Critique of Secondary Source
This essay examines a secondary historical interpretation of evidence in detail. For students and teachers, this section is meant to illustrate the critical perspective required when drawing on secondary sources.
A Critique of Jane Donegan’s Women and Men Midwives: Medicine, Morality, and Misogyny in Early America
Whenever you read a history book, it is always a good idea to spend some time reading the seemingly innocuous front matter If you open Jane Donegan’s Women and Men Midwives: Medicine, Morality, and Misogyny in Early America (Donegan), you will find that it was published in 1978. Do not underestimate the importance of the publishing date! As you will see in our critique of Donegan’s book, it can help you decide how to approach the book and what you take away from it. Even before you take notice of the date, however, you should not misjudge the importance of a book’s title. Although you certainly cannot hope to glean a book’s entire meaning from its title, you can expect to learn something about the author’s intentions.
Taken together, Donegan’s publishing date and title give us some insight into her historical perspective. Anything published in the 1970s with the words “medicine” and “misogyny” in the title tells us that this book was born in the mind of a scholar greatly impacted by feminism and the women’s health movement of the 1970s. This is incredibly important to keep in mind while reading Donegan’s book. Words like “sexist” and “misogyny’ appear throughout her writing as she tells the story of the rise of man-midwifery and obstetrics. Like any good scholar, Donegan lays out her bias in her introduction. She writes, “[this book]…is neither a history of obstetrics in the technical sense nor a history of the feminist movement, although it contains elements of both. Primarily, it is an examination of the development of male-dominated obstetrics against the background of middle-class concepts of morality, reform movements, and emerging feminism.” Donegan also explicitly engages with feminist perspectives on the midwife that view her “primarily as the victim of male bias and sexist aggression.” (Donegan, 4)
To many readers of history today, this polemical style can seem shocking, but it is important to keep in mind that Donegan and many of her contemporaries were responding to a long tradition in historical scholarship that glorified the victory of the triumphant physician over superstition, disease, and ignorance. There is much value to be taken from Donegan’s work, but good scholars learn to find the limitations inherent in any argument. In this case, Donegan’s main historical argument is that the early movements of the 18th and 19th century of traditionalists and midwifery-advocates against man-midwifery led into the eventual feminist struggles over women’s entry into the medical profession. In making this argument, Donegan’s primary effort seems to be the creation of an historical lineage for the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This kind of revisionist history was intended to correct the imbalance in historical coverage of “great, white men” and was imbued with the belief that uncovering the absent histories of under-represented groups like women, the working-class, and African Americans would also help correct the imbalance in power and opportunity that spurred the civil rights, women’s rights, and social justice movements in the 20th century. It is with this contribution in mind, then, that we should proceed with our historical critique of Donegan’s historical work.
While Donegan undoubtedly writes from a feminist perspective, her outlook is somewhat puzzling when paired with her focus on man-midwifery. Donegan actually does very little to expand our understanding of women’s experiences with midwifery or with childbirth. This discrepancy between her perspective and her narrative likely stems from her inability to locate the kinds of sources she needs to tell such a story. This problem may in fact be the most important methodological lesson that we can learn from Donegan: A good historian must maintain a healthy degree of reflexivity in their work. In other words, it appears that Donegan set out to write her history with an agenda and pre-formed narrative which informed her use of primary sources. She uses primary source materials like physicians’ letters and midwifery manuals to fill in the outline of a pre-conceived story, rather than building her history around the sources she has. The end result is a dated historical account, made slightly less relevant to readers today by its blatant agenda, but no less important for our understanding of the historiography or the place of women in history.
In the end, it is not Donegan’s feminist perspective that ultimately damages her argument, but it is the combination of this perspective with sources that speak almost exclusively to a gendered-masculine narrative that prevents her from truly giving voice to the experiences of women in the past. This example should help us to realize the importance of our contemporary beliefs on our interpretations of the past and will hopefully challenge you to think more critically about your own biases as you consider the history of medicine.