Now I am going to dip into the past and read the stories of two "turn of the century" midwives who both kept diaries documenting their midwifery practices. The first, Catharina Schrader practiced at the turn of 18th century in the Netherlands, and second, Martha Ballard who practiced in New England at the turn of the 19th century. Both woman practiced at moments in history in which men in the form of man-midwives and later as gynecologists and obstetricians where steadily infiltrating and usurping a profession that since time immemorial had been an almost exclusively the domain of women.
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