Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Contemporary Classics)
Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English
Language: English
Pages: 112
ISBN: 1558616616
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
still—for the “regulars”—this early grab for medical monopoly inspired mass indignation in the form of a radical, popular health movement which came close to smashing medical elitism in America once and for all. THE POPULAR HEALTH MOVEMENT The Popular Health Movement of the 1830s and 40s is usually dismissed in conventional medical histories as the high-tide of quackery and medical cultism. In reality it was the medical front of a general social upheaval stirred up by feminist and working
sectarian schools and special schools for blacks and women—Flexner did not consider them worth saving. Their options were to close, or to remain open and face public denunciation in the report Flexner was preparing. The Flexner Report, published in 1910, was the foundations’ ultimatum to American medicine. In its wake, medical schools closed by the score, including six of America’s eight black medical schools and the majority of the “irregular” schools which had been a haven for female students.
women who sought formal medical training were too ready to accept the professionalism that went with it. They made their gains in status—but only on the backs of their less privileged sisters—midwives, nurses, and lay healers. Our goal today should never be to open up the exclusive medical profession to women, but to open up medicine—to all women. • This means that we must begin to break down the distinctions and barriers between women health workers and women consumers. We should build shared
concerns: consumers aware of women’s needs as workers, workers in touch with women’s needs as consumers. Women workers can play a leadership role in collective self-help and self-teaching projects, and in attacks on health institutions. But they need support and solidarity from a strong women’s consumer movement. • Our oppression as women health workers today is inextricably linked to our oppression as women. Nursing, our predominate role in the health system, is simply a workplace extension of
serve him faithfully. (In the imagination of the Church even evil could only be thought of as ultimately male-directed!) As The Malleus makes clear, the devil almost always acts through the female, just as he did in Eden:All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable . . . Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort with devils . . . it is sufficiently clear that it is no matter for wonder that there are more women than men found infected with the heresy of