witches midwives and nurses a history of female healers

The power to heal, as demonstrated by female lay-healers was inherently a challenge to the will of God who had made the patient sick in the first place. On the other-hand, male healers of higher-class status who operated within Church-sanctioned methods, where doing the work of God. The authors demonstrate how the base misogyny of the Church was used to support the argument that female peasant healers, operating without Church approval, got their healing powers from consorting with the Devil. First and foremost, through systematic witch hunts which targeted them, and second through the creation of a male medical profession which was supported by the ruling classes. In the first main section of the book, Ehrenreich and English examine how women healers in Europe were suppressed in the early Modern era. The authors argue that this transition was the result of an active takeover by male professionals which sought to suppress female healers in a political, gendered, and classist struggle. The original introduction to WMN asserts that women have historically always been healers and asks how they, as a gender, arrived at their current position of subservience in the healthcare industry from a historical position of leadership. Despite the necessary corrections they make to their original text based on this more recent scholarship, the authors maintain the contemporary relevance of their research as the American healthcare system is still profit-driven. The introduction also explains the lack of scholarship which was available to the authors in the 1970s as well as the contribution their treatise made to the development of feminist scholarship as a legitimate academic field. It explains the political and social context which drove Ehrenreich and English to pen the original manuscript and presents their hypothesis that women have been systematically disempowered when it comes to both their traditional roles as healers and their understanding of their own bodies. This introduction contextualizes the original manuscript, written in the 1970s, and updates some of the authors’ initial assertions based on more recent scholarship.

The 2010 edition of Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (WMN) opens with a new introduction by the authors.

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. The following version of the book was used to create this study guide: Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deidre English.

Witches midwives and nurses a history of female healers