ABSTRACT
The new female culture had both male and female roots. In its literary manifestations it was male-influenced, both in its self-separation from the traditional collective culture of women, and through the pervasive impact of men — as patrons, publishers, readers, critics — on what was acceptable in a woman writer and her works. After about 1750 there were two distinct cultures of women: the old, traditional, oral culture, characteristic of the lower orders, and a new, fashionable, literate culture, the culture of' the ladies', visible among the aristocracy and the wealthy middle classes. Male practitioners were turned into midwives not by their own desire but through the choices of women. Only after mothers summoned into being the man-as-midwife was this form of practice rationalized as natural by William Smellie and taught as deportment by William Hunter. The making of man-midwifery was the work of women.
