African American Midwifery in the South

Gertrude Jacinta Fraser did something unusual here: she went into a rural Virginia African American community, interviewed retired midwives and the women they served, and then set those oral histories alongside contemporary medical journals and public health materials to show where the official record contradicts community memory. The result is a rigorous, Harvard University Press-published work that documents how physicians and public health authorities systematically pushed Black midwives out of reproductive care in the early twentieth century. Reviewers praised it as an important contribution to African American studies, anthropology, and maternal health history — and it continues to be cited in current scholarship on Black maternal health. The caveat is access: dense academic prose and a specialized subject limit this to researchers and serious students rather than general readers.