On Midwife-Entrepreneurs

Edith here, recuperating from knee replacement surgery. But also ecstatic to have Delivering the Truth nominated for an Agatha Award for Best Historical Mystery, and "The Mayor and the Midwife," my short story featuring midwife Rose Carroll, nominated for an Agatha Award for Best Short Story!

A friend found a used book she thought I'd enjoy, Catching Babies: The Professionalism of Childbirth 1870-1920 by Charlotte G. Borst, now a history professor in Birmingham, Alabama. (This copy is inscribed, "To Mother, with love, Charlotte," so now I'm imagining Mother, and Charlotte, and how the book came to be for sale in a used book store. Hmm, a new short story, perhaps.) The book appears to be Borst's doctoral dissertation and focuses on birth logs and other primary historical sources in four Wisconsin counties.
Perfect! Thanks, Rae Francoeur. 

So I've been leafing through it, gleaning useful research for my Quaker Midwife Mysteries. Chapter Four is titled, "Midwife Entrepreneurs in the City" and uses several urban Wisconsin midwives as case studies. Despite being an academic treatise, it reads easily and well. And I'm finding all kinds of interesting facts.

Mary Gerrard left a complete record of the births she attended. During the years my books take place, the end of the 1880s, she attended around 200 births a year. She was a full-time midwife despite having seven children at home. She had attended a three-month course at the Northwestern Academy of Midwifery in Chicago and earned a diploma in 1878. Borst discusses other urban midwives following similar careers. All were able to earn a decent living. This bodes well for my fictional Rose Carroll continuing her midwifery practice should she and beau David Dodge ever manage to tie the knot.

One point of Borst's I found interesting is that despite these women being successful in their chosen field, they didn't attempt to move beyond their neighborhoods and promote a professional identity for their occupation. The work of even these successful, educated entrepreneurs basically didn't differ much from that of the less-educated rural neighbor-midwives, and they didn't organize into a professional organization. 

Once the concept of the professional began to be more popular after the turn of the century, childbearing women started to seek out physicians to assist with their births. (Physicians certainly also sought to control the birthing environment, but that's a different book.)

Stay tuned for Called to Justice, book two in the Quaker Midwife Mysteries, which releases April 8! 

Midwifery Then and Now

Edith here, thinking about childbirth through the ages.

In my Quaker Midwife Mysteries, Rose Carroll is an independent midwife helping pregnant women

give birth in the safest way possible - in an 1888 New England mill town. How is that different from how independent midwives operate today, in the US and around the world?

Uncomplicated pregnancies and births really have not changed for many thousands of years. And as long as women have been experiencing the journey of their infant as it travels through their bodies and emerges, likewise have other women been helping them through that process.

Sisters, mothers, and friends might not have understood anything of the science of birth, but that didn't stop them from providing comfort. A damp cloth to the forehead. Strong arms to hold on to while squatting. A loving grandmother to take the new baby and wipe her eyes and mouth clean, wrap her, and hand her back to her new mother. Someone to explain breastfeeding.

A midwife merely makes it her profession to do so. She brings some way to monitor the baby's heartbeat. Something clean and sharp with which to cut the umbilical cord. Knowledge of what normal labor and birth look like and what to do when something goes awry. Often a collection of medicinal herbs. Most of all an encyclopedia of prior births in her head.

Birth these days in first world countries can be complicated by modern drugs, by ultrasound monitoring, by the hospital setting, by surgeons who want to schedule deliveries. Lives are certainly saved by modern medicine. No doubt about it. But the straightforward pregnancy and delivery of a healthy well-informed woman might not differ at all from one in 1888.

I trained for several years as an independent childbirth educator, and also worked as a doula, helping couples through their labors in a birthing center or hospital. I was not a midwife - I didn't want that level of responsibility - but I was all done producing more babies in my own family and I loved coaching couples about what to expect for their labor, birth, and neonatal period. I also visited a group of village midwives way out in the bush in Mali, West Africa at the time - not a population with a hospital anywhere in less than a day's journey - and I collected stories from them about their methods and their deliveries, both healthy and sadly not.

Those experiences gave me the confidence to write about a working midwife in this series. I was grateful for input on the birth scenes in the book from modern-day midwife and mystery fan Risa Rispoli - and gratified when she didn't find anything that needed changing!

Readers: Do you have experience with midwives in any setting?