In September 1842, following the death of Łucja Wierzbicka—a local midwife—the daily newspaper in Kraków carried a short announcement from the Department of the Interior: candidates had fourteen days to enter a ‘competition for the vacated position of city midwife to which an [annual] stipend of 200 złoty is attached’.
A price tariff published that December fixed loaf weights so that one złoty bought roughly 10–11 lb of rye bread. On her 200 złoty a year, bread alone for herself and her daughter would have taken more than a third of Wierzbicka’s income, leaving little for rent, fuel or clothing. Employed by authorities for their virtue and literacy, many of Kraków’s midwives were forced to seek paid work as the sole or primary income earners in their families. Propertyless, dislocated, overwhelmed by work and family duties, they defy easy categorisation: neither wage-dependent workers, nor the sort of entrepreneurs described by historian Eliska Bujokova.
The professionalisation of midwifery was crucial in European states’ efforts to curb mother and infant mortality in the nineteenth century. Aspiring midwives were trained in natal care in hospitals and lecture halls by male physicians who claimed authority over women’s reproductive health. The Free City of Kraków—a small quasi-state which existed between 1815 and 1846—was no exception. So-called government midwives earned a stipend drawn from Treasury funds and held a licence termed the ‘liberty to practice’, which meant that they had completed the mandatory theoretical and practical training at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University.
Has this familiar professionalisation narrative in the history of medicine, however, elided labour histories of midwifery? There have been calls for greater ‘cross-fertilization between labour history and the history of science’, and Mary Fissell has challenged historians to ‘resituate [midwifery] as an economic activity shaped by larger shifts in workforces’. The archive of a scientific institution such as the Jagiellonian University may seem an unlikely resource for labour historians. But the correspondence between midwives and the medical faculty preserved there can be treated as a biographical and rhetorical topsoil that we can combine with other layers of evidence to reconstruct working people’s lives in pre-industrial Kraków.
One of the most detailed files belongs to Gitla Festylerowa, a Jewish woman from Będzin, a town forty miles from Kraków in the neighbouring Kingdom of Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. She left her home and family to learn midwifery. In October 1828, she petitioned the university’s rector to be admitted onto the course: ‘the undersigned has an honest desire to learn midwifery…that would secure my future upkeep…My intentions strive towards a worthy aim, to better myself and become useful to society’. In June 1829, Festylerowa wrote to the rector again, more urgently; she wanted to proceed to the final examination as soon as possible because:
[she] had travelled…to the university here with the aim of bettering herself in the art of midwifery…and through her diligence answer her calling…however being away from her Jewish family that is made up of a handicapped husband, as he has been paralysed for a couple of years, and who is burdened with six children; she lives in great uncertainty about their existence, as she left them in great want.
Student midwives had to pay a fee to proceed to the final exam. Those who could not pay it had to provide a ‘certificate of poverty’: a letter from a citizen of good standing, such as an alderman, religious leader, employer or landlord, that testified to both the applicant’s impoverishment and moral propriety. Later that June, the supervisor of Będzin’s synagogue sent one, ‘[testifying] that Jan and Gitla…parents of six older and three small children, do not possess any property either in the town or anywhere else, find themselves in a very poor state to such degree that to live, and help two out of nine children felled by illness, they don’t have funds’. Festylerowa sent a follow-up letter the next month, reiterating: ‘I am unable to support myself here in Kraków.’ That same week, the dean of the medical sciences department finally set her exam for the following month.
Compelling as they are, these records should be approached with caution. Petitions and ‘certificates of poverty’ were crafted with a specific outcome in mind. Their multiple authors—midwives, their guarantors, and sometimes scribes—collaborated to persuade the reader by dwelling on hardship. Nevertheless, in the absence of other first-hand accounts, they are invaluable.
This type of correspondence also reveals the other work midwives did before their studies. Maryanna Brzozowska worked as a servant in the church of the Holy Cross for five years and got a stamped certificate of poverty from the parish priest. Several did manual labour. Katarzyna Durska was described by the alderman of her district in Kraków as a ‘widow…burdened by offspring… [who] can barely feed herself and her family with her manual pay’. Her employer confirmed that she ‘[had] been working as a housekeeper for the best part of two years…soberly, faithfully and honestly’. Similarly, Zofia Czekańska’s landlord wrote that she ‘behaved honestly’ during seven months in his house. Because her own home had ‘fallen on her children according to the law’, Czekańska did not ‘possess a piece of it’, and she earned her upkeep through ‘work with her own hands, and sewing’. Widows were especially vulnerable. Teresa Bruśnicka described herself as ‘a poor and miserable widow, abandoned by her family’ who ‘supported [herself] through working with [her] hands’. It seems likely that many ‘examined’ midwives would have had to work during their studies, and later combined midwifery work with other sources of income.
Salaried jobs open to women were rare then and the competition for them correspondingly intense. To return to the late Łucja Wierzbicka: her former position drew interest from midwives based in smaller towns and villages. Antonina Kowalska sent her application the same day as the advert appeared. In a letter now in Kraków’s National Archive, she emphasised her ‘dozen or so years of experience’ and her ‘skilfulness and knowledge of the art of midwifery’, and requested she be nominated ‘in place of the deceased Wierzbicka’. The newspaper makes no mention of Wierzbicka by name, so it seems her passing was already known among her fellow midwives.
Wierzbicka herself had won the position just a year earlier; one of nine applicants. Writing in August 1841 from Czernichów, twelve miles from Kraków, she made her case: ‘the undersigned spent twelve years in the Czernichów District fulfilling her duties with every amount of meticulousness…Moreover the undersigned being burdened by age is no longer able to hasten to sudden occurrences in villages dispersed across the district’. She would have had to travel from village to village on foot or by cart.
Unlicensed, community-based midwives—known as baby in Polish-speaking villages—were another source of competition. In September 1829, shortly after arriving in Czernichów, Wierzbicka wrote to the Department of the Interior and Police with a request ‘that the practice of midwifery by unexamined women…be banned’. An official responded to her letter with ‘a recommendation’ to the local alderman that he ‘create a list of all such women and demand evidence from them on what basis they occupy themselves with the art of midwifery’. The Free City’s authorities never enacted legislation specifically dealing with ‘unexamined’ midwives, so the exact consequences of the registration are unclear. The majority of midwives in the Free City had no institutionalised medical training, but even those that did were not trusted by physicians to perform more complicated procedures.
Nor should we assume that competition between government midwives and baby simply played out physicians’ distinction between ‘learned’ and ‘experiential’ medicine. Some unlicensed midwives may well have learnt from books, just as some government midwives may have continued to perform orally-transmitted practices.
Examination was a symbolic threshold as well as a practical one; it reinforced the notion that knowledge gained from study was superior to that gained merely from experience. In 1818, university officials made the ability to both read and write a requirement for aspiring midwives. It is probable that semi- or illiterate students in Kraków learnt by rote: the lecturer would ask a question, and the students would answer in unison. Indeed, full literacy was exceptional in Kraków in the first half of the nineteenth century. University officials gave leeway on writing, as too strict an approach would have reduced the small pool of candidates even further.
The signatures under a petition sent in 1832 by five midwifery students reflect the differing writing abilities of their authors (who also happened to live together); they range in form from unsure and disjointed to confident cursives.
Łucja Wierzbicka was not an assured writer either. When she first became a midwife, she sometimes put three crosses next to her name, though her handwriting improved with time.
Historian Gabriela Soto Laveaga reminds us that ‘erasures of laborers in history of science have less to do with the job they perform than with how they are perceived’. We may extend this: perceiving midwives as answering a calling erases them as labourers altogether. Yet impoverished student midwives who wrote of being ‘burdened’ (obarczone) by numerous children, disabled relatives, or their own old age reveal how thin the line between vocation and the compulsion to earn a living could be. The professionalisation narrative has split the scholarship in two, as Bujokova notes: obstetrics and male medical practice on one side, female community-based practice on the other.
Neither takes sufficient account of wider changes in economic history. Read as a labour archive, the correspondence of Kraków’s government midwives illuminates working people’s struggle to survive as a market in land and labour began to take hold.