However, they were also, at times, feared, persecuted and accused of something far more sinister: witchcraft.
The roots of midwifery stretch back around 40,000 years, to the Palaeolithic era, when women supported each other through childbirth, building knowledge through observation, experience and generations of shared wisdom. By the time of antiquity, Egyptian and Greco-Roman midwives were legitimate, paid professionals, until men muscled in and folded midwifery under male-run medicine. In China, midwives leaned on qi, yin-yang, and wuxing principles for millennia, passing knowledge mother-to-daughter in home settings, with no textbooks required.
Later, Colonialism added its own dark chapter: in 17th-century America, enslaved African women were forced to train and work as midwives until 19th-century male physicians pushed them out in favour of formal obstetrics.
Across Africa, traditional midwives never really left.
Māori midwifery tells its own rich story, one that’s rooted in traditional knowledge. Because birth carried such deep tapu, it didn’t happen just anywhere – women laboured in whare kōhanga – purpose-built sacred shelters set apart from everyday life, which were often burned afterward. Guiding them were kaiwhakawhānau, practitioners carrying generations of knowledge, who combined massage and herbal remedies to support both mother and whānau throughout. According to Te Ara, “mothers sang oriori to their babies – lullabies which told whakapapa, legends and tribal history”.
Perhaps the most notorious historical myth that everyone knows – the witch one – is one that is less clear than the legend suggests. Nearly 4,000 people were accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, and popular memory has long painted midwives as prime targets of the gallows and the fiery stake. When Professor Nicola Ring of Edinburgh Napier University dug into the archives in 2021, though, the real number was smaller: just 142 cases tied to healing or midwifery work, and only 19 explicitly involving midwives.
One of them was Agnes Sampson, still remembered as “one of Scotland’s best-known witches” and “a renowned midwife”. Historian David Harley pushes back even harder on the myth, arguing that midwives were rarely singled out and that a “few spectacular cases have been mistaken for a general pattern”.
From feared “witches” to trusted professionals, the story of the midwife is ultimately one of resilience – and the enduring power of women’s knowledge and wisdom.
