The Medicalization of Childbirth: A Brief History.
For centuries, medicine and religion devalued the roles and traits of females and through patriarchal ideology and misogynist views of women's reproductive abilities, excluded women from power in society. They both feared and desired to control women's "healing powers" (Cahill, 2001). However, until the 17th century, childbirth was an exclusively female domain, and men were only involved in problematic deliveries. It was during this century, as well as the 18th century, that the decline of midwifery began, as did the dominance of medicine. During the 18th century, medical practitioners with greater "scientific knowledge" of biology began to systematically dispute and devalue midwives knowledge. The practitioners used their opposition to abortion to assert intellectual and moral superiority over midwives and pregnant women (Cahill, 2001). By the time the mid 1800s rolled around, doctors were attempting to build their profession by establishing the American Medical Association (AMA) and by decreasing competition from other health care providers. Midwives had access to important clientele (i.e. pregnant women and their families) plus steady work and entrée to the family for other medical needs (Scully, 1994), and were especially targeted. The doctors ran a vicious racist, sexist, and classist campaign against the midwives, referring to their practices as a "relic of barbarism" and the women as "filthy and ignorant," while describing themselves as "modern" and "scientific" (even though they spread infections by going from an autopsy to a delivery without washing their hands) (Strother-Ratcliff, 2002).
What was happening here was a subordination of traditional "experiential" midwifery to the more "formal" knowledge and training of the doctors, from which women were excluded.
