Sairey Gamps, Feminine Nurses and Greedy Monopolists: Discourses of Gender and Professional Identity in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, 1886–1902

Abstract

The British debate over midwife registration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was highly gendered. Focusing on the period between the 1886 Medical Act and the 1902 Midwives Act, this article uses the content from the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, the two main general medical publications of the time, to explore the complex ways that gender works through other categories such as class and race to create professional identity. Specifically this article demonstrates how man-midwives used gendered language to help create identities for themselves, female midwives, and other rivals in order to legitimize their own professional identity and practice and to delegitimize the professional identities of their competition.