ABSTRACT
Engage scholars in the women's movement see the midwives of the past as a great boon to womankind. One such scholar writes, "It seems that throughout most of history medical men had no advantages to offer parturient women over the services of a midwife.”Midwives who have got their knowledge from their mothers and grandmothers," wrote J. B. Gebel, "seldom let them be recruited in the midwife school. As doctors slowly came to understand more than the midwives about the anatomy of the pelvis and the mechanism of labor, they began to examine midwife candidates and to supervise those in practice. The midwife ordinances of Frankfurt, Paris, and numerous other communities also insisted that midwives learn from autopsy findings. Just as three quarters of all births in the developing world are attended by midwives, so in the traditional epoch of Western society doctors were absent from the normal birthing scene, except in upper middle class Anglo-Saxon homes.
