Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery

THREE. Grannies, Midwives, and Colonial Encounters

67 c h a p t e r t h r e e Grannies, Midwives, and Colonial Encounters commentators in postslavery societies tended to represent midwives as a cross between Dickensian, gin-swilling slatterns and savage , uncivilized black women. In the postslavery British Caribbean, these old- and new-world tropes found form in the image of the “granny” midwife , whom Violet Nurse, an English matron, described as exercising a “sinister influence in advising the mothers in the use of bush medicines.”1 In the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Caribbean, “bush medicine” referred to a popular medical tradition that was often associated with obeah. In describing the grannies as practitioners of bush medicine , Nurse was adding a Caribbean twist to the timeworn characterization of traditional midwives as ignorant and superstitious women whose lack of skill and medical knowledge was seen as sentencing newborns and their mothers to death. Formally trained medical workers such as Nurse blamed traditional midwives, most of whom were of African or South Asian descent, for infant deaths and implicitly held them responsible for the population decline that worried colonial officials. They were also seen as uncivilized and potentially dangerous figures who may even have used such “devilish” practices as obeah. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jamaica, Guyana, and Barbados, officials saw replacing the grannies with formally trained and certified midwives as key to solving the population problem discussed in the last chapter. Their efforts to do so highlighted some of the race and class tensions in these societies. White, British-born women like Nurse and Caribbean-based physicians from various ethnic and racial backgrounds defended professional boundaries designed to ensure that only formally trained midwives from “respectable” backgrounds could minister to new mothers and instruct them in modern methods of child colonial encounters 68 rearing. But the poor, mostly nonwhite women who were the targets of the various infant and maternal welfare initiatives that emerged in the early twentieth century also played an important role in the development of Caribbean midwife training. They used the trained midwives and the maternity hospitals established in this period, sometimes too enthusiastically , in the opinion of the colonial officials who condemned them for taking advantage of these facilities. But these women also continued to rely on granny midwives. Their reasons varied, but in doing so they ensured that the grannies did not vanish from the Caribbean landscape, as much as physicians and matrons like Nurse hoped they would. Their presence and the everyday realities of life in these islands forced officials and physicians to make room for them in the regulated world of colonial midwifery. This reflected a pragmatic assessment that the goals of ensuring safe childbirths and disseminating modern child-rearing information could best be achieved if the grannies were subjected to some official oversight. But this policy also indicated that in making their own decisions about childbirth, constrained as these were by a range of economic and cultural imperatives, Caribbean women helped shape the options that were available to them. “Filthy and Ignorant” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, traditional midwives were widely condemned. One Briton living in Guyana in the 1880s described them as drunken and “innate[ly] savage” and either so “sottish[ly] indifferen[t] to the feelings of other people” or so “maddened” with drink that they “committed acts of brutality.”2 Although hyperbolic, these comments highlight common discursive patterns in the representation of black midwives in slave and postslave societies. In her work on the relationship between physicians and African midwives in the Cape Colony, Harriet Deacon has argued that a “neat combination of the European image of the ‘untrained’ midwife as a dirty, ignorant, drunk and gossipy old woman” intersected with racist colonial views of black women.3 Scholars have argued that such representations indicate the professional tensions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that accompanied the gradual entrance of male physicians into the previously femaledominated world of childbirth.4 But these images also resonate with cultural conflicts seen in many parts of the world in this period, something that in the colonial context was tied to the self-proclaimed civilizing colonial encounters 69 mission of imperial authorities.5 Untangling the discourses of race, gender , and class that underlay images of traditional midwives is especially challenging in postslavery societies. In the United States, the following quotations from two early twentieth-century physicians demonstrate the waysinwhichtheycouldoverlap...