Gateway Chronicle 2021

33
Hidden Voices
The Place of Female Midwives
in Early Modern England
Many historians have pointed to the early modern
period as a period of widespread professionalisation,
where artisans and craftsman worked with their
respective guilds to try and legitimise their own
occupations, setting themselves apart as the sole
provider of a particular service. This was especially
the case within the world of medicine, with physicians,
barber surgeons and apothecaries seeking to
align themselves as certified medical practitioners.
In doing so, these medical professionals began to
tarnish the reputation and practises of unlicensed
quacks and irregulars. The rise of gender history
since the 1980s has resulted in a large scholarship
surrounding the main victim of this campaign, the
female midwife, who was gradually replaced by the
male accoucheur. However, a revised analysis of this
transition suggests that it should not necessarily be
considered part of a misogynistic narrative. In fact,
the continuing presence of female midwives, particularly
during rural pregnancies, coupled with the
unchanging level of agency granted to pregnant
mothers, suggests that women still maintained a
significant level of power during childbirth.
Firstly, it is perhaps appropriate to outline the place
of midwives within early modern society, so that
their changing role during the period can be assessed.
Typically, midwives cut across a wide social
spectrum and because of this, their experience
as practitioners was equally as diverse. Usually a
mature, married or widowed woman with children
of her own, the early-modern midwife gained her
knowledge from attending the births of children
within her community, and indeed, from her own
experiences of childbirth. Before 1750, pregnancy
and childbirth existed within a predominantly
female-centric sphere; the delivery of the child and
the ritual of lying-in was only attended by women
from the community, known as gossips. Often
lasting for around a month, the lying-in chamber
thus became a sanctuary for female power; it housed
a discourse that simply could not exist outside of
those four walls. For many women this was a unique
opportunity to separate themselves from the traditional
patriarchal society, albeit temporarily, so it
is no surprise that most women within a community
became part of a mother’s pregnancy journey
in some way. For example, a seventeenth-century
ballad commented on the number of women attending
a typical birth and the costs incurred for the
husband; ‘Her Nurses weekly charge likewise, with
many a Gossips feast: he well perceiv’d, when purse
grew light, and emptied was his Chest’. Clearly for
this husband, the extent of the gossip culture in
early modern England was a little more than he had
bargained for.
However, there were times where the sanctuary of
this female-only space was shattered by the presence
of a male surgeon, who primarily attended
to difficult births. This connection meant that the
presence of a male practitioner within the birthing
room therefore became synonymous with a difficult
birth and the possibility of death from mother and
child, so his presence was often met with fear and
Above: a depiction of a woman ready
to give birth from Jane Sharp’s ‘The
Midwives Book’ (1671)
anxiety. Yet, over
the course of the
early modern period,
it became more
common for men to
be part of the process
of childbirth;
some men even entered
the field permanently,
becoming
‘accoucheurs’, or
‘man-midwives’.
Feminist historians
initially attributed
this shift to changing
provision that
sought to eliminate
women from
medical practice,
replacing women’s
power with that of men. Sheena Sommers, for
example, noted how the surgeon Louis Lapeyre
characterised the female midwife as ‘the lowest
class of human being’, and ‘an animal with nothing
of the woman left’. Indeed, even the midwife Jane
Sharp recognised these negative attitudes towards
female midwives. Speaking in her Midwives Book
(1671), the first book on this subject published by
a woman, she stated that ‘some perhaps may think,
that then it is not proper for women to be of this