For the woman who chose to express her feminine drives outside of the home, these occupations were presented as simple extensions of women’s “natural” domestic role. The age of witch-hunting spanned more than four centuries (from the 14th to the 17th century) in its sweep from Germany to England.

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich and Witches, Midwives, and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich and

And the stakes are even higher today, when total control of medicine means potential power to determine who will live and will die, who is fertile and who is sterile, who is “mad” and who sane. Undoubtedly, over the centuries of witch hunting, the charge of “witchcraft” came to cover a multitude of sins ranging from political subversion and religious heresy to lewdness and blasphemy. For instance, a study of infant mortality rates in Washington showed an increase in infant mortality in the years immediately following the passage of the law forbidding midwifery.For eight long centuries, from the fifth to the thirteenth, the other-worldly, anti-medical stance of the Church had stood in the way of the development of medicine as a respectable profession.

Witches, midwives, and nurses: A history of women healers

When a group of English nurses proposed that nursing model itself after the medical profession, with exams and licensing, Nightingale responded that “.

With tenfold more plausibility and reason we say it is the appropriate sphere for woman, and hers alone. There were respectable gynecological theories of the injurious effects of intellectual activity on the female reproductive organs. Woman is the mother of the race,” gushed Boston feminist Julia Ward Howe, “the guardian of its helpless infancy, its earliest teacher, its most zealous champion. White Caps, The Story of Nursing) If women were instinctive nurses, they were not, in the Nightingale view, instinctive doctors. There is probably no industrialized country with a lower percentage of women doctors than the US today: England has 24 percent; Russia has 75 percent; the US has only seven percent.