The “Midwife Menace” and How We Forget: Inter-Generational Gaps in Southern Appalachian Women Healers

Abstract

In the twentieth century, the medical profession engineered campaigns to eliminate lay midwifery. This discretionary purging of local healers erased the practice and legacy of Southern Appalachia’s granny women. Through tracing their disappearance we can uncover how ignorance is produced and deployed for social gains. And in doing so, better understand the consequences of agnotology across medicine and, more broadly, Appalachian women\u27s social power. Utilizing oral histories, periodicals, and the American College of Nurse-Midwife collection, this study unpacks how midwifery shifted from the sphere of “menace” to one of critical importance in modern neonatal care. It also explores what happens when a healing figure is evacuated from a region’s memory. In particular, voices from the “Uses of Traditional Medicine and the Health Care System Among Farm Families Oral History Project” at the Louie B. Nunn Center begged the question, how did Southern Appalachian women become so unfamiliar with their bodies? Three spheres of scholarship help frame an analysis for the cultural erasure of Southern Appalachia\u27s granny women. First, historians Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger provide a model for grappling with ignorance and causality in their book Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Second, Anthony Cavender offers an entry point into the practices of regional healers in his book Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia. Finally, discoveries illustrated in Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes illuminate who granny women might have been before they were expunged from the landscape and memories of Southern Appalachia