Witches by Sam George-Allen;

Author:Sam George-Allen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

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I have been watching a lot of Call the Midwife. A BBC drama that started in 2012, the show is based on the memoir of the same name by nurse and midwife Jennifer Worth, who cut her teeth working in London’s impoverished East End during the baby boom of the 1950s. When I tell people that I’ve been watching the show, a lot of them scoff. I have started asking them why they are so dismissive (none of the scoffers have watched an episode, of course). They tend to have trouble articulating it. I have started articulating it for them: is it because it’s a show about women’s stuff? This tends to finish the conversation.

It is a show about women’s stuff, almost purely: the challenges faced by women living in slum conditions in abject poverty without birth control or access to abortion, when home births were de rigueur and the doctor only called in the direst emergencies. I cry in every single episode. For this, I will allow a small amount of criticism. The show does list sentimental at times. But it is so hard to separate the miracle of birth—and the joy of being cared for throughout your labour by women who believe in you and your strength and power—from sentimentality. Watching these moments with only women on-screen—nurse, midwife, Sister, mother, grandmother—feels so good. Even when the scenes are tragic, I take some sustenance from them. I think it’s because we so rarely get to see this kind of gentle intimacy between women depicted in popular culture, particularly as something to be celebrated rather than something to be mocked or problematised. It’s not as anxiety-inducing as The Handmaid’s Tale, or as vulgarly capitalist as Sex and the City; it’s just women doing women’s stuff, the way women always have. It’s enough to make mushy weepers of us all.

I talk to my friend Ruby about Call the Midwife and we chortle over the places where we watch it: while doing the dishes, while cleaning the house, while folding the laundry. These chores, this women’s work, seem more beautiful somehow when put up against that other women’s work, of creating new life and bringing it into the world. It does not seem shameful or oppressive to continue the traditions of women who have come before us, or to take pleasure in the domestic sphere. It seems powerful and ancient.

Fortunately for me, my love of the show is supported by the thousands of midwives who soundly approve of it. There’s even been a marked uptick in young women choosing to study midwifery since the series’ premiere. Midwives who watch Call the Midwife, particularly midwives of a certain vintage, recognise themselves. This is as good a mark of a show nailing its brief as any.

Fortunately for me also is the fact that, despite weeping copiously at the joy and magic of birth depicted in every single episode, Call the Midwife has not done a lick to change my own attitude towards childbearing.

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