ABSTRACT
African-American midwives could be described as the symbolic mothers of their communities. Several researchers have equated their positions and influence within their communities as equivalent to that enjoyed by minister (S. Smith 1995). The prestige they held was not arbitrary, for midwives literally held the community’s future in their hands. Pregnancy and childbirth were often viewed in the nineteenth century as a frightening but inevitable and natural condition of women’s lives. The woman who had never lost a friend or relative in childbirth was rare (Leavitt 1986). Women approached births with concern and, sometimes, fatalism (Faust 1996). While other women friends and relatives might be present and provide support during a birth, it was ultimately the midwife who directed and facilitated labor and delivery. Birth had been a woman’s business, experienced by women, and overseen by women, so while modern pundits might view statistics showing that African-American lay midwives had overseen 50 percent of all births in the United States during 1910 as alarming (Ladd-Taylor 1988:255), a woman about to deliver would have been comforted to know that her midwife had safely supervised a multitude of deliveries or that she had overseen possibly even her mother’s births.
