If midwifery was solely a woman's job before Catharina Schrader’s time, this was not true anymore in the eighteenth century. As Catharina Schrader was starting her practice, men were more and more involved in childbirth, discrediting midwives’ work, experience and knowledge. Women used to be considered as having an innate and natural talent for midwifery, but with the man-midwives’ growing input in the field, they quickly became the target of accusations when deliveries had bad outcomes, accused either of procrastination or of impatience and aggressiveness, but, most of all, of ignorance.Marland, Mother and Child Were Saved: The Memoirs (1693-1740) of the Frisian Midwife Catharina Schrader, 29 This long-established tradition of midwifery was becoming increasingly professionalized and masculinized.Simonton, 68 This shift started originally with the French and English aristocracy who began seeking the help of male physicians during labor as early as the mid-seventeenth century. Along with the increasing influence of man-midwives, laws and regulations pertaining to the practice of midwifery began to appear, discrediting midwives’ skills and legitimacy further. For, before the seventeenth century’s legislation establishing courses for future midwives to be trained, women who wanted to practice midwifery would be trained by experienced, older midwives, often the woman’s mother.Lippi, 72 Here is an example of how people developed a condescending attitude towards midwives, in a document written in 1755 in Grenoble, France: “but as they know that a quantity of women without names, without titles, without abilities, and without morals are meddling with the births of this town, putting children at risk and doing illegal business, and not knowing the art of childbirth, which is in fact quite difficult; even more so is the theory than the practice, [they] maim or let children perish and the mothers.”Archives municipales de Grenoble, FF 46 (Simonton, 70)
