The king's midwife: a history and mystery of Madame du Coudray

exploration of China's reproductive past, and should be read by anyone who seeks to understand the controversy over human rights in China today. Madame du Coudray was one of those "lost" heroines, neglected by historians in spite of several decades of feminist scholarship. She has been rediscovered by Nina Gelbart who has written a fascinating account of the career of this leading eighteenth-century midwife and her medical mission to spread childbirth education throughout France. Gelbart also tells her own story of retracing du Coudray's journey and consulting more than 1,000 documents over a ten-year period in order to reconstruct the midwife's odyssey. After beginning her career as a midwife in Paris in the 1740s and then spending ten years in Clermont perfecting her skills and planning her strategy, Madame du Coudray began her mission in 1759 when Louis XV commissioned her to travel throughout France teaching childbirthing skills with the goal of saving babies for the state. Part of the Ancien Regime's statist approach, du Coudray's programme was one response to the perceived depopulation problem. Armed with her text, the famous Abrege de l'art des accouchements (1759) and her unique "machine", a life-sized obstetrical mannequin, du Coudray taught over 10,000 students over a thirty-year period. Du Coudray was the consummate strategist, negotiating her way through a maze of physicians and surgeons, bureaucrats, students, and patients. She never married, even though she took the title "Madame", and she had no children. With few domestic obligations, she gave free rein to her professional ambitions. Politically astute, she had connections both at court and among provincial political leaders. Within a few years she succeeded in gaining a yearly stipend from the king of 8,000 livres-equal to that of a decorated military general. In spite of her accomplishments, du Coudray is no feminist hero. She was not an advocate for females. She did not emphasize her gender, but rather assumed she was the equal of males. She accepted the status quo and worked within the system, all the while seeing herself as a man of action. A vehicle of science and progress, du Coudray presented herself as an expert authority. Gelbart portrays her as a woman in charge, planning her strategy, charting her career trajectory. She was an exceptional woman, in no way representative of ordinary women. Given her attitude, skills, and her system of patronage, du Coudray defied the marginalization of women which …