| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Laura E. Ettinger. Nurse-Midwifery: The Birth of a New American Profession. (Women, Gender, and Health.) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 269. Cloth $74.95, paper $26.95, CD $9.95.
In 1946, Sister Theophane, a leading nurse-midwife and director of the Catholic Maternity Institute, asked hopefully, "Is nurse-midwifery the solution?" (p. 1). From the 1930s, nurse-midwives and a handful of physician and nurse supporters hoped the fledgling field would help solve the United States' problems of inequitable and inadequate maternity care. Indeed, to some of the early leaders of nurse-midwifery, their practice seemed primed to become a new profession for women, akin to public health nursing. Yet, as early as the 1950s, many nurse-midwives came to agree with one who wrote, "No matter how high-flown our name or how rigid our requirements, we will never be more than nurses—nurses with a special skill" (p. 176).	1
In this important book, historian Laura E. Ettinger sets out to explain how nurse-midwifery, the mainstay of maternity care in many European countries, has been unable to fulfill its promise in the United States. She argues that the compromises nurse-midwifery made with what she calls the "male medical model" of childbirth actually insured that it would never become a specialized, autonomous profession, or even a widespread practice in American health care. Nurse-midwifery's leadership disagreed about its goals, its educational philosophy, and its self-definition in relation to medicine and nursing. Such internal disputes helped prevent its attaining the autonomy its leaders desired. She implies that, beyond the cost to nurse-midwives themselves, the greater cost may have been to low-income and/or rural mothers, the very women whom nurse-midwifery was designed to assist and who, seventy-five years later, are still radically underserved consumers of health care.	. . .

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