Lady Business: Call the Midwife, and the stories we tell about women’s health
Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 140th issue, published May 8, 2022.
Story Time
Over the last few months, I’ve been working my way through the back seasons of Call the Midwife, the long-running British medical drama akin to a 1960’s Grey’s Anatomy. (There’s less sex, yet so much more childbirth.)
Like Grey’s, Call the Midwife relies on patients of the week; soapy side plots about the love lives of the nurses and the (sole, saintly) doctor; regular tearjerking tragedies, with equally regular cast changes; and plenty of social commentary. And like its Shondaland predecessor, Call the Midwife has remained popular for more than a decade without getting ongoing Prestige TV buzz, or enough credit for being as groundbreaking as it is.
It’s a series where the main characters are almost all women, including several over age 50; where they work in the pink-collar fields of nursing and midwifery, serving a population of low-income and underprivileged patients; where many of the nurses are nuns, whose faith and service-oriented lifestyles are taken seriously, without mystical exoticization; and where the main characters spend most of their screen time taking care of other women and their reproductive health.
For a show set in 1950s and ‘60s London, that mostly means telling stories about pregnancy and childbirth. I tend to check my phone during the actual birth scenes—after 11 seasons, the mechanics and yelling can get repetitive, and Call the Midwife is really committed to showing many of the bodily fluids involved. But I also admire how dedicated the series is to being matter-of-fact and unglamorous about the very frequent occurrence of childbirth, without fetishizing it or turning it into a male character’s hero moment. (Looking at you, Station Eleven and your shock-nudity childbirth episode!) As The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote in 2016, “These are gross-out scenarios, but they’re also normalizers: what is ‘hard to watch’ on television inevitably depends on who’s watching.”
By regularly dramatizing pregnancy and its many outcomes, Call the Midwife acknowledges how very common these health events have always been. It also gets to show the range of consequences for the women affected. Some stories end in joy, some in tragedy—and many in the vast, nuanced spectrum in between. Because, even for the most fortunate parents, pregnancy is only the start of stories about women’s health, and their children’s health, and all the complications and costs of life.
Anyway, Call the Midwife has mostly been an excellent winter/early spring distraction—and, well, when I started watching it, I was comforted by the story’s historical remove. Sure, plenty of historically bad things happen—thalidomide-induced birth defects, criminalized homosexuality, stigmatized unwed mothers—but that was half a century ago! Life, and medicine, is so much better now!
Ha, until this week, when I happened to finish the season about the back-alley abortionist, and the variously awful consequences for women in eras when abortion isn’t legal. So much for the historical remove.
Lady Bits
–Anyway, Happy Mother’s Day?
–Ann Friedman was particularly excellent this week.
–In other distractions, I’ve also spent a lot of time recently going back to live theater. Speaking of the historical remove, How I Learned to Drive was excellently acted and brutal, but also a little comforting in how dated (or at least how pre-#MeToo) some of it felt. Strange Loop was sometimes hilarious if also dark (and something I appreciated more once I’d read some of the lyrics, which were a little let down by the show’s sound design). Daniel Craig’s Macbeth was upstaged by many, many smoke machines. And I really enjoyed James McAvoy’s very modern, (literally) stripped-down Cyrano—sure, it makes no plot sense to make Cyrano the most attractive person in the theater (and possibly the world), but then again the rest of the plot is deeply silly anyway.
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com