Over the weekend The Times ran a story about a midwifery textbook, ‘Normal Childbirth: Evidence and Debate’, published 18 years ago but still on the reading list for some midwifery courses. The book is an example of the dangerous focus on so-called ‘normal birth’, apparently, because it mentions the role of midwives intuition, and also covers the ‘rest and be thankful’ phase of labour, the well documented moment between full dilation and the urge to ‘push’. “Hippy nonsense”, was basically the line the article took.
Recently I recorded a podcast for New Female Leaders (won’t be out for a while) which was interesting because it was focused on women in the male-dominated world of business leadership. Some of the advance questions they sent caused me to re-read the chapter in Give Birth like a Feminist that describes the history of childbirth, and this latest news story had me thinking again of Elizabeth Nihell, who features in the chapter.
Nihell, who I have called ‘the first birth activist’, wrote The Treatise on the Art of Midwifery in 1760, a rallying cry against the ‘barber surgeons’ of the time - men who were beginning to see pound and dollar signs flash brightly in the domain of the birth room, and, aided by metal forceps and not much anatomical knowledge, were causing untold pelvic floor damage and making a tidy profit from it.
‘Those poor instruments of God’s making, the women’s fingers, would not much better and much safer, do everything that is pretended to be done by that same boasted instrument’ – the forceps - she wrote. She also suggested that birth should not be rushed, and that if Nature takes a longer time, she has, ‘no doubt a very good reason’. ‘Art should aim at imitating Nature; now Nature proceeds leisurely, instead of which the forceps goes too quick to work’, she wrote.
Another dangerous hippy basically.
But don’t worry - she very much lost the battle. In fact she died in the workhouse and was buried in a pauper’s grave, whilst William Smellie, the obstetrician she railed against, was rich and successful and became known as ‘the father of midwifery’.
Even in 1760, the battle of ‘forceps versus tealights’ - recognisable to anyone who’s had any involvement with childbirth in the last couple of decades - was already raging.
And it goes back further still, to the witch hunts of the 14th and 15th century, a time when tens of thousands of people were burned - 85% of whom were female, and many of them ‘wise women’, those who used herbs - and probably a fair bit of intuition too - to heal, and see people into this world, and out. In other words, many of them were what we would now think of as ‘midwives’.
Again, the battle was between the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’ - while women were sent to the flames for using their knowledge to interfere in ‘God’s plan’, the men were building their own profession of the ‘Physician’ - with top skills like leeches and bloodletting. The witch hunters guide, the Malleus Maleficarum, stated, “If a woman dare to cure without having studied* she is a witch and must die.”
*The small print, of course, said that women were absolutely forbidden to study.
By the time the witch hunts were fizzling out, men had established themselves as the scientific experts, and women, with their midwifery skills, herbs, massages, tealights, intuition and cake, were completely discredited as ‘old wives’ with zero to offer. Over and over the pattern repeats - with the great tragedy being that both ‘sides’ or ‘perspectives’ have something to offer each other. We actually need tealights AND forceps. Birth is safest if we have both - the tenderness of humanised care, and the back up of medical help if needed.
Unfortunately we seem to be headed very much for the techno-medical model as the untiring forces of patriarchy continue to undermine and dismiss women’s knowledge and power. However, the repeating pattern does also show us that women never give up, and they keep rising up, and rising up, and rising up again.
Women, it seems, have an innate knowing of what it means to burn. . . and be burned. They know the dangers in their bones. And it makes them wary.
Burning Woman, Lucy Pearce
Women who rise up get burned. Another chapter of Give Birth like a Feminist also ran through my mind this week, ‘Loose Women’, which documents what happens to both women and midwives too who try to challenge or escape the established system. I set out the many ways in which both pregnant women and midwives alike have their choices and decisions regulated and policed in a world in which they are repeatedly told they are free to do as they wish, and end the chapter by making the connection between birth and sex:
Why do we still find loud, raucous, visceral, intuitive, strong, lusty, angry, leaky, opinionated, independent women difficult to accept? These ‘loose women’ are the ones who have broken free, we cannot contain them, they are wild and unrestrained. They are the ones who will not ‘take it lying down’, they want to ‘stand on their own two feet’, or be ‘on top’, they are the movers, shakers and troublemakers. In the bedroom and in the birth room, we have historically tried to keep these women still, quiet and restrained. The ‘good’ woman continues to be the one who complies and does not cause trouble. She will lie still, and passive, and let it be done. And…those who will not comply can no longer be literally burned, so our patriarchal culture finds other ways of either silencing them, or making an example of them so that others are silenced. We threaten their livelihoods and their reputations, call them bad mothers and warn that we may take away their children. We suggest they are mad, put them in the dock, expose them in the media or even take away their freedom.
Just as women were once told, ‘sex is for procreation and nothing more’, they are now told, ‘childbirth is for procreation and nothing more’. In either act, what matters is the production of a healthy baby, and the woman is merely the means to that end. The experience of childbirth is dismissed as meaningless and unimportant to a woman’s body, heart or soul, just as the experience of sex used to be. And why? What is to be gained by these oppressions? The reasons are the exact same reasons whether it’s birth or sex: because in these places can be found both power and pleasure.
Of course, the irony hasn’t escaped me that since writing these words I’ve been put on the pyre myself - and some of the midwives I’ve previously defended from persecution have used their torches to light the fire under me, too. Because I won’t repeat the catechisms of the day and say I believe something when both science and my own eyeballs tell me otherwise, my voice is no longer wanted in the birth debate.
Another woman silenced. Who benefits? Patriarchy. Men. Who loses? Women. Midwives. Me. Sometimes the in-fighting between groups of women is just doing the work of the patriarchy for them.
Today on Woman’s Hour I heard Philippa Langley, the woman whose research led to the discovery of the location of the body of Richard III buried under a Leicester car park. How did she find the location? Well, as well as copious amounts of research, she also had an ‘intuitive experience’ in the car park, where she ‘felt she was walking on Richard’s grave’. She visited the location again a year later and had the same powerful feelings, and it was this experience that changed the focus of her research and led to the eventual discovery of the body.
They’ve made a film about her called The Lost King, around which rages another battle - this time between the forces of the University of Leicester, who say the film wrongly portrays their staff as largely male, patronising and dismissive of Langley, while Langley, and film maker Steve Coogan, argue that the University marginalised her role in the discovery. Again, the pattern repeats. All women know precisely what is meant by intuition, all women are well used to its existence being belittled and dismissed. We know it before they even say it. We know it in our bones.
Women won’t give up though. Don’t ask me how I know - I just feel it.
See you later this week to let you know how the book is going in my writer’s diary for subscribers only, Blow by Blow. Milli x
I struggled to read that without getting mad. I am currently 27 weeks pregnant and have not had one doctors appointment, I am planning a free birth so I can just close out the noise and listen to my intuition. If I need them, I know where they are. My first pregnancy the dating scan was way out. I told them it was impossible that I conceived at that time because my partner and I were a few thousand miles apart. I was travelling in India alone. They said their technology was rarely wrong and refused to change the date. They took their machines calculations over my own knowledge which of course lead to pressure and coercion to be induced when I didnt need it. I refused.
Oooo so much came to mind whilst reading this - all currently on my radar... I recently read a novel about a ‘man midwife’ in 19th century Edinburgh - gruesome and a mix of obstetricians version of history and midwives but a good story - The Way of all Flesh by (husband and wife pseudonym) Ambrose Parry - husband is writer wife doctor (I think) - anyway - a book that holds truth about allopathic medicine that is fabulous is Green Pharmacy by Barbara Griggs. And... the whole issue of ‘all that matters is a healthy baby’ once again reinforced by another celebrity birth (Richard and Judy’s daughter) in OK magazine (I only stumbled on on YouTube) - struck home with me as I was once on Richard and Judy’s show as an Independent Midwife and bless them they were so on the side of midwives and natural birth - the irony of their granddaughter’s birth a CS. As for intuition (obviously it’s real...IMO) I’ve been reading about Morphic Resonance from Rupert Sheldrake - which isn’t that far from the idea of intuition - but as a man and a scientist is all about theories and research...;) oh - and I have next to me a book I’m reviewing - written by Robbie Davis-Floyd (she’s written so many fabulous anthropology books on birth) but she actually wrote ‘Intuition: the inside story’ - how’s that for a bit of synchronicity? I’m enjoying your blog Milli - I guess that’s obvious...