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Wendy Mitchinson, Giving Birth in Canada, 1900-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2002)
WENDY MITCHINSON's book, Giving Birth in Canada, is a wonderfully rich and comprehensive social history of the controversies, practices, and realities of giving birth in Canada from 1900 to 1950, the period in which the "medicalization of childbirth" became a social as well as a legal reality. Mitchinson brings context, texture, and nuance to the professional/medical history of the physicians who supplanted the various midwives and others who had attended most new mothers in the 19th century. She argues convincingly against the romanticization of the midwife/home birth without minimizing its importance, and offers a glimpse into the professional and economic motivations behind the increasingly technologized model of medicine as it applied to childbirth.
In the context of much medical history which stubbornly refuses to recognize any but "professional" birth attendants, Mitchinson's exhaustive and well-researched portrayal of the early 20th-century birthing chamber in which midwives, nurses, and other helpers played a vital role, is a breath of fresh air. With the exception of Newfoundland where the British model of regulated midwifery was in force, the Canadian medical profession had successfully legislated female midwives out of official existence several decades before the first half of the 20th century. Having been forced underground, this was a disparate group of women. Sometimes the midwife or nurse was a frightened neighbour woman pressed reluctantly into service in an isolated community where no doctors practiced. In some cases she had acquired informal training by watching other births and learning from an older midwife. Often working to the point of exhaustion for Canadian families who could not afford to pay the physician's, or indeed any, fee, these women received scant remuneration. They had a strong presence in poor, isolated, immigrant, and Aboriginal communities. A few were exceptionally well-trained nurse-midwives...