| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Japanese American Midwives: Culture, Community, and Health Politics, 1880–1950. By Susan L. Smith. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. xii, 280 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-252-03005-2. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-252-07247-2.)

In this book, Susan L. Smith explores the experiences of Japanese immigrant midwives as a window on a previously unstudied area of Japanese American women's work and the history of midwifery from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. She begins this history in Japan during the period between 1880 and 1920 when the Japanese state-certified midwife, or sanba, replaced the toriagebaba, the traditional midwife who lacked formal training. The vast majority of the book, however, focuses on Japanese immigrant midwives' experiences in the American West and Hawaii from the early 1900s through the 1940s. While racial politics, culminating in World War II and the internment of Japanese Americans, marked the end of midwifery in Japanese American communities, Smith also notes how changing attitudes of second-generation Japanese Americans and the sanba themselves also contributed to the demise of midwifery and the increasing popularity of hospital births.

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