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

equipment and medicines such as forceps and antibiotics. It also ran the risk of becoming
utilitarian, with the sole purpose of the mother, as in traditional Chinese beliefs, as a reproducer,
though this time as reproducer for the nation instead of the family. Furthermore, childbirth
remained the domain of women in China, whereas in the United States, midwives were nearly
completely displaced by male physicians by 1950. Traditional cultural norms of female modesty
hindered male physicians’ access to female Chinese patients. In order for women to have
modern births, they had to solicit female professionals, for attending childbirth was and is a
woman’s job in China.
The Chinese situation differed markedly from that in the United States. Had a fully
American birth model been imposed on China, male physicians would have been attending births
by the 1940s as they were in the United States. Instead, midwives remained very important
actors in the realm of childbirth. Furthermore, Dr. Marion Yang studied and observed dozens of
different public health programs worldwide and only then formulated a plan that she thought
would best suit China’s population and needs. We may see midwifery as a space in which
Chinese practitioners and patients contested, modified, and transformed modern childbirth to fit
their own ideas about maternal and child health, all with varying degrees of success. We can
clearly see some broad issues regarding gender and childbirth. For example, midwives were
regulated by the Chinese state, yet they were still the ones designated to deliver children. During
the same period, American midwives all but disappeared as male physicians displaced them.
Thus, we have a unique version of Chinese urban modernity illuminated in this study of
midwifery regulation and reform.
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