From Birthing Chamber to Court Room: the Medical and Legal Communities of the Colonial Essex County Midwife Abby Chandler

Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol. 9, No. 2 • Spring 2015 From Birthing Chamber to Court Room: The Medical and Legal Communities of the Colonial Essex County Midwife Abby Chandler n a cold January day in Salisbury, Massachusetts, seventy-one-year- Oold Mary Bradbury gathered a bundle of necessary equipment and bid goodbye to Thomas Bradbury, her husband of fifty years. She was headed to the house where Martha Rowlenson was in labor with an ille- gitimate child. Mary Bradbury was a midwife, and Rowlenson needed Bradbury to deliver her child and oversee the carefully prescribed ritual that could lead to the naming of the child’s father in court and the award- ing of some form of child support. Childbirth in the early modern Atlantic world was deeply rooted in the local communities surrounding the expectant mother.1 Most women invited five to eight female neighbors to attend their births. The choice of attendants reflected a range of interests and concerns, not all of them medical. Midwives, if they existed in the area, were always the first choice. 1 For further discussion of the ritualized nature of the early modern birthing process, see Adrian Wilson, “Participant or Patient? Seventeenth-Century Childbirth from the Mother’s Point of View,” Patients and Practitioners, Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre- Industrial society, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 129– 144; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale, The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage & Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Laura Gowing, Common Bodies, Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 109 110 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Abby Chandler The term itself meant “‘with-woman,’ suggesting that the midwife was the woman who would be with the mother during the delivery.”2 Other women were chosen based on their relationship to the mother, social position in the community, and familiarity with the birthing process. There were two primary distinctions between the midwife and the other female attendants. During labor, the midwife had total control over the birthing chamber and, by extension, the household itself. She was also the only person who could expect to be paid for her services. Messages summoning the attending women were sent as soon as the expectant mother’s first labor pains began. On arriving, the attendants prepared a room for the birth by “shutting up all apertures, such as keyholes and by darkening the room with curtains . [so that] the room had to be lit with candles.”3 Afterwards, they prepared a warm drink known as a caudle, usually sweetened, spiced wine for the mother to drink. While these preparations were being made, the midwife (or the most medically competent woman present) monitored the mother’s progress. Then the mother and her attendants followed the instructions of the midwife until the child was born and the mother had recovered. The presence of multiple female attendants provided medical and emotional support for mother and midwife alike during labor. They also provided a built-in witness system. Giving birth out of wedlock, sexual intercourse before marriage, and infanticide were all punishable crimes in Europe and the European colonies in the western hemisphere in the early modern period. Midwives (or the most senior woman present) were required to repeatedly ask unwed mothers who had fathered their children. Children born within the first nine months of marriage were carefully scrutinized to determine whether they had been conceived before or after matrimony. Women who gave birth to still-born children needed some means of proving that their children were, indeed, still-born and not vic- tims of infanticide. Evidence that the midwife (or, again, the most senior 2 Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery, Childbirth in England, 1660–1770 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 26. 3 Wilson, “Participant or Patient?,” 134. While the ability to completely shut off one room was a luxury available only to upper- and middling-class women, research suggests that poor women followed these rituals as best they could. From Birthing Chamber to Court Room 111 woman present) had followed the proper procedure of action during such births was the only way to provide any form of legal protection for women giving birth under such circumstances. Consequently, the early modern birth ritual meant that midwives served as both medical and legal profes- sionals, although this element of their working lives has not always been well understood. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, early modern midwives were portrayed as incompetent and ignorant, or as witches persecuted for their knowledge of women’s bodies, or both.4 A turning point came in 1990 when David Harley accused historians who portrayed midwives as witches of “behav[ing] like demonologists, repeating old stories without checking their sources and making assertions without producing data to substantiate them.”5 Harley’s research suggested instead that European midwives had been competent, well-respected members of society, and that their professional lives were closely linked to their reputa- tions as such. Likewise, “they were more likely to be involved in checking the alleged witch for signs of the Devil’s mark . where midwives appear in such accounts, it is always in the role of agent of respectability.”6 Multiple articles and monographs on both European and North American midwives published in the past two decades have further reinforced Harley’s arguments, while adding specific details about the lives and work of midwives in England, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain, as well as the various colonies established by these countries in the western 4 See Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921); Thomas Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Witches: A History of Women Healers (New York: The Feminist Press, 1973); and Jane B. Donegan, Women & Men Midwives: Medicine, Morality and Misogyny in Early America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978). 5 David Harley, “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch,” The Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 3 (1990): 1–26, 25; and “Ignorant Midwives; A Persistent Stereotype,” The Society for the Social History of Medicine Bulletin 28 (1981): 6–9. 6 Harley, “Historians as Demonologists,” 6. 112 EMWJ Vol . 9, No . 2 • Spring 2015 Abby Chandler hemisphere.7 Examining the divide between the histories published before and after 1990, Diane Purkiss observes that “we tend to see as subversive in the early modern period whatever is normative in our own [and vice versa]. Consequently, the ‘subversiveness’ of the midwife-witch is grounded in our belief that there is something automatically radical about a woman with control over the bodies of other women . however, the power of early modern midwives [was] part of the power of church and state to regulate women’s bodies and sexuality.”8 Early modern midwives did not exist on the edges of European society. Instead, they were closely tied to uphold- ing the norms of that society, including the belief that all forms of sexual contact should occur only in the marriage bed.9 7 See also Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-In, A History of Childbirth in America (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1977); Judy Barret Litoff, American Midwives 1860 to the Present (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978); Merry E. Wiesner, “Early Modern Midwifery: A Case Study,” Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Jean Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men: A History of the Struggle for the Control of Childbirth (London: Historical Publications, 1993); Hilary Marland, ed., The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (New York: Routledge Press, 1993); David Harley, “English Archives, Local History, and the Study of Early Modern Midwifery,” Archives 21 (1994):145–54; Mark Jackson, New-Born Child Murder, Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-century England (New York: Manchester University Press, 1996); Hilary Marland, “‘Stately and dignified, kindly and God-Fearing’: Midwives, Age and Status in the Netherlands in the Eighteenth Century,” The Task of Healing, Medicine, Religion and Gender in England and the Netherlands, 1450–1800, eds. Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling (Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing, 1996); Doreen Evenden, The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mary E. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies, The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Lianne McTavish, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005); Rebecca Tannenbaum, The Healer’s Calling: Women and Medicine in Early New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); and Samuel S. Thomas, “Early Modern Midwifery: Splitting the Profession, Connecting the History,” Journal of Social History 43 (2009): 115–38. 8 Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (New York: Routledge, 1996), 21. 9 David Harley asked in 1990 whether any of the women accused of being witches during the Salem witch trials in 1692 were midwives. Mary Bradbury was accused of witchcraft and, at first glance, her accusation would seem to support the midwife-as- From Birthing Chamber to Court Room 113 As European colonists established settlements in the western hemisphere, the midwifery profession traveled with them. The most extensive discussion of a midwife in North America to date is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812, which provides readers with a vivid depiction of the life and times of one midwife in central Maine.

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