Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times (The Midwife Trilogy #1)

by Jennifer Worth

Obstetricians also doubted the female intellectual capacity to grasp the anatomy and physiology of childbirth, and suggested that they could not therefore be trained.

“She’s a caution, she is. You wouldn’t fink she’d been in the Docks all through two world wars, and the Depression, would you? She’s delivered thousands of our children. In the Blitz she wouldn’t leave. She delivered babies in air-raid shelters and church crypts, an’ once in what was left of a bombed house. Bless ’er. If she wants the crispy ones, she can ’ave ’em.”