ABSTRACT
The midwife was so important because childbirth itself and the associated ritual were central in women's lives. The popular ceremony of childbirth both reflected and helped to maintain a collective culture of women. Qualified observers of both sexes routinely claimed that few midwives could deliver difficult births. A midwife could only accumulate experience of difficult births by attending a large number of deliveries, but few midwives ever acquired such experience. In mid-seventeenth-century London the recognized way to start practice was to serve as a deputy to an established midwife, perhaps for as long as seven years — but this remarkable system, apparently created by the midwives themselves many decades earlier, was fast declining by 1700. Just as London midwives had constructed the deputy system, so also there were several seventeenth-century attempts to create in the capital a corporation of midwives analogous to those of the physicians, surgeons and apothecaries.
