Disciplining the Bodies of Single Women

Starting in 1802, the Napoleonic government promoted the education of enlightened midwives through both the Parisian Maternité and departmental schools. The Gers, in the southwest, repeatedly tried and failed to open a school that would graduate well-trained midwives. Its failure by 1839 rested on the male authorities' inability to conceive of and support spaces where three interrelated groups of women could cohabitate safely in this rural and Catholic department. Young, innocent midwifery students needed protection from the mostly unwed mothers available as bodies for practice. In turn, both the unwed mothers and the midwifery students, due to their knowledge of procreation, threatened the purity of the nursing sisters who controlled charitable spaces. Ultimately, despite attempts to redefine the bodies of unwed mothers and reconfigure the spaces to run a legitimate school, the authorities abandoned the goal of providing skilled midwives for the women in labor who needed them m...