Agency, Authorship, and Authority in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Midwifery Manuals Written by Women

This paper considers the manifold strategies used by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century midwives to actively take part both in the circulation of notions and evidence about pregnancy, labour, and childcare, and how they sought to regain control of such a gendered area of medicine as midwifery and obstetrics by countering mainstream beliefs about their ignorance and unreliability. The analysis chiefly takes into account the linguistic tools used to take the floor and state the midwives’ agency, authorship, and authority in the paratexts of five midwifery manuals of the time. Among other things, results show that the abandonment of anonymity, the use of techniques to express evidentiality and of argumentative strategies employed to demonstrate the author’s trustworthiness were used by midwives to reclaim their rightful place within the dissemination of scientific and medical information of the period.