Midwife - Language Log

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"A person, usually a woman, who is trained to assist women in childbirth."  AHDEL

But not always a woman:

Men rarely practice midwifery for cultural and historical reasons. In ancient Greece, midwives were required by law to have given birth themselves, which prevented men from joining their ranks. In 17th century Europe, some barber surgeons, all of whom were male, specialized in births, especially births requiring the use of surgical instruments. This eventually developed into a professional split, with women serving as midwives and men becoming obstetricians. Men who work as midwives are called midwives (or male midwives, if it is necessary to identify them further) or accoucheurs; the term midhusband (based on a misunderstanding of the etymology of midwife) is occasionally encountered, mostly as a joke. In previous centuries, they were called man-midwives in English.

(source)

I have often wondered about the meaning and origins of the term "midwife".  My wonderment was piqued recently by several comments on this post:  "Wondrous blue" (5/9/22).

Ronan Maye

This reminds me of something I noticed in an Old English class: a lot of cognates with modern English are misleading (false-friends?) like the tweet above (i.e. blue referring to color). For example, the word midwife sounds in modern English like it refers to a woman who helps other women give birth but it just breaks down into "mid-wife" which just means "with-woman." Mid is a cognate of German "mit" for with, and "wife" just meant woman. Another one is how "mann" (man) referred to any person and not specifically males, while the word for a male person was "were" which we still have in "werewolf."

Philip Taylor

I do not understand, Ronan, why you suggest that "the word midwife sounds in modern English like it refers to a woman who helps other women give birth" — nothing in its spelling, pronunciation or any other aspect conveys to me the idea of "a woman who helps other women give birth", even thought it has now come to mean exactly that. I have always assumed that it comes from "mit wife", and therefore means someone/thing who is with a wife, but nothing in that postulated etymology suggests that the wife need be in the act of giving birth.

Ronan Maye

Hello Philip, I just meant that to someone who doesn't know the germanic roots of the word midwife (myself in the past) the "wife" half of "midwife" seems to refer to the one who is helping the mother give birth rather than the mother herself, and mid's meaning is not transparent to someone who hasn't studied German, Dutch, or Old English since it has been replaced by "with" in modern English. To most English speakers, mid sounds like "middle," so "midwife" just seems like it refers to a woman who is in the middle of something (perhaps the process of the birth), but this is misleading for two reasons: mid doesn't refer to middle and midwife it is not a gendered occupational term like actress, waitress, etc. It is just a non-gendered term for anyone that helps a mother during the birth. Once I learned the germanic roots of the word, its meaning subsequently seemed obvious. I have tested this out on some people who are not interested in languages or etymology and they assumed midwife referred specifically to women who help other women with the birthing process.

How to adjudicate the difference of opinion?

Here's a start:

[Middle English midwif : probably mid, with (from Old English; see me- in Indo-European roots) + wif, woman (from Old English wīf; see wife).]   Word History: The word midwife was formed in Middle English from two elements, mid and wife. At first glance, the meaning of wife would would seem to be clear. However, wife often meant simply "woman" in general in Middle English, not specifically "female spouse" as it most often does in Modern English. The other element in midwife, the prefix mid-, is probably the Middle English preposition and adverb mid, meaning "together with." Thus a midwife was literally a "with-woman"—that is, "a woman who is with another woman and assists her in giving birth." The etymology of obstetric is even more descriptive of a midwife's role. Its Latin source obstetrīx, "a midwife," is formed from the verb obstāre, "to stand in front of," and the feminine suffix -trīx; the obstetrīx would thus literally stand in front of the baby as it was being born.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

The above discussion is all well and good, a quite satisfying inquiry into the meaning of a familiar, yet somehow exotic-sounding word.  Now, what I would like to know is what the man / woman / child in the street who has no linguistic instincts or training thinks of when they hear the word "midwife".

Selected readings

• "'62 years ago I was killed at a midwifery clinic'" (4/4/20)
• "Come to set" (9/30/12)

May 12, 2022 @ 7:07 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Language and medicine, Morphology

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