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Delivered by
Midwives: African American Midwifery in the
Twentieth-Century South
by Jenny M. Luke
c.2018, University Press of Mississippi
$30.00 / higher in Canada
193 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
The mailman’s come and
gone for today.
He never brings you much
anymore anyhow, just a few bills and a card sometimes; now
and then, you might get a box of something you purchased and
that’s always fun. You know, though, that the mailman
doesn’t always bring you what you ordered. As in
Delivered by Midwives by Jenny M. Luke, someone else
brings a different kind of package. |
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At the turn of the last
century, if you were an African-American woman and you were
pregnant, you might have struggled with more than just
labor: white doctors simply didn’t have to treat black
patients if they didn’t want to. Because of this, “many
African-American women in the Jim Crow South had no
expectation of medical care for pregnancy and childbirth.”
And so, as did their
foremothers when they were slaves, laboring women relied on
“granny midwives” to “catch” their babies. Doing so was a
natural conclusion, says Luke, since both men and women in
early black communities were “authorized to be healers,”
which was “a power that the white medical establishment
could not undermine.”
What the white
establishment could do, however, was to point out the
high rate of maternal and infant death in black communities.
Because of this, laws were made in the 1920s to regulate
midwives of all races. Classes on hygiene and cleanliness
were taught to help improve the health of the most
poverty-stricken mothers and their families, and joining a
“midwife club” was mandatory.
As World War II began,
however, so did the perception that not calling a doctor for
a baby’s birth indicated “an indifferent negligence toward”
the child. Black mothers still reached out to midwives but
it was increasingly becoming “a marker of status” and more
“’scientific’” to have a hospital birth. By 1970, and though
racism persisted and “hospital care and medical expertise
were… not expectations of African Americans...” nine out of
10 black women delivered their babies in hospitals.
The tide is turning back
again, says author Jenny M. Luke, but there are issues –
specifically, educational requirements for professional
midwives have become steeper, which can lead to questions of
affordability. Still, in Delivered by Midwives, she
shows a continued need for midwives, especially in poorer
communities – though getting to that point here can
sometimes feel a lot like labor.
Luke moves her history at
a good pace before repetition forces everything to slow
down, then it speeds up again, so things move quickly inside
this book – and then they don’t. We’re treated to painful,
wincing tales of past midwives and what their patients
endured, and those things might make you scream before you
hurry-up-and-wait for relevant-but-scholarly information
that slows the process down. It ends in a
somewhat-frazzling, acronym-laden whoosh.
That doesn’t make this a
bad book – it makes this informative and interesting, good
for students and prospective midwives, but not a
curl-up-by-the-fire something to read. Still, if it’s the
kind of medical, African American or feminist history you’re
looking for, Delivered by Midwife is the total
package.
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