Midwifery, Medicine, and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture

This thesis is the first dedicated study to the midwifery texts written by women over the course of the long eighteenth century. It examines the work of Jane Sharp, Sarah Stone, Elizabeth Nihell, Margaret Stephen, Martha Mears, and Jane Wright, and proposes that rather than considering these texts as individual oddities, spread over the course of a century, we can view the collective work of these women as a genre in their own right. Current work in this field is dominated by the critical narrative of the ‘rise of the man-midwife’ and the literary output of the growing number of male practitioners across the period, whereas comparatively little work has been done on the texts published by women. My work examines how female midwives participated in eighteenth century print culture to promote themselves as practitioners, and to engage in ongoing debates about female education and the rights of women. The six surviving texts can be divided into two clusters; the first three texts, written between 1671-1760, are focused upon female education and concerns about the encroachment of men into a traditionally female field of influence. The second cluster of texts date from the 1790s and explore how midwives proposed to promote the rights of women through their texts, and how they envisioned a future for their profession. By grouping these works together for the first time and approaching them from the perspective of literary texts to be analysed, rather than mere historical anecdotes, I am arguing for a new way to examine women’s roles in medicine during the long eighteenth century.