Midwives

Midwifery was a highly valued woman’s profession in a time when approximately one in five women and one in 10 newborns died from causes associated with childbirth. The cycle of pregnancy, birth, and nursing was an integral part of most women’s lives from their late teens to menopause, and the birth process was an important ritual during which women shared knowledge and spiritual closeness. The midwife cared for a woman’s medical and spiritual needs while presiding over labor and birth aided by a gathered group. Women gave birth while supported on other women’s arms or seated on the midwife’s low, open-seated stool.

Midwives learned through apprenticeships and their own birth experiences and practiced herbal medicine. A

Skilled midwife was able to turn a fetus in utero and facilitate a breech birth as well as attend to problems with a newborn. She was often responsible for baptizing babies as well as burying stillborns. Her reputation rested on the exceptional birth experiences she attended. Many of the women accused of WITCHCRAET in New England were midwives or healers suspected of affecting either curses or good fortunes on births. Anne Marbury Hutchinson, whose activities threatened the male-dominated Puritan structure in early Boston, was a noted midwife and spiritual teacher. Native American and slave women also gave birth with the assistance of women healers or shamans. Black midwives were called “grannies” and delivered babies for slave women as well as the wives of plantation owners.

Over the course of the 17th century, the Church of England tried to regulate midwifery. Scientific knowledge of birthing increased and “man-midwives” began to enter the profession, albeit sporadically, in the first part of the 18th century. The establishment in 1766 of North America’s first medical school encouraged the “professionalization” of childbirth practices. Affluent women increasingly chose physicians with obstetric tools to manage their births, hoping for easier and safer deliveries; midwives eventually became associated with the lower classes. The result was a gradual move away from childbirth as a social ritual controlled by women to an interventive medical process dominated by men.

See also eertility.

Further reading: Judith Pence Rooks, Midwifery and Childbirth in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); Paula A. Treckel, To Comfort the Heart: Women in Seventeenth-Century America (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996).

—Deborah C. Taylor and Paul A. Sivitz