The Midwife's Tale

by Billie Hunter

  In comparing the testimonies of midwives and mothers, it became obvious that although we had a strong impression of the midwives as workers, we had little sense of their personal lives. Esther S. was a notable exception and shared intimate experiences, such as the birth of her stillborn baby (see Chapter 11). In contrast to the midwives, mothers talked vividly about their feelings and personal experiences. This may reflect the fact that midwives often had to suppress their feelings in order to function as overworked practitioners who needed to live up to an accepted image of professionalism.

  The next few chapters explore in detail various aspects of childbearing on women’s lives and their effects on midwifery practice.

  4

  Women’s Knowledge about ‘the Facts of Life’

  ‘Well, we were all green. I was as green as that bloody chair when I got married …’

  Talking with older women about their sex lives triggered many memories. Feelings of sadness and resentment about lack of knowledge were often expressed with a mixture of bitterness and a lively sense of humour. Women described situations where they knew very little about sex or how their bodies worked. They felt that this was typical of women who grew up in the first half of the twentieth century, regardless of class background or general education. In those days, in fact up until the 1960s, there was, in effect, little or no sex education in schools and no open discussion of sexual matters in magazines or other media. Any allusions to sex in popular women’s literature were heavily veiled in euphemisms. In Agony Columns, Terry Jordan points out that it was not until the 1930s that there was any mention of sex and even then the advice was safely wrapped in obscure language.1 She quotes the ‘Agony Aunt’ writing in Woman’s Life, 5 April 1930:

  ‘In confidence.

  Dear Readers and Friends,

  There is no more difficult problem for a girl to settle, in her friendships with men, than this one, about which so many write to me. How much love-making should a girl permit? For I do feel very strongly that it is always up to the girl to set the standard. Nearly all men, even the nicest ones, will become too venturesome if they are allowed. It’s just masculine nature – man is the hunter and must always take the lead. It is not a bit of good blaming them for it. A girl should concentrate rather on making any real liberties impossible.

  STAND FIRM!

  For she can. The matter is always in her hands, if she will only realise it and be firm. And the best way of being firm is never to allow the first little step, which seems so harmless and easy.

  Of course, I am not suggesting that a girl should be a prude. When a man loves a maid it is natural that they should want to kiss and be alone together quite often. There are little ways of making love of which no sensible person disapproves – and there are other little ways which no girl who values her self-respect and her chances of marriage will ever allow.

  I need not specify what these undesirable ways are. Every girl who is genuinely anxious to do the right thing and to come to her husband perfectly fresh and pure will recognise them, even if she has never met them before. However the man may coax or justify them, a little warning voice within her will cry ‘Beware!’

  MORE WILL BE ASKED.

  The thing itself may seem quite pleasant and harmless. Taken alone, it is often both these things. But do realise that the man, whatever he may say or believe, won’t be willing to stop there. One point gained, and in a week he is pleading for another. Always the hunter desires a further conquest. Readers often write and ask me, ‘What does such and such form of love-making mean?’ My dears, whatever it is beyond kissing, it means only one thing. It is just a step nearer the end nature had in mind when she made men and women. And that is why all such endearments should be kept until after marriage.

  If a man cannot wait until then, he is not likely to make the girl happy after the wedding. There is another point. The girl who finds herself growing miserable and quarrelsome with her boy – or he with her – is often really the victim of this better-avoided kind of love-making. During the courtship stage, it excites without satisfying and is responsible for many a nervous breakdown and many a broken engagement.

  So heed that little ‘Beware!’ when it rings in your mind.

  Your sincere friend

  Margaret’2

  More than three decades later in the 1960s, the advice and ethics expressed by this agony aunt were still forming the basis of the sex education received by the authors of this book. However, in the 1930s, the possibility of sex education for children was just beginning to be mooted in certain quarters. For instance, in The Modern Woman’s Home Doctor, a handbook that may have found its way into some of the better-off homes of the 1930s, there is a chapter entitled, ‘What to Teach the Children about Sex’.3 However, it focuses on plants, insects and mammals, with only a short and inexplicit section on ‘How You Began’ that would certainly have left most children none the wiser.

  Advice about sex had been available – albeit for a privileged minority – since 1918 when Marie Stopes first published Married Love.4 Originally a doctor of botany, Marie Stopes was motivated by five years of unconsummated marriage to study every book on sex in the British Museum – involving texts in English, French and German. As a result of her research, Marie Stopes wrote a book that contained frank discussions of foreplay, clitoral stimulation and female orgasm. Stopes advocated an approach to sexual intercourse that took into consideration a woman’s sexual response.

  ‘The supreme law for husbands is: remember that each act of union must be tenderly wooed for and that no union should ever take place unless the woman also desires it and is made physically ready for it.’5

  Married Love was a best seller but it certainly was not in general circulation and very few women would have had access to it. Even if they had managed to get hold of a copy, they may well have found its flowery language incompatible with the everyday reality of their lives:

  ‘Welling up in her are the wonderful tides, scented and enriched by the myriad experience of the human race from its ancient days of leisure and flower-wreathed love-making.’6

  It was not simply lack of information that affected women. Misinformation was often employed, perhaps in an attempt to protect young people from reality. Sex was a taboo subject, so parents were doubly hampered in explaining the facts – not only by their own lack of knowledge and vocabulary but also by a deeply conditioned embarrassment. Ruby C., a working-class woman from Northern Ireland, remembers:

  ‘Like the way they told me that when you married you had to have a man – only once – and then the Lord sent you all these kids, as many as you want, [laughs] That’s what I thought!’

  Like Ruby C., many women recalled their lack of knowledge with humour, even though this may not have been how they experienced it at the time. Other women, though, remembered with sadness, especially when it came to talking about their own lack of fulfillment in sexual relationships. Vera W. was one of these:

  ‘There wasn’t the openness in those days. In fact, I often wish I could have my time over again. I think I should’ve understood it all better, sex that is. Even with my husband, whom I loved dearly, and who loved me, and who was gentleness and kindness itself, we knew very little. Before we were married I was able to talk to him and ask things and he taught me all I knew about it. He was kind and gentle, you know, and I found I could talk to him, but even then, I think we were babes in arms, both of us really. When I compare, when I think of what they know today, I think, “Oh, fancy, if only we had known all this then, what a much happier life – married life – we could have had”. Isn’t it a shame?’

  The prevailing view of sexuality in the first half of this century was that women did not have a sexual drive and that sex was for procreation and male pleasure only.7 Throughout society, customs designed to preserve the modesty of women and keep predatory men at bay were observed. Mrs G., a working-class handywoman, describes one such custom prevalent at the beginning of the century:

&nbs
p; ‘You went up the street in long skirts and if you had, you know, your skirt above your ankle, the chap would look at you and you’d drop your skirt. We had clips on our skirts, you see, to hold them up, but if we saw a man, we’d unclip them and let them drop, [giggles] Don’t s’pose it made any difference!’

  It was to take several decades before Marie Stopes’s revelations about women’s sexual response were considered seriously by a wider audience – let alone become commonly accepted. It must be presumed that lack of knowledge about women’s sexuality meant that, on the whole, neither women nor men would have had any expectations of women’s potential for sexual pleasure. Several women, such as Vera W., commented that they thought that women were not as interested in sex then as they are now:

  ‘Does this sound funny, or was it just the thing in my day. I’ve often wondered. I never talk about these things to people. We never had sex before marriage, never went to bed or anything like that. In five years, we never. And yet, we were quite in love with each other I’m sure. So I kept my boyfriends although I never had any sexual overtones with any of them really. Was it odd?’

  In a study of working-class women in north-west England from 1890–1940, Elizabeth Roberts suggests that the sexual aspects of marriage did not seem to be as important to couples in those days as it grew to be in the latter part of the twentieth century.8 Sex was regarded as necessary for the procreation of children or as something men did for their own pleasure. Women rarely, if ever, hinted at getting any pleasure themselves from sex. Most women who we talked to had not expected to feel much sexual pleasure. Ruby C., for example, said:

  ‘I wasn’t interested in sex, like as such, you know. People then weren’t because you knew nothing about it. It didn’t bother you like.’

  It may be that modesty and a lifetime of conditioning and denial inhibited most of the women we interviewed from admitting to any expectations of sexual pleasure. Many gatherers of oral testimony have noted that even interviewees who are very open only say what they want you to know about them.

  Some women did express feelings of frustration and sadness about their sexuality. Edie M. wistfully described the emptiness of her sexual life. Sex was a means of fulfilling her husband’s physical needs rather than an expression of affection and closeness between them:

  ‘When I had those four children, perhaps it only happened once, perhaps twice. So it wasn’t lots of sexy nights! Never knew what love was. I’d never had no fuss made of me. Automatically happened. You went to bed and, perhaps this sort of suddenly happened and finished and away you go to sleep. No love, no care.’

  Lou N., a working-class woman from London, was clearly distressed not only by her lack of sexual satisfaction but also by the almost total absence of any sexual relationship at all:

  ‘He worked behind the bar. Now, if he had any temptation it was behind the bar, wasn’t it? But no, he shut up shop when I was 28. Meself, I always believed that brooding on that brought on these strokes that I’ve had. I wouldn’t have the cheek to say that to him, but I believe that. Because I was a person that had been adopted as a kid and I was living with first one person, then another, never had no settled home, I really wanted someone to make a fuss of me and all the rest of it. No, we got the kids, but, well, I had to start teasing him towards the end. I said, “You don’t only use it for one thing, you know!” The point is this: there was no affection, you know, I wasn’t allowed to show it to him. But he stopped completely when I was 28. It was a terrible strain on me and I had my strokes when I was 48. And I always believed that that was the cause of it. But I think really, because we didn’t know anything about sex, we were affright. That was the tension at the back of it with him and me.’

  Bearing in mind the social and cultural constraints and lack of knowledge already discussed, it is hard to assess how much frank discussion, if any, went on in private between women, or between women and men. Our impression is that there was very little. Lou N. summed up the situation thus:

  ‘Well, we were all green. I was as green as that bloody chair when I got married. I was still as green when my husband died, and we’d been married 49 years! Me and Charlie, we were both green.’

  Hannah H. came from a middle-class background, very different from that of Lou N., but she echoed similar thoughts on the general lack of knowledge:

  ‘I was very innocent, I was, really. There were lots of things we never really understood. I never knew what a period was until it happened to me. Used to hear girls whispering together and shutting up when you got near, but I – I was never – never inquisitive enough. So I never knew a lot of things, really. I still don’t either!’

  As sex was not discussed at home, children learnt about the ‘facts of life’ in the playground. Like Hannah H., many girls started menstruating knowing nothing about the process. Lou N. recalls:

  ‘When I first started me periods when I was 14, I came home from school and I told the old lady what happened. “Oh,” she said, “That’s nice! But you mustn’t play with boys.” And I thought it meant that you couldn’t go out and play in the street with ‘em. She didn’t tell me no more and that’s as much as I knew.’

  Knowledge about pregnancy and birth

  The fear of pregnancy may well have dampened women’s sexual appetites, particularly those who had already given birth. However, many women we interviewed said that their first pregnancy and childbirth came as a total shock. It was apparent that lack of knowledge made the whole experience of birth a nightmare. Edie M. remembered with anguish her first labour:

  ‘I remember at the very last minute I suddenly realised where it was coming from. It shook me. I was so shocked. No, I didn’t know before. I don’t know what I thought. But suddenly, knowing that this child would have to come out of there. I knew the size of a … Oh, I was so shocked and frightened. I said, “Please, please, can you stop it coming out? I don’t mind what pain I have. I’ll suffer any pain but please can you stop it coming out?” That first one, I’d have given even me life to stop that child coming! I never dreamt it would have come from there. The very idea of your body opening like that! It’s impossible! You can understand people that don’t want them.’

  Like Edie, many women described the horror of ‘not knowing where the baby was going to come out’. Mrs G., who worked as a handywoman in South-east London, confirmed that this lack of knowledge was common:

  ‘They didn’t know where it was going to come out. But they knew where it went in, didn’t they? Well, it’s got to come out the same place. But they’re so dense some of them. I think some of them think it comes out in a bladder, like a balloon, or through the belly button. They think their belly opens. I said, “It won’t come out through there.” And they soon found out that it wouldn’t!

  ‘Well, yes, I s’pose it was frightening for the first one. You can understand it really. I used to say, “Don’t be frightened. If you’re frightened, don’t think that you’re going to split in half, ‘cause you won’t.”’

  With virtually no antenatal classes and few books with relevant factual information for prospective parents, it is not surprising that many women had no idea how the baby was growing inside them or how it would be born. Pregnancy was not seen as something to be proud of. In fact it was often hidden, as Molly B. explains:

  ‘Up there [South Shields] you didn’t tell anyone you were pregnant till you were actually having it. You didn’t discuss whether you were pregnant or not. That was a terrible thing! Even for married women it was considered shameful. After all, it showed what you’d been doing, didn’t it! [laughs] They used to say, “She’s gone to bed” and you knew she was in labour. They never said, “She’s having a baby”.’

  While we found that all women seemed to share the same lack of knowledge, their approaches to obtaining information differed. Working-class women tended to go to their friends and sisters for facts and advice, whereas middle-class women like Vera W. chose to consult the few books that were available:


  ‘I didn’t know anything at all except I bought a book. And my doctor said, “Throw that on the fire!” But I didn’t because I was so ignorant, you see.’

  The midwives were very aware of how little most women knew and, like Edie B., were mostly sympathetic:

  ‘There were no antenatal classes in my day. They didn’t know anything apart from what their mothers told them, which was practically nil. They didn’t know what to expect. They weren’t prepared for all the pain. They weren’t even told it was painful. Poor little things, they didn’t know a thing. I used to go to bed and cry … Poor girls.’

  Even some of the midwives admitted their own initial ignorance about the ‘facts of life’. Nellie H. described a situation that arose at the beginning of her nurse training where she had as little relevant or useful knowledge as the laboring woman herself:

  ‘This story will make you laugh! It was about 1924. I was on night duty and we always had to open the door at night. There were no porters or anything like that. I went to the door and there was these two ambulance men looking scared out of their wits.

  ‘And they said to me, “This girl’s ever so ill. Where shall we take her?” So I said, “Well, it depends what the matter is with her.”