UCLA

In eighteenth-century France, concerns over a perceived population crisis and a neo-Hippocratic commitment to the social and physical environment as sources of both health and disease resulted in childbirth becoming a site for widespread governmental and medical intervention for the first time. Rhetoric blaming “ignorant” rural midwives justified government- or church-funded provincial training courses. Augmenting published textbooks, a variety of unexplored sources—such as surveys, student notes, advertisements, meeting minutes, marginalia, letters, and objects including mannequins and instruments—enables my project to investigate local negotiations around midwifery pedagogy. I argue that the French governmental and medical institutions sought to regulate and control midwifery, not eliminate the practice, thus challenging the simplified, Anglocentric narrative of male usurpation of the female domain of midwifery. Attention to the administrative practices of midwifery courses illustrates the limits of both the French absolutist monarchy and medical institutions to implement their will in the provinces. While midwifery courses expanded state and medical control over childbirth to an unprecedented degree, debates around midwifery education expose the diverse and sometimes conflicting strategies midwives employed.

“Being and Becoming a Midwife” demonstrates the instability of the categories of “accoucheurs” (man-midwives) and “sages-femmes” (midwives) and the plurality of identities surrounding these terms in provincial France. Educated, licensed midwives practiced alongside untrained, licensed and unlicensed midwives. Frequently male and female practitioners collaborated through family ties, apprenticeships or educational relationships, and professional networks. Urban practitioners criticized rural midwives and surgeons alike for incompetence, revealing that geopolitical (urban and rural) and class differences shaped their social realities and medical practices as much as the division between man-midwife and midwife. By investigating the process of midwifery assimilation into mainstream medicine in eighteenth-century France, I uncover the ways that certain types of knowing become legitimized to the exclusion of others and how access to the profession was regulated.