Call The Midwife

Hello everyone!

I have just finished watching a British t.v. series called "Call The Midwife" on Netflix and it is AMAZING!
It is a series based off of a memoir of a London-based midwife from the 1950's named Jennifer Worth, who practiced midwifery at a convent and provided care for the underprivileged in the East End.

In the beginning, I thought that I loved this show because it was so entertaining and I just love anything that has to do with pregnant women and childbirth. However, now that it has ended, looking back, it was very educational in so many ways. I actually started to connect a lot of things we learned in class and some current events to this show. I loved this show because it showed a glimpse of how childbirth was beginning to be medicalized, it demonstrated the battle between breastfeeding and formula feeding, the disparities between white women and colored women, and how traditional gender roles affect women. It also perfectly demonstrated how religion is very influential in the government and in personal lives; where women could not get abortions because it was illegal, single women were not allowed to receive contraception because the government and the church did not want to promote sexual promiscuity (only married women were allowed to have contraception), and women were shamed for getting pregnant out of wedlock.

I have always heard the expression "history repeats itself" and brushed it off because, yeah it may be true, but I couldn't see it for myself so I didn't understand it. This series proved this expression time and time again, and I believed it. In class, we talked about the issues women face everyday, the problems we have with our healthcare system, our maternity care, intersectionality, the disparities between white women and colored women, etc. As I learned about all this, I did have an idea that the feminist movement and the fight against the issues women face have been around for many decades. However - now this may just be me being a millennial and all - but, sometimes I just feel like only we can understand the problems we face today because it is happening to us now and it is different than what the generation before us went through. Sometimes I think that just because we are a much more advanced society that it makes us different than all of the older generations, but that simply isn't true.

By the end of the day, we are all still humans. It doesn't matter what generation we came from or what technology we have, humans have existed for centuries, and one way or another we have felt and experienced similar things.

I recommend that you guys watch it! It was really cool to see a glimpse of how childbirth was handled in the 1950s in Europe.

-Rosely