alec and Clare.

She was a pupil at Bishop Fox’s Girls’ School in Taunton and studied social anthropology at Ruskin College and St Hugh’s College, in Oxford. She graduated in 1961 and went on to do research into race relations at the University of Edinburgh.

In 1952 she married Uwe Kitzinger, a German refugee who was an academic and diplomat, and they had five daughters together – Celia, Nell, Tessa, Polly and Jenny.

When the couple were living in France and she was pregnant with her first child, four years after they married, Mrs Kitzinger insisted on having a home birth – a highly unusual choice at the time. She would joke years later about how the other diplomatic wives were appalled by the decision.

Four more children followed – all natural births – and it was within a few weeks of the third that she wrote her first book The Experience of Childbirth.

In an interview with The Oxford Times in 1986, Mrs Kitzinger said she would write when her child was waking at 5am for breastfeeding.

“It seemed a marvellous part of the morning, when no-one was making demands on me; when I was quiet and alone with the baby.”

She continued to publish books on childbirth into her eighties and had recently completed her autobiography A Passion for Birth: My Life: Anthropology, Family and Feminism, which will be published next month.

In an interview with The Oxford Times she said of her writing: “Everything I write comes from listening to and learning from other women.

“I have always seen childbirth as one aspect of women’s sexual lives: not a series of techniques but as an experience. I am not writing about how to do something, whether having a baby or an orgasm. I’m writing about the richness of the experience and its numerous variations.”

Sheila Kitzinger died in her Standlake home The Manor on Saturday, April 11 after a battle with cancer. She is survived by her husband, daughters, and three grandchildren. Details of her funeral have yet to be confirmed.