The Midwife's Bag: Tracing the Objects of Professional Identity in Post-Unification Italy

As an immediate target of post-Unification legislation, Italian midwives were subject to national efforts to standardize educational and professional practices. As a material emblem of these initiatives, the midwife's bag signified both a recognizable marker of midwives' new professional status and a mechanism for the increased surveillance directed toward them. Drawing on the material feminism of scholars like Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the author considers three objects contained within the midwife's bag-syringes, stethoscopes, and birth registers-and the associated technologies of asepsis, auscultation, and statistical enumeration. In physical birthing rooms and on the pages of midwifery's new professional journals, the embodied practices associated with, rationale for, and impacts of novel obstetrical objects were negotiated. These technologies were part of the ongoing production of particular kinds of birthing and fetal bodies, ones that were both known and increasingly defined by technologically derived data and measurement.