Where Has it Been and Where Does the Story Go from Here?

The journey leading German midwives to their niche within the professionalization of modern medicine has been, and in many ways continues to be, one marked by triumph and conflicts. Over the centuries, midwives have gained, lost and regained recognition in the public realm. At the heart have been questions of who controls access to authority, expertise and autonomy.

If one defines professionalism in terms of codes governing public responsibility then the story started as far back as the fourteenth century with the Reformation of the Council of Trier, followed shortly thereafter by its sister codes in Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Munich and elsewhere. Male administrators used various laws within the codes to control the public role of these women such as the stipulation that only midwives who had sworn an official oath to a city were legally permitted to work inside its walls. Interactions between city officials and midwives were not only about gender (male officials regulating duties of female birth assistants), but also about class (patrician ‘honourable women’, and later slightly lower ranked ‘jury women’, used by city officials to control the actions of even lower ranked midwives).