Witches, Midwives, and Nurses Summary
Barbara Ehrenreich

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses Overview

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers is a second-wave feminist treatise on the role of women in healthcare throughout history. In the text, authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English focus on two distinct periods. First, they discuss the connection between female lay healers and midwives and early modern era witch hunts in Europe. Second, they focus on how the professionalization of the medical industry in United States in the nineteenth century consciously and deliberately excluded women from leadership and decision-making roles in healthcare. With a new introduction for this 2010 publication, the authors also address and correct some of their initial research based on scholarship which has emerged since the book's original publication in the 1970s. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses explores themes of sexism in medicine, the importance of feminist scholarship, the lens of second wave feminism, the difference between official and traditional knowledge, and the connection between female healers and witches.