ABSTRACT
When Dr Clemens Meuleman, between 1913 and 1932 director of the midwives school in Heerlen in the south of the Netherlands, interviewed candidates for admission as pupils, he was looking for more than bright, well-schooled, healthy and sturdy young women. He was also seeking malleable girls, straightforward, agreeable, perhaps a little rough at the edges, who would be transformed during their years of training into ‘modern’ midwives, their roughness smoothed out, educated in more than midwifery, taught the principles of hygiene and the importance of being scrupulously neat and clean, professional deportment, how to speak, dress and behave.
