We have come a long way since works by scholars such as Jean Donnison, Judy Barrett Litoff, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English pioneered critical studies of the history of modern midwifery in the 1970s. Donnison and Litoff changed the course of the scholarship by moving away from the mere complication of events related to midwives, and instead by focusing on politics that shaped the health care profession. Since then, the scholarship has grown dramatically to the extent that scholars today take it for granted that the development of midwifery in the industrial Western world as a female non-interventionist health care profession in charge of ‘normal’ childbirth was a product of both gender work and modernity, the elements that contributed to the establishment of obstetrics–gynaecology as a medico-scientific field dominated by male physicians and defined by intervention into ‘abnormal’ births.

Still, forty years on, the perspective regarding midwives as belonging outside modernity dominates the scholarship, suggests Lynne Fallwell in her monograph under review here. Fallwell claims that the field's adherence to the focus has then fostered studies that investigate the ‘effect of dichotomies within modern Western birth practices: nature versus industrialization; tradition versus progress; and ultimately women versus men’ (p. 2, emphasis added). The implication here is that the focus stressing the incongruence between midwifery and modernity privileges other binary categories characterizing modern midwifery in the Western world, and this needs to be revised.

The above is the basis of Fallwell's thoroughly researched monograph on the history of the midwifery profession in Germany. The concise title, Modern German Midwifery, 1885–1960, effectively captures the essence of the book. The explicit emphasis on ‘modern’ is deliberate. Against the aforementioned historiographical backdrop, Fallwell argues that ‘midwives actually took an active role in the transition from traditional practice to modern institutionalized health care by organizing and working to achieve other markets of professionalization’ (p. 2). Fallwell attempts to corroborate this point by analysing the professional development of midwifery in Germany, with a focus on the period between 1885 and 1960.

In order to drive the argument, the book is organized in roughly chronological order, facilitating our understanding of the process by which German midwives ‘weathered the transition from traditional practitioner to institutional professional without becoming subordinate to physicians, or subsumed within the practice of nursing’ (p. 12). Chapter 1 covers the long period until the late nineteenth century, giving an overview of the three phases of the development of German midwifery based on Gernot Böhme's periodization (p. 19). According to Fallwell, the period ended with a crisis for midwives as an occupation group, lacking the kind of sociopolitical structure that instead consolidated the status of physicians. The remainder of the book covers the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the period attributed by Böhme as the fourth phase, ‘midwifery as a modern profession’ (p. 19). Within the structure, the chapters are divided into two subcategories: the process of professionalization itself and various aspects of midwifery education.

Chapter 2, covering the period between 1885 and the 1920s, contrasts the story of crisis presented in Chapter 1 and discusses the active role that midwives played in carving out occupational authority in institutionalized medicine. It first describes how the formidable Berlin-based midwife Olga Gebauer launched the Society of Berlin Midwives (Verein Berliner Hebammen) and the society's Berliner Hebammen-Zeitung (Berlin Midwifery Journal), and then examines how Gebauer's effort had an implication for midwifery nationwide when the society became a national Organization of German Midwives (Vereinigung Deutscher Hebammen, VDH) by 1890 and its journal was taken over in 1886 by the medical publishing house Elwin Staude-Verlag. Chapter 3 is about midwifery under the Nazi regime. It depicts how the state took interest in the midwives – alongside doctors – as ‘guardians of the nation’ (p. 64) under the aegis of the cult of Aryan race and health that prevailed in Nazi Germany. It also studies how, in response to the political climate, midwives, led by charismatic Nanna Conti, consolidated their professional status.

Chapter 4 is a thick description of recruitment criteria in midwifery education during the entire period of the fourth phase. The chapter argues that the ‘definition of what constituted a good student was not constant’ but, despite this, the lower socio-economic background from which students came remained ‘the greatest constant’ (p. 118). Chapter 5 then compares the training curricula in the Third Reich, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. The chapter clarifies the common understanding prevalent in the three distinctive political contexts that midwives' duties should extend beyond merely delivering babies, and that midwives should fulfil their expected roles within a wider society. Finally, Chapter 6 is a careful examination of midwifery textbooks. It studies the contents of textbooks authored by the physicians – what was included/excluded and how a certain content was depicted – and points out physicians' agenda and wider sociopolitical contexts that participated in the construction of the textbooks.

With the book's structure and the thorough archival research that pillars it, we learn efficiently how midwives professionalized and what that professionalization meant for midwifery in Germany between 1885 and 1960. Midwives were neither left out of the process of modernity nor pushed into the domain of anti-modern natural childbirth as a result of modernization; they were part and parcel of the whole process. Midwives were able to professionalize not by antagonizing themselves against their male competitors, but by integrating themselves into the sociopolitical structure facilitating the professionalization of obstetric care. The book carefully constructs the argument with detailed description of the cases that many have hitherto tended to overlook.

What is more, the book directly engages with the issues of texts as historical artefacts. Like many social and cultural historians studying actors who left behind few written records, historians of midwifery tend to get confronted with the problem of the partial nature of archival materials one way or another during the course of our research. What is particularly insightful about this book is that it invites us to think of the existing records. The author not only draws attention to power politics inscribed in the process by which the written record linked to midwifery was produced, but also discusses how this process itself ultimately served to disempower midwives as a profession, despite midwives' active participation in professionalizing themselves. The author skilfully maps out the intricate links between the politics of text production and the politics of making midwifery a profession. This is a book that will have a lasting impact on the ever-growing scholarship of the history of midwives and midwifery. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and I think you will too.