By Dr Rachel Newell
County Antrim, Ireland, 1900. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)
This blog post on an article in progress on the criminalisation of female centric, traditional healthcare and community responses.
In early twentieth century Belfast, the home birth continued to reign supreme for many working-class women. As they prepared for the family’s newest arrival, many were surrounded by female relatives and neighbours who helped to ease any fear or apprehension and cared for older children. Community care was an important part of the birth experience for many, though not all, married women. Handywomen, local women with experience of aiding in childbirth, were often key to the traditional birth experience for working-class mothers in Belfast and throughout Ulster. They would also in some cases continue to provide care and assistance in caring for the newborn baby in its first few days of life. Handywomen were recognisable actors in childbirth in Ulster. On occasion they were asked to speak to police in cases of suspected infanticide where newborns were believed to have been killed. Within the cultures of care that surrounded childbirth for many working-class women in Ulster, and particularly Belfast, handywomen were a focal point of a female centric culture that was changing but remained valued by local communities. Into the turn of the twentieth century large numbers of Irish women preferred to allow familiar women, rather than unfamiliar doctors handle their reproductive care.
This blog broadly discusses six cases where handywomen were charged with manslaughter after the death of one of their patients during childbirth. Each of the cases occurred in the six north-easter counties of the Irish province of Ulster which are today known as Northern Ireland. However, as these cases took place before the partition of Ireland in 1921, I will refer to Ulster rather than Northern Ireland. These cases emerged during my research for my PhD which focuses on female criminality and society in Ulster between the 1890s and 1920s. These manslaughter cases against handywomen, occurring between the years 1900 and 1904, show how the courtroom could become a place to create and challenge narratives about what amounted to criminality.
In the forty-year period covered within my thesis no other handywomen were brought before the courts on manslaughter charges outside of these five years despite high levels of maternal mortality compared to England and Wales into the 1930s. In this transitionary period, when new legislation for midwives was introduced in England and Wales, the line between care and crime briefly blurred in the Ulster court system. However, this did not go unchallenged. Families and juries questioned the narratives used against handywomen and championed the agency of the deceased women, highlighting care in the courtroom and pushing back against its criminalisation.
A midwife on a bicycle in Ilford, UK, 1947. (Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images): The Midwives Act marked a unique moment in the criminalisation of the handywoman’s role in Ulster.
Context: The Midwives Act, 1902
In 1902, the Midwives Act was introduced in England and Wales. It mandated that midwives should have a certification for practice or have had three years of experience and ‘good character’. This Act was not introduced in Ireland at the time and would not be until 1918. However, as those in Britain watched continental Europe, medical officials and lawmakers in Ulster and particularly in Belfast watched Britain. The concentration of cases against handywomen surrounding the passing of the Midwives Act in England and Wales suggests that the prosecutions had little to do with the actions of individuals and that they were more concerned with the contemporary political and social situation.
The six cases clustered around the passing of the Midwives Act marked a unique moment in the criminalisation of the handywoman’s role in Ulster. As mentioned above, no other handywomen were brought before the higher courts charged with manslaughter between the 1890s and 1920s. Not only that but these six cases accounted for sixty percent of murder and manslaughter cases brought before the Ulster courts between 1900 and 1904 when infanticide cases were discounted. Handywomen would have remained an important part of the birth experience in Ulster, as in the rest of Ireland on into the twentieth century. This is also shown through attempts by the Belfast Corporation to curb the activity of handywomen by introducing its own Act in 1911 which prevented any uncertified women from assisting at a birth unless they were operating under the instructions of a certified medical practitioner.[1]
In the Courtroom
Prosecutions before the courts in Ulster do appear to have been envisaged as a warning, both to the ‘untrained’ handywoman and the working-class women who patronised her. This approach from those in authority focused on the perceived danger of the handy woman vis a vis not only the trained midwife, but more commonly the doctor. Doctors were routinely witnesses in the cases and often detailed how they would have been better able to care for the deceased woman. At the heart of many of these cases appears to have been the belief not that a male doctor needed to be present at the birth of every child, but the woman present should always defer to his authority. Certified midwives, it seems, were trusted by doctors to do so while handywomen were not. This narrative also served to paint working-class women as in need of guidance and unable to make sensible decisions for themselves. These were prosecutions which were brought forward by officials, and which were not supported by the families of the deceased women.
In fact, families were more likely to challenge the depiction of the handywoman as uncaring and emphasise the role that she played not only in the birth in question but also her longstanding history with the family and their past experience of her care. Handywomen were familiar to those they looked after in childbirth while the ‘medical man’, and it was typically still a medical man, was a stranger. The mother of one of the deceased women noted that in all of her previous births, five in total, she had never been attended by a doctor but by the mother herself and a local handywoman. The deceased woman’s husband added in his own witness statement that his wife had vehemently opposed all attempts to have a doctor brought, going so far as to threaten to throw herself from the window if one came into the house. At such a dangerous time in the lifecycle, a period which was often accompanied by so many rituals and protective measures carried out by local women, a desire to stay within this traditional, female dominated world was understandable. Delay and Walter have suggested that rather than capable, scientific professionals, as Doctors saw themselves, women viewed them as intruders and disrupters to a system of support.[2]
Caring could be criminalised when it appeared to move outside of proscribed boundaries of medicine and science. A nurse and women with their babies in a hospital waiting room, October 1954. (Photo by Thurston Hopkins/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Husbands were more likely to be sympathetic to the presence of doctors than mothers. It was typically the husband who advocated for the doctor to be called. However, in the courtroom they still challenged attempts to paint the handywomen as ‘unskilled’ or ‘unhygienic’. They, like their mother-in-laws, largely continued to speak in a positive manner of the women who had cared for their wives despite their deaths. They chose to recognise the care that had been offered.
When the bereaved family discussed the actions of the handywomen in their witness statements, they often highlighted the continuity of practice. This was not the first time that they had known the handywoman in question to supervise a birth. They were aware of the level of care that she would provide and they were confident in it. Their understanding was likely also reflective of how women and men from working-class communities understood and appreciated the risks of childbirth. Doctors, who were called later in the confinement or its aftermath, spoke of what they believed the handywoman had done wrong and how they could have saved her. They used science and what they believed to be logic to argue the case that they should have been called earlier, they reiterated the things that they believed the handywoman had done wrong and stressed how they could have saved the deceased woman. However, family and community members did not necessarily believe them, and they were often not swayed by these words detailing how their loved one could have been saved. Their loyalty instead generally remained with the handywoman.
The witness statements of family members appear to have heavily influenced how the handywomen were ultimately received in the courtroom at the time of their higher court trial. Only three of the six women were actually indicted and faced trial before the assize courts. In one of those three cases, after hearing the evidence the judge ordered that the woman be acquitted. In the other three cases, the grand jury found no bill meaning that they believed that there was not enough evidence to proceed with charges. While the courtroom presented an opportunity to voice expectations for midwives and handywomen and to attempt to enforce them, this could be counterargued by local communities happy with current levels of care and traditional arrangements.
Conclusion
Community support was an important part of the courtroom trials of handywomen in Ulster, emphasising the importance of these women and of female-led traditions within working-class communities. The witness statements of family members, and at times neighbours, provide a glimpse into how women experienced childbirth and the care offered to them by their local communities. The cases also emphasise the danger of caring, and how this could be criminalised when it appeared to move outside of proscribed boundaries of medicine and science. Care in these circumstances was a risk for both handywoman and her patient, but it was a risk and a responsibility that both sides embraced. It was also one which had the support of their community who reiterated that this was care, and agency, not a crime.
[1] Lucia Pozzi and Liam Kennedy, ‘Too long a sacrifice? Maternal mortality in Northern Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century’ in Annales de Démographie Historique, 139 (2020), p 149.
[2] ‘“You said that it would be alright”: trust, betrayal and women’s relationships in Irish abortion experiences, 1900-67’ in New Hibernia Review, 26, pp 17-40.
Care or Criminality? 