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The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times by Jennifer Worth

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Late-life memoir recalling the author's youth as a midwife in London's East End in the 1950's.

Picked up for the from-the-trenches view of birth (not that much has changed in 60 years when what you're talking about is midwife-assisted, largely unmedicated delivery). Kept for the other 70%, which turned out to be a rich, compelling, complicated, sometimes uncomfortable personal/social history. And for Worth herself, who was smart, and driven, and talented, occasionally racist, and often struggling to find compassion. This is a memoir of someone who was powerfully compelled into exhausting, difficult work that challenged her social comfort zones for reasons she never fully understood, and that resonated with me. As did her explicit recounting of her repeated struggle to see the person under the most abject degradations of poverty. The book is not so well-observed when it comes to ethnocentrism and, in a few startling instances, gendered violence, but there is something about the strength of Worth's writing that makes it all go down as a capsule, her strength and her charm and her painful blind spots.

I want to watch the TV show now.




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