INTERPRETING A MIDWIFE’S TALE

Chapters 5 and 7 in A Midwife’s Tale, and the “Martha and a Man-Midwife” exercise at dohistory.org, document how cooperation between doctors and midwives gradually turned into competition and male efforts to exclude women from medical practice.

It is a historical fact that male doctors increasingly competed with, and often displaced, female midwifes in 19thcentury America. What that fact means is a matter of interpretation. What is Ulrich’s explanation for the increasingly competitive and adversarial relationship between male doctors and female midwives? Cite specific passages from Martha’s diary and explain how Ulrich uses these passages to support her conclusions about what happened and why.

Why do you think women’s medical knowledge and roles were restricted and devalued in the 19th century? Do you believe that tensions between men’s roles and women’s roles as medical practitioners continue today? Or have we gotten beyond gender role stereotypes in medicine?

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