Barbara Ehrenreich

Deirdre English

As we watch another agonizing attempt to shift the future of healthcare in the United States, we are reminded of the longevity of this crisis, and how firmly entrenched we are in a system that doesn't work. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, first published by the Feminist Press in 1973, is an essential book about the corruption of the medical establishment and its historic roots in witch hunters. In this new edition, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have written an entirely new chapter that delves into the current fascination with and controversies about witches, exposing our fears and fantasies. They build on their classic exposé on the demonization of women healers and the political and economic monopolization of medicine. This quick history brings us up-to-date, exploring today's changing attitudes toward childbirth, alternative medicine, and modern-day witches.

A History of Women Healers

Witches, Midwives, & Nurses (Second Edition)

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To know our history is to begin to see how to take up the struggle again.

Raymie Smith

Amelia

There is no historically consistent justification is for the exclusion of women from healing roles. Witches were attacked for being pragmatic, empirical, and immoral. But in the nineteenth century the rhetoric reversed: women became too unscientific, delicate, and sentimental. The stereotypes change to suit male convenience—we don't, and there is nothing in our "innate feminine nature" to justify our present subservience.

Professionalism in medicine nothing more than the institutionalization of male upper-class monopoly. We must never confuse professionalism with expertise. Expertise is something to work for and to share; professionalism is—by definition—elitist and exclusive, sexist, racist, and classist.

What this means to us in practice is that in the health system there is no way to separate worker organizing from feminist organizing. To reach out to women health workers as workers is to reach out to them as women.

Healing was considered suspicious because it “did not rely on confession of sin” to clergy, and disease was still thought to be caused by either God or the Devil.

The suppression of the “witches” and the later, less violent elimination of midwives and aspiring female doctors in the United States are hardly the only instances in history of willfully squandered talent, education, and experience. Human intellectual progress proceeds, to the extent that it does at all, only haltingly, with ghastly interruptions for the slaughter of suspicious individuals or groups, colonial extirpations of indigenous cultures, and backslidings into religiously imposed ignorance. Sometimes an important task for progressives is the “conservative” one of recovering, or at least pointing out, what was lost.

We are told that our subservience is biologically ordained: women are inherently nurse-like and not doctor-like. Sometimes we even try to console ourselves with the theory that we were defeated by anatomy before we were defeated by men, that women have been so trapped by the cycles of menstruation and reproduction that they have never been free and creative agents outside their homes. Another myth, fostered by conventional medical histories, is that male professionals won out on the strength of their superior technology. According to these accounts, (male) science more or less automatically replaced (female) superstition—which from then on was called “old wives’ tales.

The stakes of the struggle were high: political and economic monopolization of medicine meant control over its institutional organizations, its theory and practice, its profits and prestige. And the stakes are even higher today, when total control of medicine means potential power to determine who will live and who will die, who is fertile and who is sterile, who is “mad” and who is sane.

Witches, Midwives, & Nurses (Second Edition) quotes

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