In Their Own Words: Midwives and Memoir

• In Event: 19th-Century Russophone Women Writers III: Memoirs by Actresses and Midwives, Crime Fiction, and Screenplays

Abstract

In the mid-late 19th century, many populist authors and thinkers in the Russian Empire associated personal freedom, as well as the social and professional opportunities, with the new education trained midwives had begun to receive. Consequently, the majority of these women deliberately became midwives to enjoy an autonomous life and purposeful career out from under the patriarchal yoke that characterized both city and country living conditions in the Russian Empire. During the 1880s and 1890s, it became increasingly popular for midwives to publish memoirs of their medical practice in the same thick journals that Russia’s leading prose authors, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, wrote for. As a result, these memoirs typically were of high literary quality, containing rich characters and complex plot and thematic developments. The source texts for my paper include numerous memoirs that were written by midwives themselves that expose the extent to which they embodied in reality the hopes of a new and successful future for women that progressive Russian society ascribed to them. My analysis of their memoirs uncovers these memoirs' poetics of women’s lived experience and the ways they present a career in midwifery as providing new opportunities for women’s liberation and self-actualization. At the same time, these texts also reveal that while midwives derived deep professional and personal gratification from their work, they continued to face discrimination, hazardous working conditions, and premature death.

Author

• Melissa Lynn Miller, Colby College