Witches & Wombs

Ecotheology and the Canadian Colonial Motherhood Ideal

Introduction

In all natural environments, there is a delicate balance between beauty and decay. An entity once teeming with life can quickly begin to rot if the conditions for its survival deteriorate. If manipulated in just the right way, a life source can become a death sentence. The humanist experience is not exempt from recipes of the natural world: all things good and alive can quickly become corrupted. Most notably, this has become illustrated in perceptions of the female body. 

In colonial Christian society, a woman’s character was judged by her ability to succeed in motherhood. If a woman could not successfully become the caregiver of the home or produce children at all, the value of her body and worth would ultimately decrease significantly in the fabric of society. Early modern European artwork often depicts Mother Mary nursing a newborn baby Jesus, and is perhaps considered one of the holiest scenes in the Christian faith. As illustrated, an ability to breastfeed was associated with the divine immortal itself. Only through drinking a mother’s “nectar” could a child receive the necessary nutrients required for early survival. This knowledge would be passed down through ancestral womanhood, often in the ancient practice of midwifery. As argued by J.T.H. Connor, “women assisting other women before, during, and after childbirth—the practice of female midwifery—probably constitutes the oldest, most traditional, and culturally widespread health care activity”[1]. With the rise of modern medicine and society, however, we have seen a decline in both midwifery practice and breastfeeding longevity. Parents often instead lean towards weaning children at a far younger age or opt for formula-based milk entirely. Additionally, the concept of breastfeeding has begun to lose the romantic allure of immortality, instead being dismissed as unnecessary or even harmful to the child, depending on the state of the mother’s body. With this, one cannot ignore the growing influence of nature, culture, and politics over the ideologies of motherhood. The question begging to be asked, then, is this: what happens when the sacredness of the female body becomes tainted, or even poisoned?

Gerard David, Virgin and Child, Oil on Wood, ca. 1520. Image taken from a MET Publication.

This paper traces conversations surrounding the historical impact of gender and ecotheology in midwifery and breastfeeding practices, with a specific focus on colonial Canada. Perhaps best defined by Elizabeth A. Johnson in her work Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love, ecotheology prescribes that “virtually all major religions, whether indigenous, formed in the classic axial period, or of more recent vintage, include the natural world within the scope of their vision of the Sacred”[2]. In the context of colonial midwifery and breastfeeding, I argue that the eco-theological masculine ideal shaped understandings of the body, medicine, and motherhood. This paper will also explore the ideology of “toxic bodies” in environmental history, and how this phenomenon has disproportionately been inflicted upon women—especially Indigenous women and women of colour—residing in the colonial state. As such, I argue that the commodification of the breast and womb is a direct result of the masculine socio-environmental manipulation of the body. This can be credited to an innate need for male control in medicine. After all, a human body is only as toxic as the environment that creates it.

The Midwife-Witch

Midwifery in Canada was not traditionally a condemned practice in the religious sense. This is an important distinction to make: while there are often associations between midwifery and witchcraft accusations, it is a highly contested claim in modern historical analysis. In the height of the witch craze, some religious sources described midwives as “satanic” for assisting in gynecological care: a 1484 papal decree titled The Bull of Pope Innocent VIII proclaimed that witches were “slain[ing] infants yet in the mother's womb and hinder[ing]...women from conceiving”[3]. Similarly, the Brandenburgische Hebammen-Ordnung of 1743 alluded to accusations of midwives using the umbilical cord for witchcraft [4]. The general attitude of early Christian condemnations of midwife involvement was that the midwife prevented or intervened in the sacred lifegiving that was bestowed upon a child by the mother during birth. Early scholarship drew on these documents to assert that the demonization of midwifery duties resembled an overall lower societal status of women who were midwives, along with a “witchy” stigma of impurity and unholiness. Ultimately, it was assumed in Christian Europe that there were connections to be found between witchcraft, sorcery, and midwife knowledge [5].

Photograph of two Indigenous midwives weighing a crying Indigenous child on a set of scales in the hospital at the Glacier National Park, near the Canada-United States border. Photo from Getty Images.

However, feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Allemang argue that “the North American midwifery movement claimed the persecuted European midwife-witch as part of its heritage…this historical construction of female healers and their suppression has come under scrutiny with new developments in the practice of history in the latter decades of the twentieth century and the early-twenty-first century”[6]. Perhaps then, one can argue that the concept of the midwife-witch itself acted as a method to further discredit the midwife profession in a colonial masculine society. Allemang further asserts that “to some midwives the midwife-witch figure may be a meaningful symbol of power and resistance, or even of persecution. As a western ideological construct that was influential in a predominantly white, middle-class North American revival of midwifery in the 1970s and 1980s, it may have no or little cultural or historical relevance to other midwives or students”[7]. What is indeed an uncontested argument, however, is that while midwifery may have existed as a valued asset of the community, it grew to become widely dismissed in the face of modern medicine and colonial male influence.

The Feminine Unclean Birth

The birthing process in early colonial Canada commonly took place at home, surrounded by female caregivers who knew and understood the body, in addition to the supervision of a midwife. Women who practiced the Christian faith even saw midwifery and assisting others in childbirth as honouring their faith: a study on women in historic Newfoundland explained that “women expressed Christian belief through their work in childbirth, traditional healing, and death rituals”[8].  However, as argued by Krista McCracken, “the establishment of the medical profession, rise of science in health care, and lack of professional midwife organizations all contributed to the marginalization of midwifery by the mid 1900s”[9]. Instead of being seen as essential to the community, and perhaps even sacred, midwifery quickly became subject to questions of cleanliness, legitimacy, and godliness.

Midwifery was additionally tasked with the problem of legality: while it was not illegal on paper, it was also not considered a regulated or recognized medical practice in mid-twentieth century Canada [10].  While there is a deeply gendered and legal analysis to this phenomenon, one can also argue that there was an additional connection that was inherently environmental. Modern colonial medicine required that births be sterile, and under the supervision of a, traditionally male, hospital-trained medical physician. This connotation speaks to the ideology that a birth unburdened by men was seemingly unnatural, dirty, and therefore strayed from the intended sacredness of childbirth. Marlene Epp also points out a distinct shift in this era: the association of midwifery with death. Epp explains that “in many settings, midwifery was a ‘many-faceted calling’ in which a woman took upon herself a wide range of health care duties”[11]. This meant that “in addition to their varied expertise and services in providing healthcare, midwives quite often held another important function, that of undertaker, which might include certifying deaths and, especially, preparing bodies for burial… midwifery and the performance of funeral duties were among the few positions for which women received public recognition”[12]. One can argue that to associate a midwife’s interaction with the decaying of the dead ultimately tainted the profession. In a colonial society that promoted “Christian” values of bodily cleanliness and purity, contaminating midwifery with postmortem care would perhaps mark it as unfit for a sterile birth.

Furthermore, as Morgan also speaks to, with an increase in “male medical discourses that characterized the female body as ‘other’ and ‘prone to sickness’”[13], a further association with death and dirt would not bode well for midwifery legitimacy in colonial Canada. To reject midwifery as essential for birth would therefore shift the process into the masculine sphere, ultimately reasserting men’s domination over the female power.

The Controlled & Commodified Breast

Birthing and midwifery would not be the only aspects called into question. With the rise of masculine medicine, a woman’s ability to breastfeed and the female body itself would also be closely examined under the same regulations. While the breastfeeding process had traditionally been navigated between mother and child, male physicians began to study postnatal diets and impose regulations. Medical texts in the 1930s began advising women on food to increase their breastmilk supply, along with generalized regulations of diet with little to no explanation [14]. As explained by Wendy Mitchinson, "often physicians assumed that women should know why a certain food was being prohibited and therefore offered no explanation for the prohibition. Either that, or they thought that women should simply accept their advice without questioning”[15].

Poster promoting breast feeding and proper childcare, showing a mother nursing a baby. Ca. Sep 1938. Image taken from the Library of Congress.

The policing of women’s bodies would not stop there. In the twentieth century, breastfeeding became increasingly politicized, attributing infant survival rates to physical environment and “proper” breastfeeding practices. A 1912 newspaper article, cited by Tasnim Nathoo and Aleck Ostry, reported that “the best babies came from Earlscourt. This was attributed to the ‘fresh air of the district and the fact that the good, old-fashioned method of breast-feeding has generally been adhered to’”[16]. The message was clear: a woman’s body was best subjected to childbirth and motherhood under the direction of men, and if a body could be controlled, it could be commodified. With the rise of environmental eugenicists in the post-war period, there was a decline in breastfeeding as racial and class separation became more apparent: “upper-class women could purchase ‘laboratory milk’ and have it delivered to their homes…working-class women could find affordable milk at city milk depots or could use diluted condensed or evaporated milk”[17]. After all, in the age of modernization and industrialization, what purpose did a mother’s breast serve in the sustenance of her child?

Milk or Poison?

If the Virgin Madonna symbolized a perfect birth, then Eve would become the patron of breastfeeding. A 1940s Saturday Night newspaper article proclaimed that “the Canadian baby is  fast becoming a parasite on the cow, and the female breast (to quote a Toronto pediatrician) fit only for hanging a sweater on”[18]. No longer was breastfeeding viewed as the sacred lifeform long associated with Mother Mary and her son—instead, breastfeeding was outdated, valueless, and ultimately mockable. In 1952, it was reported that “there has developed a negative attitude towards breast-feeding, chiefly due to lack of knowledge. Some women retain childish attitudes of prudery or disgust; others may have had inadequate health and sex education; while still others may have insufficient knowledge regarding the value of breastfeeding”[19]. Women also began to battle public notions that breastfeeding was taboo, dirty, and inherently sexual in nature: North American activists were “particularly angered by the failure to decouple the nurturing breast from the sexual breast”[20]. Phyllis L.F. Rippey suggests that this ideology was also perhaps a nod back to the male desire to associate breastfeeding with witchcraft, reflecting that “capitalist development required the disciplining of women’s bodies, and that this is what explains the witch hunts in history”[21].

The metaphorical ideals of poisonous breasts would also become a physical reality with the rise of industrialization and environmental pollution. Within Canada, Indigenous women and women of colour were disproportionately subjected to toxic bodies resulting from their physical environment, including tainted breastmilk. Brittany Luby’s Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory suggests that tainted breastmilk played a role in heightened Canadian residential school enrollment and Sixties Scoop displacement. Luby uses the case study of Anishinaabe women throughout Treaty 3 territory in the early twentieth century, where methyl mercury poisoning became possible for infants through pregnancy and/or breastfeeding. Additionally, “some Anishinaabe parents relied on federal institutions- such as residential schools- to feed their children because of the food shortage caused by hydroelectric development”[22], including breastmilk. Indigenous women were characterized as unfit mothers due to the perceived inability to feed their children, stemming from the bodily harm caused by ecological decline. Rippey suggests that not only did the “labelling of [women’s] milk as diseased violate the premise of the day that maternal milk was a healing salve for all society, but it also restores the earlier images of women as bestial in comparison with men’s greater rationality”[23]. Through the eco-theological colonial masculine ideal, the motherhood experience effectively became a tool used to encourage a woman’s body into becoming the mirroring image of the divine Madonna, or risk being cast out of Eden, into the dirt with Eve.

Conclusion

So, what did a woman in colonial Canada need to concern herself with on the path towards motherhood? If you consulted the Christian bible, you would be reminded of the sacred birth giving task: “when a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world”[24]. In the same sitting, you would be reminded of the pressure to provide breastmilk: “even jackals offer the breast; they nurse their young…the tongue of the nursing infant sticks to the roof of its mouth for thirst; the children beg for food, but no one gives to them”[25]. The men of the community would hold you to that commitment—for better or worse, you would deliver a child suitable to be heir. You would not rely on the ancestral knowledge of your mother and aunts, instead following the guidance of a physician who would remember your husband’s name before your own. In the post-war era, it is essential to hope and pray that a career does not interfere with motherhood work, or an ability to breastfeed successfully, for if the breast and womb are not sacred, they will be sexualized. This is the Canadian colonial motherhood ideal: or so what the patriarchy has told us.

Endnotes

[1] J.T.H. Connor, “Larger Fish to Catch Here than Midwives: Midwifery and the Medical Profession in Nineteenth-Century Ontario,” in Gorham and Dodd, Caring and Curing: Historical Perspectives on Women and Healing in Canada, (Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press, 1994): 103.  

[2] Elizabeth A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love, (London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014): xiv. 

[3] Heinrich Kramer and Montague Summers (translator), Malleus Maleficarum, (London, John Rodker, 1928): 43. 

[4] Thomas R. Forbes (Translator), Brandenburgische Hebammen-Ordnung, Paragraph 43, Section 28, 1962.  

[5] Thomas R. Forbes, “Midwifery and Witchcraft,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences XVII, no. 2 (1962): 264–83

[6] Elizabeth Allemang, “The Midwife-Witch on Trial: Historical Fact or Myth?,” Canadian Journal of Midwifery Research and Practice, Vol. 9 no. 1 (2010): 11. 

[7] Allemang, “The Midwife-Witch on Trial,” 11. 

[8] Bonnie Morgan, Ordinary Saints: Women, Work, and Faith in Newfoundland, (Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019): 105. 

[9] Krista McCracken, “A Patchwork of Care: Midwifery in Canada,” Active History, 2015.

[10] McCracken, “A Patchwork of Care,” 2015. 

[11] Marlene Epp, “Catching Babies and Delivering the Dead: Midwives and Undertakers in Mennonite Settlement Communities,” in Rutherdale, Caregiving on the Periphery: Historical Perspectives on Nursing and Midwifery in Canada, (Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010): 63. 

[12] Epp, “Catching Babies and Delivering the Dead,” 71. 

[13] Morgan, Ordinary Saints, 105-106. 

[14] Wendy Mitchinson, Giving Birth in Canada, 1900-1950, (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2002): 286. 

[15] Mitchinson, Giving Birth in Canada, 142. 

[16] Tasnim Nathoo and Aleck Ostry, The One Best Way?: Breastfeeding History, Politics, and Policy in Canada, (Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009): 34. 

[17] Nathoo and Ostry, The One Best Way?, 49. 

[18] Ibid, 89. 

[19] Ann Sharkey, The Canadian Nurse, (1952): 188-89. 

[20] Phyllis L.F. Rippey, Breastfeeding and the Pursuit of Happiness, (Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021): 24.  

[21] Rippey, Breastfeeding and the Pursuit of Happiness, 83. 

[22] Brittany Luby, Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory, (Winnipeg, University of Manitoba Press, 2020): 160.

[23] Rippey, Breastfeeding and the Pursuit of Happiness, 136. 

[24] John 16:21 (Holy Bible, English Standard Version). 

[25] Lamentations 4:3-4 (ESV).

Bibliography

Allemang, Elizabeth. “The Midwife-Witch on Trial: Historical Fact or Myth?” Canadian Journal of Midwifery Research and Practice 9, no. 1 (2024): 10–20.

 Connor, J.T.H. “Larger Fish to Catch Here than Midwives: Midwifery and the Medical Profession in Nineteenth-Century Ontario.” In Deborah Gorham and Diane Dodd, Caring and Curing: Historical Perspectives on Women and Healing in Canada. 1st ed. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1994.

Epp, Marlene. “Catching Babies and Delivering the Dead: Midwives and Undertakers in Mennonite Settlement Communities.”  In Myra Rutherdale, Caregiving on the Periphery: Historical Perspectives on Nursing and Midwifery in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010.

Forbes, Thomas R. “Midwifery and Witchcraft.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences XVII, no. 2 (1962): 264–83.

Johnson, Elizabeth A. Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

Kramer, Heinrich, and Montague Summers (Translator). Malleus Maleficarum. London: John Rodker, 1928. 

Luby, Brittany. Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory. Winnipeg, Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press, 2020.

McCracken, Krista. “A Patchwork of Care: Midwifery in Canada,” Active History, 2015. 

Mitchinson, Wendy. Giving Birth in Canada, 1900-1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Morgan, Bonnie. Ordinary Saints: Women, Work, and Faith in Newfoundland. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.

Nathoo, Tasnim, and Aleck Ostry. The One Best Way?: Breastfeeding History, Politics, and Policy in Canada. 1st ed. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009.

Rippey, Phyllis L.F. Breastfeeding and the Pursuit of Happiness. 1st ed. Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021.

Sharkey, Ann. The Canadian Nurse (1952): 188-89.