Within a small family collection, the Michaelson Family Collection (P-808), is a fascinating trove of records related to a Jewish midwife’s work at the end of the 19th century into the early 20th century. Anna Shair Michaelson carefully recorded the births of more than 800 infants that she delivered on the Lower East Side of New York City. These birth certificates include the child’s name, sex, race or color, father’s name, mother’s name and maiden name, birth date, address where birth took place, mother’s place of birth, mother’s age, father’s place of birth, father’s age and occupation. The records also list the number of previous children born to the mother and the total number still living. There is also a still birth certificate dated 1899 for the Taurez family, showing the reality of maternal care at the turn of the century.
Additionally, there are two ledgers, starting with the beginning of Michaelson’s midwife career in the U.S. (on December 8, 1893). These ledgers include addresses of mothers with birth dates and sex of the child, as well as notes on treatments for various conditions, prescriptions, druggists, and doctors. Some of her notes are in Yiddish.
Anna Shair Michaelson was born in 1862 near Odessa, Ukraine in Alexandrvosk. At age 16 she married Bernard (Boris) Michaelson who was approximately fifteen years her senior. The couple immigrated to New York with their five children and Anna’s mother Nachama (Naomi?) Shair in 1891. Soon after they arrived, they separated and by 1906 Bernard was living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Out of the couple’s eight children, six survived into adulthood: Louis/Lewis became a Rabbi, Jacob an engineer, and Max a dentist. Her daughters worked until their marriage: Ida as a nurse, Sarah as a social worker, and Rebecca as a kindergarten teacher.
Records such as these are invaluable clues about the realities of female life during this period. We see not only a record of a woman’s work, but also a glimpse into women’s healthcare, particularly within a lower income immigrant community. This period also represents an inflection point in maternal healthcare, as Barbara Ehrenreich explains:
“In 1900, 50 percent of the babies born were still being delivered by midwives. Middle- and upper-class women had long since accepted the medical idea of childbirth as a pathological event requiring the intervention and supervision of a (preferably regular) physician. It was the “lower” half of society which clung to the midwife and her services: the rural poor and the immigrant working class in the cities. What made the midwives into a “problem” was then not so
much the matter of direct competition; the regular doctors were not interested in taking the midwife’s place in a Mississippi sharecropper’s shack or a sixth-story walk-up apartment in one of New York’s slums. (Although one exceptionally venal physician went to the trouble of calculating all the fees “lost” to doctors on account of midwifery): It only makes sense to speak of “competition” between people in the same line of business; and this was not the case with the midwives and the doctors…
The work of a midwife cannot be contained in a phrase like “practicing medicine.” The early-twentieth-century midwife was an integral part of her community and culture. She spoke the mother’s language, which might be Italian, Yiddish, Polish, Russian. She was familiar not only with obstetrical techniques, but with the prayers and herbs that sometimes helped. She knew the correct ritual for disposing of the afterbirth, greeting the newborn, or, if necessary, laying to rest the dead. She was prepared to live with the family from the onset of labor until the mother was fully recovered… But the problem, from the point of view of medical leaders, was that the midwife was in the way of the development of modern institutional medicine.”
Midwives were cast by the medical establishment as dirty, unhygienic, and, ultimately, un-American: “She was a foreign “micrococcus” brought over, as was supposedly the case with other germs, in the holds of ships bearing immigrant workers. The elimination of the midwife was presented as a necessary part of the general campaign to uplift and Americanize the immigrants—a mere sanitary measure, beyond debate.”1
Anna Michaelson represents the meeting of tradition and science, the Old World and the New, the immigrant and her new home. As these immigrant women welcomed their American-born children into the world, they did so with a midwife who had one foot in each of these worlds, who was able to translate the language and customs of their chosen country while maintaining a link to their homeland and religion.
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- Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. For her own good: Two centuries of the experts’ advice to women. New York: Anchor Books, 1978. ↩︎
