This paper follows the work of the woman-who-helps, a figure who must be part of many French rural histories, but who I will talk about in the context of Yvonne Verdier’s 1970 anthropological study of the town of Minot, in Burgundy. The woman-who-helps is talked about as being the person who ‘does the births’. Her work is an expression of bodily tending to bodily needs, and her place, if it can be called that, is all over town. Her history, told to Verdier and her co-researchers, is an oral history, it is made of memories of memories, passed along stories and anecdote. In the context of Silvia Federici’s ‘house of the future’, a house at the centre of collective life, the woman who helps is a radical and exemplary figure.
Hannah Arendt writes about Ancient Greek conceptions of private and public space: ‘A first meaning of the public: that which is real, that which is seen, which appears, which has publicity, that which is real to us because of this’. In the public scene, ‘only what is considered to be relevant, worthy of being seen or heard, can be tolerated, so that the irrelevant is automatically a private matter’. A way to define private and public actions would be to talk about ‘things that should be shown and things that should be hidden’.
Silvia Federici suggests that ‘if the house is the
Yvonne Verdier’s 1970 anthropological study of the French town of Minot, in Burgundy, describes a community organised by the work of, and by beliefs about, women. A crucial figure is the woman-who-helps:
The history of the woman-who-helps, told to Verdier and her co-researchers, is an oral history, it is made of memories of memories, passed along stories and anecdote; it is full of holes.
The spaces of birth in Minot’s oral history are spaces of timeliness. It is important who gets there and when. The tragic birth is one that the doctor arrives at too late. The good birth is quick. Until the 1950s the space of birth is predominantly the double bed in the home. This might be the home of the pregnant woman or the home of her mother or another family member. If travelling she will aim to get there a month before the birth. As there has been no doctor resident in the town since 1879, the question is always, will he get there in time?
The midwife will come from one of the neighbouring counties. And the rich families will book her in advance. But the woman-who-helps lives in Minot. She is always on hand and always there in time. At the turn of the century ‘childbirth was the affair of the midwife and the woman who helped. In principle, you didn’t call the doctor, and if you did it was the midwife who decided, in the case of a laborious delivery and only when she felt helpless, in fact, when there was nothing left to do, almost always too late.’ (
By the 1950s, doctors travel by motorbikes instead of horses, and you could telephone for them instead of sending the town mayor on his horse. It was still not the doctor that was needed for the average birth in the town. First you called upon the women in your family, then the woman-who-helps, the midwife, and eventually your neighbours and the father of the child. Each had a part to play and each was present at a particular moment. Can birth at this time be said to have been
My sister in law had her five children here, the doctor never arrived on time, labour lasted an hour or more.
Up until the end, for my four, I looked after the cows, it was easy, I didn’t suffer, they passed like a letter through a box. At five I was with the cows, at eight, they were here with me.
I was in the garden when I had my first pains, I said to my mother “must go”. Two hours after the kid was here.
I didn’t feel well, I made the bread first, warmed the oven, I baked, and then I went to bed. A half hour later the kid was here. (
Verdier characterizes the public character of birth in Minot as easy, without drama, and fitting into the rhythm of circumstance. Disavowals of drama continue in the younger women interviewed who emphasize the quotidian nature of the act, even if they are further away from the activities and objects of the home when it takes place.
I was calm, very calm, more calm than my husband could believe, it was hard, but I refused the anesthetic.
I gave birth in Dijon with anesthetic the first time, without the second time, I refused. Obviously it wasn’t fun, but I wanted to see.
For the first, I feared nothing, I went to give birth in Dijon, without anesthetic. But I screamed a bit more the second time, I knew what it is.
What has shifted, from the 1950s on, is the register of what is shown and what is hidden and what must be made clear. In these later births there is a new need, to clarify your use – or rejection – of pain relief. This is accompanied by something that disappears – the women who attend births note the disappearance of
At that time, they shouted! Oh they shouted! I don’t know why but women don’t shout any more.
Me, I remember having a good shout. The midwife from Beneuvre, she said: Oh, I can hear in this shout that it’s coming! I don’t worry as soon as I hear that.
Until a woman says she’s going to die, it will not come.
The old women would say you had to shout loud enough for the whole town to hear!
The woman who helps affirms that not everyone does it the same, ‘there are some who have no pain, who give birth like that, and also others who suffer for a long time. There are those who cannot shout and there are even those who sleep.’ But reflecting on the changes through her working life she says ‘No one shouts any more. It no longer happens.’ (
Of course, for those who do not take the anesthetic, the pain has not gone, but its public character has. And their relationship to that pain has shifted too. Has it become private? Intimate? Irrelevant? And can this muting be linked to the changes in the circumstances surrounding birth? Because what also shifts at this time is the presence in the room of ‘a large and above all feminine audience’. (
This is why I have said the woman-who-helps is a trailblazer of sorts, someone who can come and stay, or come and go. She is not part of the public of common knowledge, the gossip, the anecdote, the story to be passed around, and is certainly not part of the family or the marriage – she is impervious and trustworthy in this way, a little like the doctor, who is feared for his skill, but she is very much of the town, one of them. She is anachronistic because she is not paid by the state (as the doctor and the midwife are) and is in fact not paid money at all but rather in favours. She receives kindnesses, gifts of good things from the store cupboard or the market, the use of cars, and other tools. She would never accept (and would be appalled at the suggestion of) payment.
I want to talk now about her work and how that too makes holes in the definitions of hidden and shown, private and public.
She prepares the bed and once it arrives she prepares the child.
We put a mattress underneath and then above a good layer of newspaper, and then a sheet, a good proper sheet. We then took four old sheets, folded in four, wide enough to cover, and put two on top of each other, well positioned, well flattened. When the delivery was over, the first sheet was removed. The next day you do the same with the second, and you give another. It was well done.
Preparing the child is her true task, the one she does even if the doctor and the midwife are there, though when they are there they steal the first ‘gestures of separation’ (they cut and tie the cord). (
As I translate Verdier’s book from French to English, I come across a word like this thread, a resistant word. It does not seem to want to step over the line of language – I cannot quite make it work. The word that I struggle to carry across is a word that is essential to the work of the woman-who-helps, and a word that links her to her traditional ancestors. It is
This gesture, this readying, is repeated at the point of the woman-who-helps’ other service, that of doing the deaths.
For the well arranged death, the woman who helps gives herself to a mortuary household: closes the windows, closes the shutters, covers the mirror with a piece of linen – white according to some, black according to others – otherwise it would reflect eternally, the face of the dead. Today we also veil television screens, a surface that evokes the mirror, captures, carries, leads to distant worlds? Or even an indiscreet look? All these gestures attest to a concern for closure and tend to forbid passage to the outside, nothing should come out of the dead man’s room. (
The woman who helps stops the clocks, prepares the death chamber, lights candles because electric light cannot be used.
The body remains like this for three days. In the daytime, neighbours pass by, sprinkling the dead with holy water, those who wish to see him for the last time raise the handkerchief. At night, the woman who helps organises the watch. At midnight she makes coffee. (
The same woman makes a set series of gestures at birth and at death. She stands in for the family who do not know how or who are afraid. Verdier points out that in Minot, there is the same fear at both moments. ‘In front of the new born as in front of the dead, the same panic seizes them.’ Today, her interviewees say, things have changed, it is all over in a night, and strangers and neighbours do not come anymore. ‘The public of death has narrowed down in recent years to its simplest and most symbolic expression, the woman who helps.’
Verdier likens her work to that of her ancestors in trade, the washerwomen. They too make ready and prepare, they too cross from private to public places, and do what others cannot do. In Minot these women would arrive at certain points in the year, and the great wash would be the occasion where ‘the year, with the laundry, would get its annual clean’.
The woman who helps is neither public nor private, because she does not seem to respect the differences between these states or these spaces. She
Hannah Arendt,
Silvia Federici,
Yvonne Verdier,
‘I’m a strange new kind of inbetween thing aren’t I?’, Antigone in
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
Mary Douglas, ‘Woman, the measure of all things, reviewing Yvonne Verdier
The author has no competing interests to declare.