Women Workers in Seven Professions: A Survey of Their Economic Conditions and Prospects
General
Women Workers in Seven Professions: A Survey of Their Economic Conditions and Prospects
Vocational guidance; Women -- Employment -- Great Britain
The training for the examination of the Central Midwives' Board is
based on the method pursued in medical education in English-speaking
countries, viz., there is not one uniform course, but each of the
training schools attached to hospitals follows out its own plan of
training, each hospital having been approved by the Central Midwives'
Board as giving an adequate training for its examination. There are
now seven maternity hospitals in London, where women students may
train in midwifery. Of these, only one--the Clapham Maternity Hospital
(with its training school founded by Mrs Meredith in 1885)--is, and
always has been, entirely officered by women. Here the course advised
is six months, viz., three months in the hospital (Monthly Nursing),
and three months in the hospital and district doing Midwifery proper.
During this time over 200 cases may be seen, and nearly 100 cases
attended personally. The cost of this training is £35 to £40, which
includes board and residence for twenty-six weeks. Students previously
trained elsewhere may take one months' extra training at a cost of
ten guineas. Private doctors and midwives may also take pupils if
recognised as teachers by the Board.
Midwifery training is now required not only by those who are going
to act as midwives, but also by most missionaries, all fully trained
nurses (for matrons' posts or colonial posts) and by health visitors
and inspectors before obtaining appointments.
But it should be borne in mind, especially in considering the present
condition and future prospects of Midwifery as a profession, that even
now a large though ever-decreasing proportion of registered midwives
are still ignorant women who have never passed the Central Midwives'
Board or any other examination, and have had no teaching from any
one more experienced or better informed than themselves. For when
the Midwives' Act came into force in 1903, it was necessary to move
slowly, and so a clause was inserted, permitting women who had been
in _bonâ-fide_ practice for more than one year before 1902 to continue
their work under inspection and supervision (with many attempts at
teaching them by means of simple lectures and demonstrations). This
plan, or some similar one, was necessary, not only in the interests
of the midwives themselves, a set of decent and kindly, if ignorant
women, who would have been ruined by too sudden a change, but also
because a large number of mothers in England would have been left with
no one to help them in their time of need unless they were prepared
to run the risk of breaking the law. This, until recently, respectable
English women disliked to do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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