EN had the privilege, unusual for an Englishwoman and only secured through the patronage of a French nobleman, of two years' training in midwifery by the nuns of the Hôtel Dieu in Paris under Marie-Claude Pour . Here, she observed with satisfaction, midwives and not doctors were in charge of a successful operation. During her two years there, more than 2,000 babies were delivered at the Hôtel Dieu, with no instruments and only four maternal deaths (each from a specific cause). With this experience EN was accepted as an apprentice midwife.

JS , who published in 1671, stands in a line of militant midwife-writers, close to Elizabeth Cellier before her and followed after a longer lapse of time by Elizabeth Nihell . Like theirs, her text is proto-feminist.

The small but significant literary output of seventeenth-century midwife EC amounts to three pamphlets on topical religious, medical, and gender issues, notably including the attempt to establish midwifery as a profession parallel to the male medical professions.

She was, however, a good friend of Richard Steele during the time of her relationship with Tilly. She helped Steele find a midwife when he had fathered an illegitimate baby. The friendship ended when he refused to advance her money, and political differences converted it into enmity. They were, however, reconciled in 1717.

HS , a wealthy London businesswoman (midwife and moneylender) in the mid-sixteenth century, published either two or three pamphlets attacking the minister of her church: not on religious grounds but in a quarrel over property.

Davies taught at Liverpool School of Art in the 1950s; he was said to have been unenlightened on matters of gender, and to have pressured BB to be more domestic. They had a son, Paul Aaron (born after a difficult pregnancy on 5 February 1957), and daughter, Johanna Harriet (born on 19 September 1958 and later, as Jojo Davies , a midwife living in London). Late in life BB had regular baby-sitting duties with her grandchildren. There were seven at the time of her death, and they bore a remarkable physical likeness to her. Having been left very young to cope with bringing up her children, BB later believed that she was a bad mother to my son. She said she had made it up to him since.

Later MC moved to Richmond, where she settled with bushrangers named Rouse whom she had met on the voyage out. She worked again as a nurse and apparently as a midwife, then as a farm overseer, and finally as a shopkeeper.

She had been in labour 4 or 5, five, days, attended by her aunt, her sister Lady Norton, four midwives, Lady Thynne (probably the mother of Thomas Thynne , later Viscount Weymouth, rather than his wife the literary patron), and a man-midwife. The latter was convinced the child was dead, and was putting on his butchers habitt to apply instruments for cutting it up inside the womb and so removing it, when my greatt and good God thatt never failed me (or deneyed my reasonable request) raised me up a good woman midwife, who had been recommended by Lady Thynne. She worked for two or three hours to deliver EF . The child appeared dead, hurt wth severall greatt holes in his head (made by the midwives' efforts); but he revived to be baptised that evening with her father's name. A month later he was again thought to be dead (and was removed from his mother to prepare for burial), but again recovered. At six months old he had his leg accidentally broken by a nurse who managed to keep this fact a secret for nearly three months, but eventually he recovered from his lameness also. He even survived smallpox at the age of ten.

Lady Powis (as she was until 1689) used her rank to help her fellow Catholics: for instance, she served as patron to the midwife Elizabeth Cellier , commissioning her for a kind of survey of Catholics in prison and later seeking royal support for Cellier's scheme for a professional society for midwives. Lady Powis also (according to Victor Stater in the ODNB) conspired with Cellier to spread rumours of a Presbyterian Plot, a mirror image of the alleged Popish Plot in connection with which which her husband had already been arrested. The public proved more sceptical about Protestant than Catholic plotting. Thomas Dangerfield , who was apparently working for Lady Powis, proved a double agent, and Lady Powis was accused of treason (in a third fictitious plot, that of the Meal Tub where incriminating papers were planted). She wrote and published at least one, though probably two, ballads about the plots.

She took up the project of this novel while doing undemanding jobs that required little of her mind. While working as a shop assistant, she began to compile notes and charts about the events of 1789-94 and to put them into a card index. As she kept working she was plagued by a spate of dreams in which I was a midwife who had let a child die.In choosing the French Revolution for a subject, HM defined herself as distinct from a notion of Englishness that she had begun to see as white, male, southern, Protestant and middle class. She writes: I defined myself from the first as a European writer.At the same time the old regime, its casual cruelties, its heartless style, seemed to her familiar aspects of a still extant institutionalized despotism. Each, then and now, was marked by unratified decisions, handed down from the top, arbitrarily enforced: the face of strength when it moves in on the weak.Recalling the condescending words of the psychiatrist who had described her as conscientious and with a mind for detail,HM researched with a vengeance. Writing a novel was thumbing her nose at the doctor who had forbidden her to write. Her object was, she says, to produce a novel that gives the reader the scope to change opinions, change sympathies: a book that one can think and live inside.Time passed. I moved to another country [Botswana], another continent. Still I wrote it and wrote it.

She dedicated this work to Phainarete , mother of Socrates , who was reputedly a midwife. Nightingale started collecting materials for her work after an epidemic of puerperal fever (commonly known as childbed fever) closed the midwife school she had helped to found at King's College Hospital . She soon discovered that reliable statistics on maternal and fetal mortality were lacking, and set out to correct this situation.

Interestingly, although Victoria later opposed female midwives and doctors, she was delivered by a German midwife, Fräulein Siebold. Her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, were living in Germany until the last month of the pregnancy. At this time the Duke decided that the child should be born in England, as she was close enough to the succession to be of concern to the government and royal family. Despite the risk to his wife's health and their lack of money, they journeyed towards English soil. Victoria was born a few days after their arrival.

As well as her close relationships with Angela Thirkell and Barrie , LCA built a significant friendship with the novelist D. H. Lawrence (who has been seen as drawing her portrait in The Blind Man and The Ladybird and in Lady Chatterley's Lover). His Glad Ghosts is a mixture of Cynthia and the Hon. Dorothy Brett . After meeting Lawrence she wrote that something new and startling has come into our lives. He for his part, felt that [s]omewhere, in her own soul, she is not afraid to face the Truth, whatever it may be. She is something of a stoic, with a nature hard and sad as rock. She read and commented on The Rainbow in manuscript, and called her role in his work midwifing. When her eldest child began acting strangely, becoming too antisocial for a normal toddler, Lawrence showed extraordinary interest and sympathy, and wrote out extensive, detailed advice (not to exercise authority over the child but to be constantly, undemandingly available) based on his perception of the potentially constricting effects of fashionable society and its ways. The exhibition of his paintings at the Warren Gallery in London (which was closed down by the police for obscenity on 5 July 1929) included an almost obvious portrait of herself in which she is being embraced by the Lawrence-figure. Beauman reproduces this picture in her biography. After Lawrence died Asquith edited and bowdlerised his letters to her before handing them to Aldous Huxley for his edition.

Maria, the beautiful, speechless protagonist of The Dumb Virgin, has an elder sister, Belvidera, who is visibly deformed in limb: both disabilities are due to their mother's emotional state at their birth, to a family history than encompasses the supposed death of the eldest child, a boy. He resurfaces years later, unidentified, as a young man named Dangerfield (oddly out of step with the other names in the story, as if referring to Thomas Dangerfield , an actual Catholic spy who crossed swords with the midwife writer Elizabeth Cellier around 1680). Maria marries him, and dies as a result of her unintentionally committed sin of incest.

Although she spent most of her time with her grandparents, Breeze's mother, a midwife, taught her to recite poetry almost from babyhood. Reflecting on this later, JBB noted that the poetry her mother shared was never written down, and always learned through recitation. In her words, there were never any books. Her mother's profession also meant that she was constantly being looked after by working-class women while her mother was out delivering babies. JBB believes that this resulted in a real sense of what working-class Jamaica was really about, an awareness that is reflected in much of her poetry.

Julia, who believes that a baby ought to be born under his father's roof, is rushed down a mountainside to a clinic when her baby comes inconveniently early, and faces the agonising decision as to whether or not to have a caesarean. She thinks a specialist ought to decide, or at least advise her, but the law of France says that since she is adulte and consciente, [she] must make her own choice entirely unaided and uninfluenced. Visited by a memory from farming days of a cow that died in birth (and whose calf later died too), she plumbs the depth when monsieur le professeur tells her that in any case her baby must be dead because its heart is silent. The sage-femme or midwife, however, leads her aside, listens, and says the heart is fine, only the Professor is a little deaf. When Julia chooses the caesarean the medical staff wring her hand and assure her she has made the right decision. To an English supporter she says: My God, what a set of bastards they are, not to have told me themselves. French law requires her also to choose the baby's name at once. At the end of the book Philip is back, the mystery is solved, and Julia is snatching a few moments from the breast-feeding schedule. Her husband is a little surprised to find she has decided to call the baby Philip Bernard (the latter, which he calls a non-family name, chosen to honour one of the friends who saw her through her crisis). But his heart, his normally unexpressive Scottish heart, fairly sang with happiness, confidence in the future, and grateful love.

Described by critic John Sutherland as a modern changeling fable,The Engrafted Rose has as its eponymous heroine Rosamunda Thoresbye, who is exchanged at birth by a miserly, unscrupulous midwife for the Thoresbyes' still-born child. Rosamunda becomes a skilled musician and a beauty: her mother regards her with both inordinate pride. . . . [and] an amazed sense of self-glorification, but also with a thrill of fear; much in the way that a superstitious person raps three timens[sic] on the table as a safeguard against the ill-luck which follows upon boasting. Rosamunda is devoted to her sister Ethelinda, who is equally devoted to her, and the girls' intense and supportive relationship often overshadows the novel's love plot. Eventually Rosamunda's parentage is revealed: she is the legitimate daughter of Clement Clarel, owner of Marske Hall, one of the area's great estates. Clarel had entered into a second marriage to please his father, knowing that an imprudent first marriage made this an act of bigamy—a crime only prevented by his first wife's death in childbirth a few hours before the ceremony. Rosamunda refuses Clarel's offers to recognize her as his daughter when she hears how he neglected her mother. Instead, she strikes out on her own, first living with her mother's family, who are farmers, and subsequently in poverty, supported only by her musical ability. Eventually she is rescued, and returns to her family (and Ethelinda) in anticipation of her marriage and a new beginning.

SC was a great networker. Having met George Ballard , a local man (perhaps because her sister was a patient of his mother, who was a midwife), she introduced him to Elizabeth Elstob and to Samuel Richardson . She helped find patronage and a source of income for Elstob, writing on her behalf a circular letter to potential patrons. The £100 subscription with which Queen Caroline responded reflected the queen's admiration for Chapone's letter as well as for Elstob. In introducing Elstob to the bluestocking circle, SC formed a personal and intellectual link from them back to Mary Astell .

HC 's mother, Eva Cixous (born Klein), a midwife, was born in Germany but left in 1933 for Oran after Hitler 's rise to power. Her family was Austro-German Jewish, and many members died in Nazi concentration camps or were deported from Germany. Eva Cixous spoke German, which became her daughter's first language. HC wrote that her mother's was the first face she saw after her birth; she associated her mother (and her feelings for her mother, intense love and fear of loss) with her desire to write. She adored her mother's face, but was plagued by the terror of understanding that her mother was mortal and one day would die: I feared, without knowing it, the disappearance of the maternal body. As a child, HC wrote, she kept her mother as close as possible to her, with the ferocity of a beast, for fear of losing her.

The child, James Annesley, was sold as an indentured slave to the American colonies. This was the easier for his cousin, the fifth Lord Altham, to achieve since James' father, the fourth Lord Altham, had abused and persecuted his wife and cut her off from her son. The fourth Lord Altham had then, under the influence of first one and then another mistress, treated his son badly (giving the impression that he was illegitimate) and falsely reported that he had died. On the death of James's father, Richard Annesley (DDB 's father) kidnapped the boy and in his absence enforced the illegitimacy story: James, he said, was not Lady Altham's child but that of the midwife at his birth, who was also one of his father's mistresses.

By this time, however, she was acquiring a circle of patrons. She had met Sarah Chapone , parson's wife and proto-feminist, who this same year published her anonymous, hard-hitting The Hardships of the English Laws in relation to Wives. It was Chapone who introduced Elstob to the remarkable dressmaker and self-made scholar George Ballard , who was one of the large family of a widowed midwife and who made himself an academic in the end, though as a young man he had lacked the money to attend university. One of his sisters, Elizabeth , became a numismatist; Sarah Chapone's sister was one of his mother's patients. Undoubtedly EE 's concerned friends must have also have included Mary Delany , her sister Anne Dewes (who claimed to have made the original re-discovery of Elstob), and that Anna Hopkins of Evesham whose note to Ballard a few years later constitutes the most solid evidence of Chapone's authorship of the Hardships. Another frequent visitor to Elstob was her Cousin Mallet, a Roman Catholic.

MF 's mother, born Lilian Hind , was a very conscientious and also a very bright child, though at the school she attended the education given to girls was inferior to that given to boys, omitting fractions, equations, physics, and chemistry. Lily loved her work as a secretary in Carlisle Public Health Department, but had to give up her job when she married, as was customary. She lived the life of a conventional working-class housewife and always tried to play down, or to hush up, her own mother's early, painful, socially unacceptable history. Her daughter Margaret believed that probably she suffered a nervous breakdown in 1943, which at that time was thought to be shameful, a reason for family silence and secrecy. Yet she was the kind of woman who could cope in an emergency, delivering a neighbour's baby, for instance, when the midwife failed to arrive in time, or offering a brief respite to a battered wife or child. MF wrote about both her mother and grandmother in Hidden Lives, A Family Memoir, 1995. Lilian Forster died on 12 August 1981, after a decade of bad years, plagued by illnesses and depression. One of the last things she said to her elder daughter was, It hasn't amounted to much, my life.

From this marriage she had six children, three of each sex, and five of them delivered by the same midwife who had delivered five of her mother's babies. By 2002 she had sixteen grandchildren. AF was not totally faithful to her husband, but twenty years after their wedding she considered myself to be happily married, or at any rate happy in my marriage . . . . I had never for one moment envisaged leaving my marriage. She admired her husband for such qualities as courage and decency, but thought of him as at heart a loner. When she realised the depth of her feelings for poet and playwright Harold Pinter she decided (in June 1975) to leave her husband. She brought Pinter home for a serious talk with Sir Hugh Fraser—only to find (according to her later account) that the two men got on well and sat talking cricket and Proust in a conversation she had no part in.

This short novel, a blend of fairytale, adventure story, didacticism, the occult, and a study of an orphan finding herself, is set in the seventh century in the kingdom of Dalriada (now the Isle of Mull), two hundred years after its conversion to (Roman Catholic ) Christianity. Wise Child is the Celtic name given to a nine-year-old girl abandoned by her mother, the witch Maeve. Since her father, a sailor, has vanished and her grandmother died, she is brought up by the village doran (meaning a gateway), a midwife, healer, and white witch, Juniper. This young woman is not a churchgoer and lives in an uneasy truce with the stern village priest. She teaches Wise Child the mysterious arts of herbal medicine and reading. The re-appearance of Maeve at first divides her daughter's loyalties; it also destabilizes the social situation. Juniper is tried for witchcraft, but by this time Wise Child has developed her own occult powers and is able to rescue her.