According to histories of maternity care written throughout the twentieth century, having a baby in nineteenth-century Australia and throughout the British Empire was a very risky business, largely because maternity cases were attended by women without any education or training. Such histories celebrated the removal of uneducated women from midwifery practice as a health reform welcomed by women, and emphasized medicine's and trained nursing's superior scientific knowledge as pivotal in transforming maternity care. More recently, this long-standing perspective has been questioned by some within the profession of midwifery, and by midwifery advocates in Australia and elsewhere. This follows a worldwide professionalizing movement aimed at uncoupling midwifery from its association with nursing and installing midwifery as a separate and distinct profession. In part, this professionalizing stance has been justified on a revisionist interpretation of maternity care history. As the argument goes, midwifery in the nineteenth century was an ancient lore practised by autonomous women who had childbearing women's best interests at heart. This perspective contends that doctors, aided by the nascent profession of nursing, hoodwinked women into biomedical care based in hospitals by declaring home births unsafe and by denigrating women who attended at them. Revisionists argue that medicine simply wanted to control maternity because it was a lucrative area of practice.

Given the polarization of these perspectives, it is hard to know if either reflects the reality of birth for women in the nineteenth century.