The midwife's family tree
A couple of days ago, Nicky Grace tweeted a picture of a page from The Midwife’s Tale – a wonderful book of oral histories, collected from midwives and mothers in the 1980s by midwives Billie Hunter and Nicky Leap. The picture Nicky Grace tweeted included an account of a caesarean carried out on a kitchen table in 1926, told by the wife of the GP who did the surgery. The story, recounted around 40 years after the event, is full of nostalgia, and understatement: ‘he was a bit nervous doing the Caesarean in the house and thought, “oh dear...”’ and goes on to describe what must have been an excruciating lancing of a breast abscess with ‘she got over that all right’.
The story is one of many in the book, mostly told by midwives practising after the 1902 Midwives’ Act had phased out traditional handywomen, but before the advent of the NHS. What shines through particularly strongly is their sense of professional identity – of being a midwife and doing midwifery. At that time, both their practice and therefore their identity was described through objects – imagine the ‘Call the Midwife’ props cupboard – pinard stethoscopes, capacious bags and bicycles. It was also the acts of care: the slow, regular tending of women through labour, but more strikingly from a contemporary perspective, in the postnatal period. Multiple home visits, administering, helping with domestic labour.
Many of these practices seem far removed from the experiences of contemporary midwives in the UK, but in the most part, that sense of identity remains. In one of Billie’s more recent projects, with Lucie Warren, which explored what helped midwives in the NHS remain resilient, one of her interviewees memorably said “A Midwife is what I am. It’s written through me like a stick of rock”. Being a midwife is both the doing and the being, and perhaps doing the midwifery also gives you access to the comfort of being part of something bigger than yourself – a community, a thread, a story.
Thinking of ‘midwives’ as a ‘family’ is likely taking it too far – too twee and too problematic. And yet, what the stories in A Midwife’s Tale do is anchor midwives into a kind of professional genealogy. I’m currently reading Rachel Reed’s Reclaiming Childbirth as a Rite of Passage, which does the same thing too, going back far further. Reading these stories and reflecting on the value and power of a professional identity has got me thinking about the value of midwives (and this also goes for obstetricians, nurses, maybe teachers too) learning about their history and their genealogy. Making these connections with the past would lead to some powerful questions: Where do you come from? What practices and norms have you inherited? What does that mean for you? Who does and doesn’t feel like a part of your community? Who is excluded and why?