The latest book published by the Van Raalte Press of the A. C. Van Raalte Institute at Hope College, “Present, but Not Counted: Dutch-Immigrant and Second Generation Midwives Working in Dutch Colonies in the United States, 1840-1940,” spotlights a group of women that author Janet Sjaarda Sheeres discovered were rendered all but invisible by their times even as they played an invaluable role during them.
“In his seminal book [‘When Women Didn’t Count’], Robert Lopresti makes the case that women’s history has consistently been hidden and distorted throughout some two hundred years of official government statistics; their lives and occupations have been left out of official records,” Sheeres notes in the introduction. “That has hindered my work to find any references in official records and in Dutch American history to Dutch-born women working as midwives in Dutch immigrant colonies in the United States.”
In contrast, Sheeres explains later in the text, the relative scarcity of physicians and hospitals during most of the era that her book chronicles meant that midwives practiced widely, and were often the only caregivers available, particularly on the frontier and for the urban poor.
“It is generally estimated that, as late as 1910, 50 percent of all births in the United States were attended by midwives,” Sheeres notes. “Forty-five thousand midwives were practicing across the United States in late 1910 and early 1920 at various levels of expertise.”
As a freelance researcher and author whose work focuses on the history of Dutch immigrant women, she felt called to fill in the record for the segment of the population that she has been studying for decades.
“[D]etermined to find and identify these valiant females, I searched through immigration and census records, city directories, family histories, newspaper accounts, and county archives,” she writes. “I also spread the word throughout the Dutch community, seeking anyone who had a Dutch-born female ancestor who had worked as a midwife.”
“Present, but Not Counted: Dutch-Immigrant and Second Generation Midwives Working in Dutch Colonies in the United States, 1840-1940” is divided into two parts.
The first section of the book has nine chapters that discuss the history of midwifery in the Netherlands and the United States. Some midwives were even formally trained. Amsterdam, for example, established a clinical school with a two-year program in 1828, and as early as 1668 began requiring midwives to serve a four-year apprenticeship and pass an exam to earn a license before practicing on their own.
With mothers-to-be concerned with modesty, and considering that midwives were often mothers themselves, Sheeres notes that Dutch-immigrant women for many years preferred midwives. That changed, she writes, as society shifted and male obstetricians became the standard for skilled care, not least of all because the developing medical establishment denigrated midwifery.
“The general opinion of the medical profession by that time was that infant mortality was caused by uneducated immigrant midwives,” she notes. “Already before the turn of the twentieth century, there were calls by the medical profession to outlaw midwifery.”
“The result of all this negativity was that the second and third generation of immigrants believed that one way to show they were truly American was to have a male obstetrician deliver their babies,” Sheeres writes.
The second part of the book presents three alphabetical directories that contain the names and brief biographical sketches of more than 100 women of Dutch heritage who served as midwives or in related roles around the country. They are organized as either Dutch-born midwives; second-generation Dutch midwives; or “baaksters” (women working as live-in caregivers for new mothers and their infants) and/or maternity nurses.
One example: Prijntje Josiena Meerman Waling, who became licensed as a midwife in the Netherlands after attending the medical school in Middelburg in the Netherlands, receiving her diploma in 1843. She and her husband immigrated to Holland, Michigan, in 1854, and she attended births in the community for the next 13 years.
Another: Beitsche [Betsy/Bena] Vander Schaaf Dykstra, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1882 and practiced in Sioux Center, Iowa. Her biographical sketch doesn’t include formal training, but does note that she served for a time as a maid for a doctor. In later years, one of her grandchildren became a legendary Hope College faculty member: Dr. D. Ivan Dykstra, who taught at Hope from 1946 to 1980.
This book was the last one edited by Dr. Jacob E. Nyenhuis, director emeritus of the Van Raalte Institute, prior to his retirement on Sept. 1, 2023, as founding editor-in-chief of the Van Raalte Press. During the course of the project, he discovered an ancestral connection of his own to midwifery.
“It has been a privilege and a pleasure to bring so many fine books into print over the past sixteen years, but I take special pleasure in publishing this book,” he writes in the Preface, “because it has revealed to me that my great grandmother, Maria Bosscher Timmer (mother of my paternal grandmother), was a midwife in my home town of Pease, Minnesota, and in nearby Bogus Brook Township, where I was born.” She had stopped practicing some time prior to Nyenhuis’s birth, which was attended by a doctor.
In addition to “Present, but Not Counted,” Sheeres is the author of “Son of Secession: Douwe J. Vander Werp” (Eerdmans, 2006), “The Not-So Promised Land: The Dutch in Amelia County, Virginia 1868-1880” (Eerdmans, 2013) and “For Better For Worse: Stories of the Wives of Early Pastors of the Christian Reformed Church” (Eerdmans, 2017), and the editor and annotator of the CRC Synodical Minutes 1857-1880 (Eerdmans, 2014). She has also acted as president of the Zeeland Historical Society and of AADAS (Association for the Advancement of Dutch American Studies), and currently chairs the Historical Committee of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA). She has worked as editor of Origins, the magazine of the Calvin University Archives, and has published numerous articles in various international genealogical and historical magazines.
The Van Raalte Press facilitates publication of the scholarship of the A. C. Van Raalte Institute at Hope College, and was founded by Nyenhuis in 2007. Established in 1994, the A. C. Van Raalte Institute specializes in scholarly research and writing on immigration and the contributions of the Dutch and their descendants in the United States. The institute is also dedicated to the study of the history of all the people who have comprised the community of Holland throughout its history. The institute is located in the Henri and Eleonore Theil and Jacob E. and Leona M. Nyenhuis Research Center at 9 E. 10th St. More information about the Van Raalte Institute is available online at hope.edu/vri
Copies of “Present, but Not Counted: Dutch-Immigrant and Second Generation Midwives Working in Dutch Colonies in the United States, 1840-1940” are available for $25 and can be purchased at hope.edu/bookstore as well as through Amazon.