I just spotted this piece on midwifery in the 1950s, and it quotes Mary Cronk quite extensively. Mary is a famous and enormously respected midwife, and in the latter years of her career she focused on helping women in difficult circumstances or with problematic medical presentations, who wanted a home birth. By pure chance she came out as a backup midwife for the birth of my first child, which started out as a home birth (we ended up with an assisted delivery in hospital). Mary would have been in her early seventies then, and mobility was difficult for her but she was amazing. She knelt on the bathroom floor beside me as I laboured, spooning honey into my mouth or offering sips of water, and made conversation between contractions. She even managed to keep Steve calm(ish), which is no mean feat. When she found out I was a writer she told me she had attended the same school as Iain Banks--that was a surreal moment. When Andrya, my much-younger main midwife, offered me Rescue Remedy for the shakes, Mary snorted and muttered in my ear that I'd do better with a dram of whisky.
I'm not sure I could watch the program without gales of tears, though. Reading this article and thinking about what Mary's work must have been like in those days reminds me how easy we have it now! Not that 'easy' is the first word that leaps to mind. Shudder.
I'm not sure I could watch the program without gales of tears, though. Reading this article and thinking about what Mary's work must have been like in those days reminds me how easy we have it now! Not that 'easy' is the first word that leaps to mind. Shudder.
My great grandmother was a midwife. There aren't many stories, but I'm trying to glean out more from the few that are still alive that remember her.
I hope you can gather some more stories. So many lost oral histories from prior generations; I wonder if your great-grandmother even guessed how interested people would have been in her life and work.
I doubt it very much. According to my aunt, she was very pragmatic, and did what she needed to do to get a job done. Yet she was also very generous. She owned a store by herself (her husband died when they were young and she was pregnant with their 5th child), and once a year would cancel all the debts the people had there, with the idea that if they didn't have the money to pay, they didn't have the money.
I'm tagging all these family history entries here if you want to read them.
Thank you for the tag link. I've seen in passing some of your recent entries, though I haven't been too regular in my reading. Love the idea of your project.
This season started an enormously popular BBC series, "Call the Midwife," based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth and set in East London in the 1950s.
Love, C.
Love, C.
Love, C.
And yes, I'm eternally thankful childbirth got easier and easier (not to mention less dangerous) in the past century. Still no walk through the park, but much better.