Sex in an Old Regime City by Hardwick Julie;

Author:Hardwick, Julie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Care Work: Midwives and Wet-Nurses

Along with landladies, midwives and wet-nurses provided vital intimate labor. For the wet-nurses and midwives who made a living through the work of reproduction, discretion was an attribute just as it was for landladies and notaries. They sometimes facilitated informal out-of-court solutions as well as providing essential reproductive services for women, both married and unmarried. Most midwives who delivered out-of-wedlock babies lived in the city while wet-nurses usually lived in the rural parishes around Lyon, but they were all part of the business of reproduction network.

From the middle of the sixteenth century, regulation of midwives increased although, as with many early modern new legal requirements, these rules were seldom honored. Treatises by male doctors and other specialists were filled with criticisms of the ignorance and incompetence of midwives. In part in response to such critiques, Lyon and many other communities followed Paris and began to appoint licensed midwives who had demonstrated some basic knowledge and were often paid a yearly fee by the community for their services.15

Women who worked as midwives in Lyon were sometimes registered officially by the municipality and sometimes worked outside that licensing structure. The legal actions single women brought against their intimate partners routinely included claims for the costs of delivery, clearly identifying the activities of midwives as paid work. Their work was described in different ways in legal records. Anne Caneu, for example, who delivered both babies for Gabet and Benoist was the wife of a master patissier who “made her profession as a midwife.” Jeanne Julien was not identified by the court as a midwife but her actions indicated her work when she offered to deliver the baby after learning that her neighbor’s daughter was pregnant. Midwives who did work for the courts were identified in that context as “city midwife” (matronne de la ville), and they presumably had been examined to ascertain their competency and might have been paid a yearly fee by the city for their work as was the case elsewhere.16

Like landladies, midwives kept their own counsel about their work when they felt the situation required it. Midwives usually did not house the women they delivered, and this probably worked to the advantage of both landladies and midwives. Catherine Brosset gave birth in a room rented short term by her intimate partner and recalled that she did not know the name of her midwife because she had delivered the baby without talking to her. Bruyere explained that she did not know Claire Bariou’s last name until she asked Bariou’s confessor for payment some time after the baby was born, because Dumas had told her only that she would be well paid for her work because Claire came from a good family.17

On some occasions, midwives—like other community safeguarders—dispensed criticism, advice, and other forms of assistance along with their core work, and they focused on men’s failure to meet their responsibilities rather than on sexual immorality. Anne Caneu criticized Francois Benoist for delaying too long in calling her to assist his partner with the birth of their second child.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.