Social Networks, Social Authority, and Early Modern Midwifery

It is clear that midwives were among the most respected female medical practitioners of the early modern period. While the realization that few midwives fit the “old crone” stereotype is salutary, historians have yet to explore midwives’ place in the community or the nature of their authority. This paper investigates the social and medical aspects of midwives’ authority, and the role that a midwife’s place at the intersection of social networks played in the creation of her authority.

While midwives were seen as medical practitioners, historians would be mistaken in assuming that their authority hinged solely, or even primarily, on medical knowledge. “Midwife” was rarely a woman’s main social identity, and other identities such as wife, mother, and neighbor played a vital role in perceptions of her medical authority. Midwives fashioned public personae in keeping with work as a midwife, and this social work helped increase and maintain their medical authority.

Simultaneously midwives used their medical authority to augment their social power. As experts on female sexuality, midwives were vital to the investigation of crimes ranging from bastardy and fornication to witchcraft and infanticide. Upon her testimony hinged the honor of men and women accused of sexual misconduct, and the very lives of women accused of capital offenses. Her privileged place in the community also allowed her to spread or quash rumors of illicit pregnancy, adultery and even infanticide. Indeed, the “soft power” exercised by midwives could be of greater social import than her formal authority. In the person of the early modern midwife we thus see medical knowledge not as a guarantor of medical authority, but one aspect of it. Medical authority was intertwined with social and legal authority, each of which were deployed and developed by midwives in an effort to maintain their position within the parish community.