Recommended Reading

I requested The Midwife's Tale by Sam Thomas after reading an interview with the author on Mama Birth's blog. I really enjoyed the story and how the author was true to the times. One thing in particular that was fun for me was reading about the "gossips" that attended the births. The author doesn't go into much detail about them, but I had already read a little bit about them in Get Me Out.

The best description I could find online was from the book Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-cultural Perspectives, which I was pleased to see is free to read on Google Books. (Apparently I can't copy and paste from the book, which makes sense, but if you want more detail it's on page 211)

Gossips originally were called God-Sibs and they were a laboring mother's sisters in God. They were there to "nurture her during labor and to care for both her and the baby afterward...They came from the surrounding neighborhood to make the birth room ready, to sit with, comfort, and encourage her, to cook sustaining food and prepare herbal drinks, to pray and sing together, and to share in what was essentially an exclusively female process of bonding in love and power."

In other words, they were doulas! Love it!

P.S. I wish the girl in white was pregnant because that would make a GREAT doula figurine, don't you think?