Birthing a New World?: On Midwives and Personal Freedom in the Fiction of Aleksandra Shabel’skaia

• In Event: 19th-Century Russophone Women Writers II: Sex and Childbirth in Works by Dostoevskaia, Tolstaia, and Shabel’skaia

Abstract

Born and educated in eastern Ukraine, Aleksandra Shabel’skaia (1845-1921) worked as a practicing midwife before she became an author. Many of her stories draw upon this expert knowledge in their depictions of pregnancy and childbirth, topics that many women writers shied away from as being too gendered. While midwifery, as one of a few professions open to women in the 19th century Russian Empire, did reinforce certain gender norms, my paper will also explore how, in Shabel’skaia’s fiction, it offered new opportunities for women’s liberation.

Author

• Melissa Lynn Miller, Colby College