I’ve been looking for more material on midwifery to see if it’s something I want to make a massive career change to, and there’s kind of a dearth of good documentaries and movies about home birth. I ran across one, which we had in the library, called All My Babies, which is actually a training film produced by the Georgia health department. It has a lot of documentary aspects to it too (some obviously staged). It was made in 1952 about what I guess was the last generation of “granny midwives” - women who served poor women out in the country.
The weird and hilarious thing is, I can’t get in touch with my dad but I think he might have known this woman! She worked in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s in Albany, Georgia and surrounding counties, which is where he grew up! She served black people and poor whites in Mitchell County, which is where he was born. (And definitely poor white.) She delivered more than 3,000 babies in her career, which is a lot considering how many people didn’t live in those places! And, get this - the second woman to give birth in the film lives on “Hardup Road”, which may be an expression, but my aunt Ritha lives on “Hardup Road” and it’s certainly plausible that it’s the same place. (Although it’s come up a bit in the world, because while it ain’t the Ritz, in the film it’s Tobacco Road.) I mean, what are the chances?
It’s really a fascinating film - for one thing, it might as well be in the 20’s for all you can tell. You rarely see poor rural black people’s houses in movies from the 50’s, so you have no context - the midwife’s house has power and a fridge but a wood stove, but the Hardup Road people don’t seem to have a stove (they’re new in town) and when she tells the husband to go get some wood he has to go chop it. (It’s not the most prepared family in the world - they obviously have major problems not limited to the pregnancy.) Their house has maybe two rooms in it, and there are cardboard boxes insulating the walls.
What’s really surprising is that even in this place childbirth is already starting to be medicalized - I wasn’t surprised to see the emphasis on seeing the doctor during your pregnancy or going to him for your birth if you have problems based on your checkups, but I was surprised when the midwife didn’t give the baby to the mother immediately (cut the cord, weighed it, delivered the afterbirth, and cleaned up beforehand) and when she insisted that the babies be delivered in bed (although walking around in labor was encouraged) and that the second, poorer woman not labor on the floor, where she obviously wanted to be.
Warning - it’s a training film and you do see childbirth in detail (although amusingly the sound is cut out so you don’t hear anybody grunting or moaning.) It’s absolutely fascinating for its very clear depiction of what they were doing in terms of cleanliness and sterile technique (there’s a lot of boiling). Anyway, I seriously recommend it for anybody who’s interested in the subject, the time period, rural life in the first half of the century, race as it relates to health, or just an interesting look at a profession that no longer exists in this form (and that was in a very real way dying at the time, only to be reborn decades later but in a different manner.)
