Southwestern Historical Quarterly

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On March 24, 1885, German Texas midwife Lisette Mueller was called to deliver the first child of Caroline and Henry Hopf on Williams Creek, twenty miles outside of Fredericksburg, Texas. A boy was born at 10:30 am, but he was lifeless. "The child seemed dead," Mueller recorded in her diary. She was likely prepared for such a dire moment. German midwives were trained to immerse the failing infant back and forth in warm and cold water, fling its arms briskly, and blow air into its tiny nose and mouth. The intervention worked, and the infant survived. That child, Charles Hopf, grew to adulthood, probably never knowing that the midwife had saved his life.

Lisette Mueller was recruited from her professional school in Germany, Marburg Midwifery, by "Old Dr. Keidel" of Fredericksburg to come to Texas to deliver his patients. She arrived in 1884 and delivered babies in Gillespie and surrounding counties for forty years. In her "Tagebuch für die Hebamme" (Diary for the Midwife), Mueller documents the medical details of six hundred cases.¹ This casebook, now stored at the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, is one of only five known American midwife journals from before the twentieth century. But Mueller's is the only one to provide medical details of a midwife's practice.² She practiced until [End Page 413] 1931, showing the endurance of midwifery in Texas well into the twentieth century. Mueller was a highly trained professional who was esteemed in her community and whose journal shows a high survival rate of mothers and infants.

Delivery by midwife was more common than delivery by doctor in Texas, and this pattern lasted longer in the state than other parts of the country. In 1900, 50 percent of women in the United States used midwives, while 75 percent of Texas women did, a full 50 percent higher.³ In addition, as Lisette Mueller shows, midwifery was a respected profession for European immigrant women, particularly those from Germany. Formal education and professional standards for midwives were far more developed in Germany; while Anglo (native-born White women), Black, and Latina midwives were highly respected within their communities, their expertise tended to be acquired through apprenticeship or experience. In the late 1930s, birthing practices changed in Fredericksburg when "Young Dr. Keidel" opened a hospital with a maternity ward, and in Fredericksburg and elsewhere in Texas, many, although not all, women chose to have a hospital delivery with a physician.⁴ Nationwide, by the middle part of the twentieth century a concerted effort by American doctors in the Northeast diminished the standing of midwives in the United States. But their arguments were often at odds with the facts, as Lisette Mueller and other competent—and professional—women demonstrated. "Midwifery has been the almost exclusive province of women throughout recorded history," historian Jean Barrett Litoff has noted.⁵ Giving birth was a "female mystery," and only women could have knowledge of its intricacies.⁶ As a result, midwifery "is the oldest female occupation and without doubt one of the most important," with skills passed down from mothers and community wise women.⁷ In North America, midwifery from colonial days through the nineteenth century functioned within the model of "social childbirth," in which neighbor women all came to the laboring woman's home to offer sisterly support to the birthing mother, to assist [End Page 414] the attending midwife, and to learn through observation how to deliver babies.⁸ However, as early as the late eighteenth century, doctors started attending childbirth for White, upper class women.⁹

Mueller, who only spoke German, served in the German communities of the Hill Country. As urban White women in America were moving toward doctor deliveries, rural, minority, and immigrant women wanted women, and women from their own culture, in the birthing room.¹⁰ These demographics constituted a large part of Texas women. Texas immigrant women, German, Czech, Scandinavian, and Polish, lived in "ethnic islands," a term coined by...