ALEGAL MIDWIVES: Oral History Narratives of Ontario Pre-Legislation Midwives by Elizabeth Mae Allemang A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Humanities, Social Sciences & Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto © Copyright by Elizabeth Mae Allemang 2013 Alegal Midwives: Oral History Narratives of Ontario Pre-Legislation Midwives Master of Arts, 2013 Elizabeth Mae Allemang Humanities, Social Sciences & Social Justice Education University of Toronto Abstract This study examines the oral histories of midwives who practiced in Ontario without legal status as a counter practice to mainstream maternity care in the two decades prior to the enactment of midwifery legislation on December 31, 1993. The following questions are answered: Who were Ontario’s pre-legislation midwives? What inspired and motivated them to take up practice on the margins of official health care? Current scholarship on late twentieth century Ontario midwifery focuses on a social scientific analysis of midwifery’s transition from a grassroots movement to a regulated profession. Pre-legislation midwives are commonly portrayed as a homogenous group of white, educated, middle class women practicing a “pure” midwifery unmediated by medicine and the law. Analysis of the oral history narratives of twenty-one “alegal” Ontario midwives reveals more complex and nuanced understandings of midwives and why they practiced during this period. The midwives’ oral histories make an important contribution to the growing historiography on modern Canadian midwifery. ii Acknowledgments My Master of Arts program has taken a long time for me to complete, and I have many people to thank for their patience and support over the many years it has taken me to get this job done. I must first thank my academic supervisors for your attentive assistance and your inspiration as teachers, researchers and historians committed to student success and a high standard of academic excellence. Particular thanks to Liz Smyth for your ongoing availability, enthusiasm and attention to detail, and for encouraging an organizational structure that strengthens this work. I would also like to thank Ruth Roach Pierson, who I had the fortune to work under in my early years at OISE, for your positive mentoring, creativity and role modeling as a graduate supervisor. I could not have completed this thesis without the ongoing support and encouragement of my MA program and thesis supervisor, Cecilia Morgan. Thank you Cecilia for always being responsive when I would appear, without warning, with requests for assistance, and for calmly and confidently guiding me through to the end, ever reminding me of the perspective of the historian. Thank you to Nancy Shannon for your expert and speedy transcription and to Martha Sharpe for your skilled assistance with bibliographic cataloguing. I am also enormously grateful for the support of my midwifery practice and my academic and professional colleagues for their roles in assisting my completion of this thesis. The midwifery community in Ontario is small and so there are multiple hats worn by the individuals I wish to acknowledge here. Thank you to all of the midwives in my midwifery practice, the Midwives Collective of Toronto, for granting me a long term leave of absence to complete this work. This includes midwives who may no longer be practicing with the MCT, but who played an important role over the years when I was actively engaged in this research. You continue to inspire me with your commitment to a strong primary care model for midwifery and for integrating feminist politics into practice. Particular thanks must be expressed to the partner midwives of the practice that I had the fortune to work with over the course of my graduate work: Elizabeth Brandeis, Joyce Coombs, Wendy Katherine, Katrina Kilroy, Sylvie Lemay, Merryn Tate, Edan Thomas, and Vicki Van Wagner. I would also like to express a heartfelt thanks to Heather Douglas for iii your support to me as a midwife over the years in your position as Practice Manager of the Midwives Collective of Toronto. Thank you to my fellow faculty members and program staff at the Ontario Midwifery Education Program consortium for your ongoing encouragement and support to complete this research. Thank you especially to my Ryerson faculty colleagues: Nicole Bennett, Nadya Burton, Manavi Handa, Rena Porteous, Judy Rogers, Bobbi Soderstrom, Mary Sharpe, Chris Sternberg, Andrea Roberston, Vicki Van Wagner, and Karline Wilson-Mitchell. I would also like to thank Sue Williams and Usha George, who held the position of Dean in Ryerson’s Faculty of Community Services over the course of my research, for your patience and commitment to my position as a faculty member in the midwifery school. I must also include thanks to André Foucault of the Ryerson Faculty Association for facilitating my ability to blend completion of this thesis with my ongoing work at the Ryerson Midwifery Education Program. I am also grateful to the Association of Ontario Midwives, and to Executive Director Kelly Stadelbauer most notably, for your generosity in creating a space to house archival materials from this research. Thank you to my other midwifery friends and colleagues, within and outside the province, for your continued interest and support of this thesis research. I would like to express a special thanks to the following midwives (and honorary midwife family members): • Katrina Kilroy for encouraging me to take an open ended leave from clinical practice. I always appreciate your clarity of priorities, as well as your personal friendship and support. • My friends and colleagues Judy Rogers and MaryAnn Leslie for receiving the trials and tribulations of my research process with humour and patience, as well as to Claire Rogers and Ed Leslie for listening to talk about midwifery. • Holliday Tyson for your quiet and encouraging presence over the years of my research. • Patty McNiven for giving me inspiration for the “just get it done” approach, and for your interest and your encouragement in my program of research. • Elsie Cressman, who passed away in September 2012, for being a role model for a lifelong love of midwifery. Her generosity and pride at sharing her photos and her memories of her midwifery work conveyed her love of birth and babies that was both infectious and inspiring. iv I was fortunate to have had opportunities for writing retreats in several beautiful regions of Canada that enabled me to step out of my work and family lives for a time to focus on writing. I feel immense gratitude to family and friends who made these opportunities available to me in Cape Breton, Manitoulin Island, Parry Sound and Haliburton. I was also enormously lucky to be to locate a small “camp” on a windy lake outside of Sudbury that became a peaceful oasis where I was able to turn the corner on my writing process. This opportunity came to me by chance and I thank my family for supporting me to take this opportunity and to Sharon O’Neill for your generosity in making this experience so valued. Thanks also to Susan James and the MEP staff at Laurentian University who facilitated my ability to carry on with my teaching responsibilities during this time. A huge thank you to my family who took on the lion’s share of patience, encouragement and tolerance over the years. Thank you is not an adequate expression of my gratitude to you all. With love and dedication: Sophie Bourgeois, Léo Bourgeois, Vicki Van Wagner, Estair Van Wagner and Martin Bourgeois, and to the newest members of our family, Kevin Hille and the little one, Henry Van Wagner Hille. Special thanks to Estair Van Wagner and Vicki Van Wagner for your thoughtful reflections on my work. My gratitude, above all, must be expressed to the midwives who entrusted me with your stories, as well as to those midwives who were willing to share their stories but who I could not accommodate in this research study. My hope is that this thesis helps to inform interested readers about midwifery’s late twentieth century renewal in Ontario and that it makes a valuable contribution to the historical record on Canadian midwifery. As someone who is coming within sight of the end of my work life as a practicing midwife and a midwifery educator, my greatest hope is that this research plays a role in informing and inspiring future midwives. v Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... vi List of Appendices ...................................................................................................................... viii Acronyms ...................................................................................................................... ix Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 Research Questions ............................................................................................. 5 Research Rationale ............................................................................................. 6 Thesis Outline ............................................................................................