ABSTRACT
A 1908 study revealed that 86 percent of all Italian-American births in Chicago were reported by midwives. When immigrant women arrived in America, they continued to employ midwives even though very few provisions for their training and regulation existed in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Very few printed materials were published expressly for American midwives during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For a brief period, American midwives had a journal in which they could relate their experiences and even reply to the criticisms of those physicians who maintained that they were "dirty and ignorant." The question of the midwife's status in American society was heatedly debated between 1910 and 1930. The revival of the feminist movement and the increased interest in women's history over the last ten years, however, have caused historians to take a fresh look at the role of the midwife in American society.
