The author is grateful to Judith Weisenfeld, Charles McCrary, Tisa Wenger, Sally Promey, Kathryn Lofton, Zareena Grewal, Michael McVicar, Ulrike Guthrie, and anonymous peer reviewers for offering insightful comments. I also would like to thank colleagues and graduate students from The Crossroads Project of Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures, and Florida State University's American Religious History Colloquium for reading and providing helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.

¹ “Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” 1944–1946, State Board of Health Midwifery File, Florida State Archives (FSA). The “Plan for Improving the Midwife Service” program in Tallahassee, Florida (Leon County), only lasted less than a year. Thomas was part of the first group of trainees who started on August 1, 1945, at FAMC, after it was finalized in June of 1945. But by May 1946, the program had ended. Some have speculated that the suspension of the program was due to a lack of participation from Black women in Florida. Contemporary anthropologist Debra Susie noted that the costs to travel to Tallahassee as well as those of being away from home, family, and work responsibilities for three months prevented Black women from participating in the program. See Debra Anne Susie, In the Way of Our Grandmothers: A Socio-Cultural Look at Modern American Midwifery (PhD diss., Florida State University, 1984), 63.

² Dr. Georg Gwyn sent a letter to Lucille J. Marsh on how the Leon County Medical Society gave the greenlight to establish the midwifery program. This program was approved by Coughlin, director of Leon County Health Department on December 8, 1944. “Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” FSA.

³ Applicants had to have completed the eighth grade to be considered for the program. I will discuss the age requirements in more detail later in the essay.

⁴ “Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” 1944–1946, State Board of Health Midwifery File, Box 2, Folder 21, FSA.

⁵ For instance, one county health worker recommended potential lay midwives and women who were affiliated with the county health department in some form: Escambia County's Supervisor of Nurses Bertha C. King recommended two candidates for the program. One was a prominent midwife who did not meet the age limit, but King “hope[d] that she [could] avail herself of the course offered.” Bertha C. King to Jule O. Graves, July 20, 1944. King also sent a letter to Graves about a younger “colored girl” entering the program and her possibilities of attending the Tuskegee Institute's midwifery school. Bertha C. King to Jule O. Graves, October 11, 1944, “Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” FSA.

⁶ On the aspirations of Black women in health care against entrenched racial segregation in professional medicine, especially nursing, in the twentieth century, see Hines, Darlene Clark, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 63–84, 89–107Google Scholar. For instance, FAMC was the only accredited Black college with a baccalaureate nursing department in the mid-1930s. Hines, Black Women in White, 65. Nursing schools were racially segregated in the Jim Crow South.

⁷ One applicant for the second Improving Midwifery Service program in 1946, Francesca Marrero, was Spanish Catholic. She was the only non-Protestant applicant. Marrero left both “race” and “religion” blank on her application. Yet she had a recommendation letter from J. H. Johnson, a rector and pastor of the St. Mary Star of the Sea located at 1010 Winsor Lane in Key West. Johnson alluded to her good character and confidence. He also noted that she was fluent in both English and Spanish, and would fill a real medical need in the Spanish community. I am unsure whether Marrero was selected for the course. If she was not selected for the course, the reasons were likely twofold: (1) the program was halted in May of 1946 and (2) it appeared that she did not meet the educational or age requirements. State Board of Health Midwifery File, FSA.

⁸ The Julius Rosenwald Fund Archive (268–494), 1917–1948. John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections and Archives, Fisk University.

⁹ W. M. Everett, “February 21st, 1945, State Board of Health Midwifery File, FSA.

¹⁰ “Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” 1944–1946, State Board of Health Midwifery File, Box 2, Folder 21, FSA.

¹¹ Smith, Susan L., Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women's Health Activism in America, 1890–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Looking at the establishment of the Office of Negro Health Work during the New Deal era, Smith notes that institutionalized Black health work within federal bureaucracy relied on the “foundation of black health programs [already] put into place by middle-class black activists well before the New Deal.” Smith, Sick and Tired, 59. Contemporary medical historian Karen Kruse Thomas also discusses the opportunities (in a more celebratory light) for Black health initiatives in the South created by New Deal administration in Deluxe Jim Crow: Civil Rights and American Health Policy, 1935–1954 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). For more on the impact of the New Deal social welfare policies on Black politics, especially as they provided the opportunity for the Black middle-class to participate in the political mainstream and consequently “uplift” the masses, see Ferguson, Karen, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² I thank Kathryn Lofton for pointing me to the Bureau of Maternal and Child Welfare as a parareligious organization. For work on the parareligious organization as a site to understand Black women's religion, see Weisenfeld, Judith, “Invisible Women,” Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 1 (2013): 133–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ The Bureau of Child and Maternal Welfare had many names prior to 1945 and 1946. It began as the Bureau of Education and Child Welfare in 1918, before it changed to the Bureau of Child Welfare in 1920. By 1933, the Bureau was suspended and its work in maternal and child welfare and midwifery control was subsumed under the Bureau of Public Health Nursing. In 1936, the State Health Department organized the Bureau of Maternal and Child Health. Contemporary scholars note how physicians contributed more to the high mortality rates than midwives.

¹⁴ The Sheppard-Towner Act was a federally funded program that ran from 1921 through 1929. Sponsored by Senator Morris Sheppard and Representative Horace Towner, the bill consisted of the provision of “matching federal grants to states to setup prenatal clinics and infant care education programs.” Judith N. McArthur, “Maternity Wars: Gender, Race, and the Sheppard-Towner Act in Texas,” in Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 251. The federal grants were to address the high mortality rates among women and infants during delivery. The Act also revealed the concessions (and compromises) of the weak federal state to the relatively strong state and local politics. On the dynamic of the federal and state relations of the 1921 Act, see Johnson, Kimberly, Governing the State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 136–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Florida was one of the states that partook in the Sheppard-Towner Act. Johnson reported that the federal government gave Florida a total of $16,532 between 1923 and 1926.

¹⁵ For information on progressive white middle-class women who used their roles in the U.S. Bureau of Immigration to leverage the administrative state to police immigrant women's sexuality (e.g., such as the fight against “white slavery” [prostitution] and to supposedly make “deportation” more “humane” and “protective”), see Payne, Eva, “Deportation as Rescue: White Slaves, Women Reformers, and the U.S. Bureau of Immigration,” Journal of Women's History 33, no. 4 (Winter 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ The Bureau of Education and Child Welfare was part of what contemporary historian Molly Ladd-Taylor dubbed the “maternalist movement,” which comprised club women, physicians, and social workers, and transformed childbearing and rearing to a “subject of grassroots activism and public policy” in the Progressive period. The movement culminated in the founding of the Children's Bureau in 1912 and the Sheppard-Towner Act in 1921. Many of these progressive female reformers worked in the New Deal government and played a role in welfare policies. See Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 18Google Scholar. Taylor also reveals that motherhood was gradually becoming a scientific and professional matter in this period. Also, there were a few Black nurses who worked with the Bureau. But Black women were limited because of the refusal of the state to fund and create opportunities for Black women.

¹⁷ Gertrude Jacinta Fraser, African American Midwifery in the South: Dialogues of Birth, Race, and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 41.

¹⁸ The literature on Black midwifery and state bureaucracy is rich and vast. Multiple historians and anthropologists have well documented these Southern initiatives aimed at Black and lay midwives in general. See Fraser, African American Midwifery in the South; Susie, In the Way of Our Grandmothers; Mattias Mary Pugh, Lay Midwifery in Twentieth Century American South: Public Health Policy and Practice (master's thesis, Florida State University, 1990); Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Grannies and Spinsters: Midwife Education under the Sheppard-Towner Act,” Journal of Social History 22, no. 2 (Winter 1988), 255–75; Yulonda Eadie Sano, “Protect the Mother and Baby: Mississippi Lay Midwives and Public Health,” Agricultural History Society (2019), 393–406; and Kelena Reid Maxwell, Birth Behind the Veil: African American Midwives and Mothers in the Rural South, 1921–1962 (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2009), 83–115.

¹⁹ Bureau of Maternal and Child Welfare also collected “superstitions” from low-cash white communities in “out of the way” places in the Florida. For instance, nurse-midwife Jule O. Graves collected “superstitions” from white midwives in rural Florida.

²⁰ Fraser, African American Midwifery in the South, 68. Fraser agrees with other scholarship that interpreted the use of Black spirituals and nursey rhymes as pedagogical strategies by state health departments to “teach hygiene, state authority, and prenatal care” in a simplistic and elementary manner to communities that were perceived as “dumb.” I do not doubt that Black religion might have a pedagogical device to simplify what they took to be complex content and techniques for Black people with little to no formal education. Regardless of how representatives of state departments used African American religion, it nevertheless underscored how Black religion was significant enough to manage, and not obliterate, in the process of secularizing traditional midwifery in the South.

²¹ Ibid., 27

²² I borrow “state truths,” which legitimated science and religion over and against “superstition,” from Jason Josephson-Storm, “The Superstition, Secularism, and Religion Trinary: Or, Re-Theorizing Secularism,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 30 (2018): 1–20.

²³ On the “hegemony of biomedicine,” see Hans A. Baer, Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America: Issues of Class, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 33. Baer's definition of biomedicine comes from Robert Hahn and Arthur Kleinman.

²⁴ Robert C. Fuller, “Policing the Boundaries of Medical Science: Causality, Evidence, and the Question of Religion,” The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health (London: Routledge, 2021), 395.

²⁵ Epistemologically, Arthur Kleinman notes that in Western biomedicine's primary emphasis on the natural made “[t]he psychological, social, and moral . . . superficial layers of epiphenomenal cover that disguise the bedrock of truth, the ultimate natural substance on pathology and therapy, the real stuff: biology.” Arthur Kleinman, Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 30.

²⁶ This state process of regulating midwives and reproduction is a matter of biopolitics—meaning what French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault noted as the regulation of the population as species. See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 139. Yet I agree with anthropologist Carolyn Rouse's critique that the “overuse of biopolitics” overlooks the different ways in which certain racial “populations” benefit from state power and surveillance in contrast to “Black Americans who would love to be subjects of biopolitical regulatory controls if they were to receive quality health care.” Carolyn Rouse, “Necropolitics vs. Biopolitics: Spatialization, White Privilege, and Visibility during a Pandemic,” Cultural Anthropology 36, no. 3 (2021), 360–67.

²⁷ Charles McCrary and Jeffrey Wheatly, “The Protestant Secular in the Study of American Religion: Reappraisal and Suggestions,” Religion 47, no. 2 (2017), 257. I am also indebted to Vincent Lloyd's view of secularism as a mode of managing racial and religious difference. See Vincent Lloyd, “Introduction: Managing Race, Managing Religion,” in Race and Secularism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 1–19.

²⁸ For works on Liberal Protestants in medicine and public health, see Pamela Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Kristy L. Slominski, Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States (New York: Oxford University, 2021).

²⁹ Anthony M. Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 6. In his chapter 2, Petro argues how U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop represented the “moral politics of public health where medicine became intertwined with religion and politics.” Petro, After the Wrath of God, 56.

³⁰ The other trainees arrived on campus in August: Gertrude Brown, Marie Louise Peterson, Lille Mae McGill, Ruth Lee, Mabel Mathias, and Louise Brown. I cannot tell from the files if others attended the program with the first cohort. The second program appears to have begun on November 1. On October 24, 1945, Dr. Gates of Inter-Office of Communication told Ruth Mettinger that the budget had been approved to cover the course from November 12, 1945, to February 12, 1946. I'm also unable to tell how many groups of female trainees participated in the program.

³¹ Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College (FAMC; now University, FAMU), the state's first land-grant institution for Blacks, was founded with the passing of Senate bill 103 in the aftermath of the federal Blair Education Act in 1887. For a thorough history of FAMU, see Leedell W. Neyland, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University: A Centennial History, 1887–1987 (Tallahassee: Florida Agricultural and Mechanical Foundation, 1987), 1–10. For additional information about the place of the normal schools for freepeople that created the intellectual (e.g., liberal arts education for training teachers over against the Tuskegee Model) and material conditions of the State Normal School for Colored Students, later FAMC (and then FAMU), see Larry E. Rivers, “‘A Monument to the Progress of the Race’”: The Intellectual and Political Origins of the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, 1865–1887,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 85, no. 1 (Summer 2006): 1–41.

³² FAMC, Bulletin, 1932–33, 68. Credited to college president J. R. E. Lee, these reports about the school's happenings and budget were distributed to local state government. To petition for more resources at the hospital, in part to secure the college's accreditation for their nursing school, Lee asserted that the “hospital enjoys the distinction of being the only hospital between Pensacola and Jacksonville.” FAMC, Bulletin, 68. Also see J. R. E. Lee, Biennial Report, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes: For Biennuim, 1928–1930 with Budget Report for 1931–1933. Lee stated that “[t]he hospital is becoming a center, not only for the school, but for the entire [Black] community.” Lee, Biennial Report, 9. FAMC was the only hospital between Pensacola and Jacksonville during the 1945–1946 midwifery program. The hospital closed in 1971 in the aftermath of Civil Rights legislation of 1964. For more information on the history of the hospital, particularly in the modern Civil Rights period, see Darius Young, “‘When the Dark Clouds Gather on the Horizon’: The Closing of the Florida A&M University Hospital,” The Griot: The Journal of African American Studies 36, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 90–106.

³³ In 1945, hospital director L. H. B. Foote reported that FAMC served at least ten counties for over ten years—Leon, Gadsden, Wakulla, Jefferson, Taylor, Bay, Liberty, Calhoun, Madison, and counties in South Georgia. “Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College: Hospital Data,” FAMU Special Collection, 6.

³⁴ Lucille J. Marsh to Lucrecia Thomas, July 13, 1945, “Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” FSA. The same letter was sent to the other applicants too.

³⁵ Members of the first cohort reportedly included trainees Gertrude Brown, Marie Louise Patterson, Lille Mae McGill, Ruth Lee, Mabel Mathis, Louise Brown, and Marie Francis. I am unsure how many cohorts participated after the first group.

³⁶ Ruth E. Mettinger to Alberta Wright, May 23, 1946, “Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” FSA.

³⁷ For instance, Susan Smith argues that the program was discontinued because of the low participation resulting from its requirements that took predominantly Black female workers away from their many obligations and duties for three months. Also, women were required to “furnish” their own transportation.

³⁸ Paul J. Coughlin to Lucille J. Marsh, August 3, 1944, “Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” FSA.

³⁹ One paper listed some of the requirements for eligibility and completion of the program. On the “length of time of study,” trainees had to undergo three months of training or until “five deliveries had been observed and twenty women delivered.” “Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” FSA.

⁴⁰ For a discussion on the history of birth certificates as a mode of racial management in early twentieth-century Virginia, see Fraser, African American Midwifery, 44–49.

⁴¹ Paul J. Coughlin to Lucille J. Marsh, August 3, 1944, “Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” FSA.

⁴² Coughlin to Marsh, “Plan for Improving.”

⁴³ Smith, Sick and Tired, 219. Smith further notes that, in 1930, “80 percent of all remaining midwives practiced in the South, where most were African Americans.” Smith, Sick and Tired, 119.

⁴⁴ Kruse, Deluxe Jim Crow, 58.

⁴⁵ Kriste Lindenmeyer, “A Right to Childhood”: The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 238. The EMIC was based initially on a request for more support and care for pregnant mothers and families of servicemen from the Commanding Officer of Fort Lewis in Washington State in 1941. The EMIC existed from 1943 to 1949.

⁴⁶ Lucille J. Marsh, “Emergency Maternal and Infant Care Program in Florida,” Florida Health Notes 36, no. 5 (1944): 85–86. Marsh explained the details of the EMIC, such as that “[u]nder the provisions of the Florida Emergency Maternity and Infant Care program, hospitals are paid on the basis of a cost statement for as many days of hospitalization as the attending physician may deem necessary during the prenatal or six weeks postpartum time. Many of the wives in Florida are delivered by physicians in the Armed Forces.” Marsh, “Emergency Maternal and Infant Care Program,” 86. She also mentioned how infants up to one year of age were cared for, such as with immunizations and supervision. Marsh mentioned only one Black hospital involved in the EMIC program—Brewster Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. I need to do more research on the percentage of Black families under the EMIC program in comparison to their white counterparts.

⁴⁷ For a history on how nuclear “family norms” contributed to welfare policy (and its stratification) in the United States, see Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 1–13. For an extended treatment on the place of race and patriarchy in welfare policy (the stratification of distinction between social security and welfare that Gordon discussed), see Dorothy E. Roberts, “Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship,” Yale Law Journal 105, no. 6 (April 1996): 1563–602.

⁴⁸ Lucille Marsh, “Maternal and Child Health,” Forty-Fifth Annual Report of the State Board of Health for the Year Ending December 31, 1944 (Jacksonville: Florida State Board of Health, 1946), 132.

⁴⁹ Lucille J. Marsh, “Maternal and Child Health,” Forty-Sixth Annual Report of the State Board of Health for the Year Ending December 31, 1945 (Jacksonville: Florida State Board of Health, 1946), 63.

⁵⁰ “Negro Health,” Time 35, no. 15 (April 8, 1940).

⁵¹ “Negro Health,” Time.

⁵² The state comprises different individuals with different and conflicting political ideologies. For instance, many of the public health nurses formed organizations and lobbied for policies in the Progressive era that they enacted in the New Deal and World War II eras—meaning that they championed federal intervention, called for training public Black nurses, and thought Black and poor communities need more medical resources. Yet these public nurses were undermined by Southern male policy makers, private doctors, and civic groups that often denounced their initiatives and programs as a Bolshevized (or socialized) medicine. Thus they had to tread lightly in their own public health initiatives to not offend the Jim Crow order, which partly conditioned their efforts to target Black lay midwives and their conduct (as physicians were equally responsible for maternal and infant deaths). Nevertheless, this behavioral model in the midwife programs aimed at Black women still replicated racial logics that maintained segregation that contributed to the health and social plight of Black communities.

⁵³ In the history of the “long [medical] civil rights” in the 1930s and 1940s, there was a debate between liberal medical organizations on whether to direct their energies and resources to developing Black health infrastructure within racial segregation or to call for medical integration. For instance, the Rosenwald Fund's Negro Health unit championed the former while the many Black physicians of the National Medical Association—for example, W. Montague Cobb, Louis Wright, and Paul Cornely—stood for the latter.

⁵⁴ For the history of modern gynecology and obstetrics as practiced on enslaved women in the antebellum period, see Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017). Additionally, we cannot forget the negative eugenic practices (involuntary sterilization) used by medical physicians against Black women in the Southern states in the twentieth century. Black feminist legal scholar Dorothy Roberts notes that the campaign of involuntary sterilization that targeted Black women in the South accelerated in the World War II period. See Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 2017 [1997]), 89.

⁵⁵ Public health nurses often celebrated their statistical reports about the decline of lay midwives registered in Florida. A law passed in 1927 required all midwives to register with the State Board of Health.

⁵⁶ For more on Laurie Reid and her Progressive racial eugenics sensibilities, see Christine Ardalan, The Public Health Nurses of Jim Crow Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019), 61. Reid said she “[p]ersonally, . . . loathe[d] the midwife, and would be glad if we can have what I am firmly convinced every woman ought to have, a trained obstetrician, under [whose] care she should be from the moment she knows she is pregnant until she is safely over the first month following the delivery.” Ardalan, The Public Health Nurses of Jim Crow Florida, 54–55.

⁵⁷ Ruth Mettinger to Ruth Stuart Allen, October 8, 1945, “Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” FSA.

⁵⁸ Jule O. Graves, “The Midwife Program in Florida,” Public Health Nursing 31 (October, 1939): 531. Graves notes, “This procedure (ceremony) removes the possibility of needlessly hurting her (old granny) feelings, as she feels that she is not simply discarded.” Graves, “The Midwife Program in Florida,” 531.

⁵⁹ “The Midwife Law, 1931,” 2–3.

⁶⁰ Coughlin's idea was underdeveloped. Essentially, Coughlin wanted the younger midwives to fool the granny midwives into thinking that they were still doing all the delivery work in the community, when it would be the younger midwives, who were now more qualified with their more scientific training, who were actually doing the work. Paul Coughlin to Lucille J. Marsh, August 3, 1944.

⁶¹ Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 55. From the standpoint of the enslaved community, old age represented “a significant foundation of authority for black healers within slave communities.” Fett argues, “The elderly, though a small proportion of the southern enslaved populations, were honored for their learning and the services they continued to provide to slave communities [and whites, too].” Thus “[t]he active engagement of respected older women with the health of slave communities directly contradicted the score for ignorant ‘old women’ so prevalent in antebellum medical journals.” Fett, Working Cures, 55.

⁶² In her ethnography on African American lay midwives in Florida, Debra Susie's informants used granny to describe the midwives in the community. Yet Susie notes the term was debated at the Southern Granny Midwives Conference at Spelman College in June of 1984. Many attendees wanted to get rid of the granny label because of its “slave origin.” They preferred “traditional.” Susie, In the Way of Our Grandmothers, 1.

⁶³ Fett and others discuss the contradictions of the race during enslavement—meaning that Black women were delegitimated as ignorant, dirty, and evil, yet the slave planter class depended on them and exploited them for care and health work.

⁶⁴ I borrowed this quote from Fett, Working Cures, 53. Other scholars of midwifery often use Lula Russeau's interview to point to the intersection of midwifery and spirituality.

⁶⁵ Margaret Charles Smith, Listen to Me Good: The Life of an Alabama Midwife (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), 85. Smith was a member of Rehobeth Primitive Baptist church in Greene County, yet she noted that her “midwifery called to her more strongly than churchgoing did.” Smith, Listen to Me Good, 8.

⁶⁶ There was a debate between nurse-midwives and obstetricians. Few nurse-midwives criticized obstetricians for their professional yet impersonal approach to birthing that amplifies the pathological state that demands a comprehensive physical examination. Hazel Corbin asserted, “The coming of a baby into a family is more than a physical process governed by biologic chemistry and limited to the science of drugs, masks, routines, and methods.” Corbin called for a new philosophical approach to birthing that emphasized the whole person and their health and well-being. She states, “We have come to the point in obstetrics when we need a new philosophical concept of the aims and goals toward which we are striving. The whole emphasis must be shifted from the negative to the positive, from pathology to health, from the reproductive organs to the woman, the mother, the wife.” Hazel Corbin, “A Nurse Looks Ahead,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 51, no. 6 (June 1946), 813. I discuss this debate to think about the ways in which granny midwives represented a broader approach to birthing and care separate from modern obstetricians. For more on Black lay midwifery practices, such as “kind words” and “consolation talk” during labor, see Smith, Listen to Me Good, 89–91. Margaret Smith asserted, “Talk consolation. That's smart things. Some people have hard labor, and you be standing by feeling sorry for them. You would say inside of your heart, ‘Lord, have mercy on this person.’ That is very important because the Lord said to call Him pure and sincere from your heart, and He will hear you. If you're just phony, He don't go along with that. But if you say, Lord, have mercy on this person, He really would.” Smith, Listen to Me Good, 90–91.

⁶⁷ For information on the “triple consciousness”—the ways in which the bulk of the “responsibility for biological and social reproduction—was formative to the [religious] beliefs, practices, and motivations unique to enslaved women,” as it relates to ways in which childbearing and childrearing shaped the “womb ethics” (e.g., abortifacients and filicide) of enslaved women, see Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 2 and 50–94.

⁶⁸ For discussion on how enslaved women took some control in reproduction while male obstetricians denigrated but also adopted their knowledge and treatment methods in colonial Jamaica (e.g., oil therapies to treat dryness and cracking of breasts during feeding, West African bathing rituals, wet nursing and sociality), see Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 117–31. The authority of Black midwives and bondswomen took place amid the tension between white planters and obstetricians.

⁶⁹ C. E. Terry, “The Negro: His Relation to Public Health in the South,” American Journal of Public Health 3, no. 4 (1913): 301.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ Charles McCrary, Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 83–110.

⁷² For an insightful discussion on the knave–fool distinction, a secular discourse of (religious) sincerity, see McCrary, Sincerely Held, 47–51. Following this distinction, the implication of Terry's argument was that the granny was not “superstitious,” but used “superstition” on her incredulous and ignorant patients for material (secular) gain.

⁷³ Ruth Doran to Fred Hayes, November 13, 1944, “Plan to Improve the Midwife Service,” FSA.

⁷⁴ I borrowed this quotation from Smith, Sick and Tired, 125. Flex J. Underwood read this paper in front of the Southern Medical Association in 1925.

⁷⁵ For more on the constitutive trinary of religion, science, and superstition in the secular state, see Josephson-Storm, “The Superstition, Secularism, and Religion Trinary,” 1–20.

⁷⁶ Many of the Florida nurse-midwives—for example, Jule O. Graves and Ruth Mettinger—came to the Florida State Health Board in the aftermath of the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act. They were cultivated in the Progressive era that considered the practicality and morality of Protestantism as amenable to modern reproduction. I am also thinking about what Robert Orsi called the “hidden moral structure of religion” used by progressive-liberal frameworks to adjudicate good religion for liberal society while obliterating so-called irrational and unnatural superstitions. Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University, 2006), 177–203. They also embraced a Protestantism that was opened to scientific and medical advancement coupled with their willingness to advocate and work across the racial divide in public health in Florida.

⁷⁷ The White House has been hosting conferences on children since 1909. The 1940 conference was the first one that emphasized the place of religion in child development and parenting.

⁷⁸ Edward L. Israel, “Religion and Children in Democracy,” Proceedings of the White House on Children in Democracy, Washington, D.C., January 18–20, 1940 (District of Columbia, Children's Bureau, 1940).

⁷⁹ Israel, “Religion and Children in Democracy,” 30.

⁸⁰ “Midwife Indeed,” Midwife Manual (Jacksonville, Florida State Board of Health, 1936), 3. One of the verses reads:

⁸¹ See Muigai, Wangui, “Something Wasn't Clean: Black Midwifery and Postwar Medical Education in All My Babies,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 93, no. 1 (Spring, 2019): 82–113CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. I am arguing that the religious orientation of Cooley and broader African American religion was adopted to promote state-sponsored modern reproductive authority that separated her from the “old granny network” (as well as formally trained nurse-midwives).

⁸² I am referring to the film Let My People Live, sponsored by the Committee on Tuberculosis among Negroes.

⁸³ Graves, “The Midwife Program in Florida,” 527.

⁸⁴ Smith, Sick and Tired, 229.

⁸⁵ Inspired by Hampton Institute's Negro Organization Society, Booker T. Washington and his physician founded National Negro Health Week in 1915, before the United States Public Health Services’ Office of Negro Health Work took over the week (and the movement) from Tuskegee Institute in 1931/32. Observed during the first week of April, the Negro Health Week was a “social movement” designed to advance the health of Blacks mainly through education on modern techniques of heath care and to some extent also providing access to health care.

⁸⁶ F. Rivers Barnwell, “The Citizen's Responsibility for Community Health,” Annual Sermon for National Negro Health Week, April 2–9. In this sermon, Barnwell preached about “the responsibility of [the Black and professional class]” to be involved in public health programs and campaigns for the community. Born in 1883, Barnwell was an African American minister as well as health care worker in Texas. He was one of the committee members of Negro Health Week and director for the Committee against Tuberculosis among Negroes in Austin. He was the main preacher for the National Negro Health Week under the federal Office of Negro Health Work. I am currently writing on Barnwell and tuberculosis for another publication. I am thankful to Melissa Grafe and Quinton Dixie for sending Barnwell's sermons for Negro Health Week and other primary sources to me.

⁸⁷ Foster, W. F., “The Minister, The Church, and Health Education,” Florida Health Notes 36, no. 6 (June 1944), 111–12Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ Leavitt, Judith Walzer, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 195Google Scholar. Leavitt notes that “[b]y 1940, 55 percent of America's births took place within hospitals; by 1950, hospital births had increased to 88 percent of total; and by 1960, outside of some isolated rural areas, it was almost unheard of for American women to deliver at home.” Leavitt, Brought to Bed, 171. For more on male midwives, obstetricians, and gynecologists replacing women in birthing in the United States, beginning in the eighteenth century but accelerating in the mid-twentieth century, see Wertz, Richard W. and Wertz, Dorothy C., Lying-In: A History of Child Birthing in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989 [1977]), 29–177Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ D. E. White, “To Whom It May Concern,” April 2, 1945, “The Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” FSA.

⁹⁰ M. M. Lindsey, September 11, 1945, “The Plan for Improving the Midwife Service,” FSA.

⁹¹ On the racial and gender implications of the Protestant-secular, see Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

⁹² Susie, In the Way of Our Grandmothers, 71–106. Susie records that some old grannies felt that state nurses manipulated retirement ceremonies to force them out of reproductive care. They said they did not agree to retire from midwifery.

⁹³ Graves, “The Midwife Program in Florida,” 527.