Mennonite Weekly Review

WATERLOO, Ont. — Midwives in Mennonite communities played a critical role in maintaining traditions and practices, and were not the untrained women in conflict with doctors that stereotypes make them out to be, according to Marlene Epp.

Epp delivered the 2008 Benjamin Eby Lecture, “Women Who ‘Made Things Right’: Midwife-Healers in Canadian Mennonite Communities of the Past,” Nov. 21 at the Great Hall of Conrad Grebel University College, which was packed to capacity.

Epp, associate professor of history and peace and conflict studies at the college, as well as the chair of the Canadian Committee on Women’s History, launched her book Mennonite Women in Canada: A History after the lecture.

Epp’s research included information about midwives and healers in family and settlement histories, interviews with a few midwives and their patients, and documents and tools midwives left behind.

In the lecture, Epp told the stories of several women who played a vital role in sustaining the health and identity of Mennonite communities they served.

Midwives provided separatist communities with a wide range of health services, including dental care and first aid for injuries. They were even undertakers at times.

Epp refuted the popular belief that midwives were untrained women whose expertise in helping family and neighbors was simply having given birth themselves. Many midwives either took training overseas or apprenticed with doctors, nurses or other midwives.

They also benefited from correspondence studies and medical texts. The sheer numbers of births — which sometimes ran into the thousands — also testified to the fact that midwifery was a career rather than an occasional activity. Epp demonstrated the need for midwives, showing that the Mennonite birth rate in North America before the 1970s was 40 to 50 percent higher than that of the general population, and that birth rates of 19th-century Mennonite immigrants actually increased in Canada.

She also challenged the concept that doctors and midwives always had an adversarial relationship. In remote, rural communities, the two worked as partners by necessity and depended on each other’s services.

Having a Mennonite midwife meant a mother could be assured of shared cultural practices and theological beliefs. A Mennonite midwife would speak the mother tongue of her patient, would be aware of cultural norms and would be able to provide soothing foods. She also could be counted on not to perform “emergency” infant baptisms, such as those experienced by 16th-century Anabaptists.