BUILDING THE NATION THROUGH WOMEN'S HEALTH: MODERN ...

CHAPTER FOUR. THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF MIDWIVES IN EARLY
TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA
During the 1920s and 1930s, Chinese government officials and medical professionals began to
exert more control over the training and licensing of midwives. Midwifery was incorporated into
the ranks of the medical personnel being trained in modern medicine as part of modernization
and nation-building efforts. This chapter examines how old-style midwives, elderly, uneducated,
and apprenticed, were replaced by young, literate, modern midwives. How did an occupation
once considered dirty and backward become a valid career choice for young Chinese women?
How did government officials and modernizers create and support modern childbirth and the
midwifery profession? How did women participate in childbirth, both as professionals and as
patients? Given the displacement of midwives in the West, what we find is surprising: a
transformation of the birth process in China based on ideas of modernization, science, and
national strength. The new midwives were created by the First National Midwifery School to
have higher prestige, emerging from this process stronger and better organized than American
midwives of this period.
Local and national Chinese governments during the Nationalist period created and
supported midwifery training programs with consistent curricula for each type of course. The
body of knowledge that was given to the new midwives was regulated, standardized, and
controlled, an essential part of any profession. The midwives filled a crucial slot in the
development of a larger modern medical assembly. One of the main duties of midwives was the
173