Ask the Author Part the Second: For want of a nail

[attackfish]

Ganked from askerian by way of suzukiblu

Inspired by Doctor Who's "Turn Left:" Pick one of my stories and tell me a point in the tale that you'd change. Something tiny (e.g. "and then Harry told a knock knock joke instead of a light bulb joke") or big (e.g. "and then June found Koh's spine and ripped it out before he could crush her arm and steal her face") and I'll tell you how that one difference would have altered the course of the entire story.

Comments

[roachpatrol.livejournal.com]

Considering the way Civilized Western Society handled things for a long time, the male healers would have considered themselves 'professionals' and had women around to do the cleaning up, i.e getting the icky barf and blood out of the way after the men had done the important chakra realignment stuff. Or possibly women healers would only have been allowed to heal women? They certainly wouldn't have ever been allowed to learn how to fight, no society busy disenfranchising a group wants that group to know how to kick some ass. The Northern Water Tribe has some serious Issues, man...

[clockwerkchaos.livejournal.com]

Yup, though they might not even be allowed to heal women. Remember, in western society "midwives" were pushed out of even helping to give birth by doctors.

...


Oddly enough I had a cyberpunk AU which had this premise for it's waterbenders. As technology advanced, the "combat" aspect of waterbending became less and less important, but the healing became more so. Thus, the males pushed the females out of their traditional role. Only "professionally-trained" waterbenders (male-dominated) were considered appropriate for high stakes healing.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

And at the time this was happening in the real world, doctors still really knew nest to nothing, whereas midwives had a boatload of traditional knowledge. Doctors waged a cultural smear campaign with huge amounts of racism showing a filthy poor black woman midwife asking if they wanted that woman touching their child as well as a legal campaign to make midwifing without a medical license illegal. This of course was at the time that docs still believed in hysteria caused by uterine malfunction. Maternal and infant mortality soared. It's these sort of underhanded life endangering tactics that the men in the Northern Water Tribe would have used. I wonder if also in a Victorian model would women have become "angels of the house" and a cult of domesticity have been born as they were kicked out of their other traditional occupation? Probably.

We didn't see the lives of poor NWT members at all, if they exist. Obviously poor women have always worked.

[(Anonymous)]

And at the time this was happening in the real world, doctors still really knew nest to nothing, whereas midwives had a boatload of traditional knowledge. Doctors waged a cultural smear campaign with huge amounts of racism showing a filthy poor black woman midwife asking if they wanted that woman touching their child as well as a legal campaign to make midwifing without a medical license illegal. This of course was at the time that docs still believed in hysteria caused by uterine malfunction.
--
I agree with all this. However I'm a bit curious about this.

-Maternal and infant mortality soared. -

The first professionalization for midwifery took place around the 18th century, with a second wave around the early 1800. The earliest remotely reliable data I can find for infant mortality is around 1850 (http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haines.demography). Which doesn't mean anything, it's not my area of expertise, but I'd love to look at the data from earlier. Any chance you could direct me to where I could find it?

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

According to the NIH and National Library of Medicine, the rates of maternal mortality in England (The records were better there, why the U.S. NIH was keeping the data...) in doctor and midwife kept records in the 18th century (which they were already starting to be careful about, though governmental involvement in those records would come later) Midwife and surgeon home births accounted for between 5 and 29 maternal deaths per 1000 women, depending on the location and how maternal death was calculated. The numbers shrank as the use of certain surgery techniques were mostly abandoned in favor of midwife style techniques on the parts of surgeons. However, as lying in hospitals became more common, their maternal death rates were calculated to be 85/1000, likely due to pore sanitation and a greater willingness on the part of doctors to take surgical solutions. Since the big push by doctors was not only to get rid of midwives but move births into hospitals. Since lying in hospitals and physician assisted birth was still relatively rare, and midwife and surgeon home birth was improving, this did not effect average birth and death rates.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

This AU sounds interesting. link?

[clockwerkchaos.livejournal.com]

Just an idea at the moment, haven't posted it at the moment. But give me a day or two and I can post the write up I have.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Thanks XD.

[clockwerkchaos.livejournal.com]

This.... thing, balllooned in to a 11k monstrosity of a write up that reads like the revenge of my econ major. But, it is final completed (in two parts). Here it is.

http://clockwerkchaos.livejournal.com/

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

This. Men taking women's roles before women have started taking men's leads to something similar to what happened in the Western early Industrial era, with women's work on the farm no longer needed and male "scientific" doctors (medical science being in its infancy, they weren't all that scientific, as I'm sure you know) taking over female herb healing roles. Women were displaced completely, and the ones well off enough not to have to work in factories were pushed into a solely domestic role and devalued further even while they were being touted as pure, pure paragons of virtue, charged with raising moral youth and taming their menfolk. In other words, things would have gotten worse for our NWT ladies.