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jessicat_meow 's review for:
Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s
by Jennifer Worth
Really fascinating from a social history aspect. I shamefully never suspected that maternity and childbirth could be so interesting, but I guess that’s because history has done a great job of systematically devaluing "women’s" activities. It’s terrible that midwifery was only recognised and regulated as a profession in the early 20th century, and before then women had to fend for themselves unless they were wealthy and could afford a doctor. I can’t believe that even in the 1950s it was unheard of for a man to attend the birth of his own child because it was seen as private women’s business and therefore taboo. This built on my recent shocking discovery at the Portraying Pregnancy exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, where I Iearned that only in the past couple of decades has it become normal for a woman to be painted or photographed as *visibly* pregnant. Historically court portraits and more recent works went out of their way to avoid showing a woman in this delicate condition, as if being pregnant is inherently shameful.
Aside from vignettes of various pregnancies, it was super interesting to learn more of an unrecognisable postwar and be-smogged 1950s East London. Life in the East End sounded extreme and dire for both sexes: men worked all hours under insane pressure to provide for enormous numbers of children and the women were chained to endless cycles of laundry and child-rearing in horrific and thankless conditions. Families in the double digits gave birth in and shared one or two rooms in half-destroyed slum tenements without running water.
As a former community midwife Jennifer Worth’s anecdotes provide an incredible cross-sectional flavour of a time of intense social change across the UK, with the arrival of the National Health Service and post-war housing reforms. She supplements her personal observations with findings from modern research that are tightly delivered and that avoid providing tedious levels of detail.
As a narrator Worth is refreshingly human. She’s honest about her flaws without being jarringly self-indulgent; she describes recoiling from certain patients in disgust, or befriending them more out of a kind of benevolent voyeurism than real connection. In all, Call the Midwife is highly readable and I recommend Worth's memoir to anyone with an interest in social history and reforms in the twentieth century.
Aside from vignettes of various pregnancies, it was super interesting to learn more of an unrecognisable postwar and be-smogged 1950s East London. Life in the East End sounded extreme and dire for both sexes: men worked all hours under insane pressure to provide for enormous numbers of children and the women were chained to endless cycles of laundry and child-rearing in horrific and thankless conditions. Families in the double digits gave birth in and shared one or two rooms in half-destroyed slum tenements without running water.
As a former community midwife Jennifer Worth’s anecdotes provide an incredible cross-sectional flavour of a time of intense social change across the UK, with the arrival of the National Health Service and post-war housing reforms. She supplements her personal observations with findings from modern research that are tightly delivered and that avoid providing tedious levels of detail.
As a narrator Worth is refreshingly human. She’s honest about her flaws without being jarringly self-indulgent; she describes recoiling from certain patients in disgust, or befriending them more out of a kind of benevolent voyeurism than real connection. In all, Call the Midwife is highly readable and I recommend Worth's memoir to anyone with an interest in social history and reforms in the twentieth century.