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Dora Black (1867-1964) was a Jewish midwife, who became well known for her work around Manchester in the early 20th century. The records Black kept of the 890 births she attended between 1913-1934, have been described as 'meticulous', and an important 'repository of bygone maternity culture'.

Life and work

Dora Black was a Romanian émigré, born in Fochon, Romania in 1867.

Dora and Solomon Black had eight children together. Their eldest son, Myer, was killed in France during the First World War while serving with the King’s Liverpool Regiment.

It is not surprising, then, that émigré women in the former Jewish Quarter typically preferred to birth at home with the support of local and valued maternity carers, such as Dora Black. Dora began supporting mainly émigré women through childbirth and postnatal care just before the First World War broke out, and was trained by an elder midwife who Dora knew from Roumania. Whilst Dora practiced as an ‘unregistered midwife’, Lou Black described how his mother was regarded locally by the affectionate status of ‘Bobby Black’ – the Yiddish term for grandmother as well as midwife (also heyvn). Tucked away at the Manchester Jewish Museum is Dora’s ‘baby book’, etched with the records of 890 births that she attended between the years 1913 to 1934 (Figure 3.1). Dora’s maternity book maps out the considerable distances she travelled on foot or by tram when attending births, from the slums and predominantly émigré areas around Derby Street, right through to the Northwardly and more affluent neighbourhoods. Her book is a repository of a bygone maternity culture, holding scores of names, addresses, labour dates, attending Jewish physicians, sex of newborns and occasionally a tender annotation of ‘stillborn’ (Figure 3.2). Stillbirths were not officially recorded in England and Wales until the year 1927, signalling how meticulous Dora’s records were. Caring for women during childbirth was the main source of Dora’s family income, though she also gained extra money by providing postnatal guidance around infant bathing: She’d showed the first time, the newly wedded, mother … how to bath the baby, put it in the water and hold its head up and sometimes she would show two or three how to bath a baby. Then when the bath was empty … they’d throw coppers in the bath. That was her perks, butt geld [sic], bath money. Sidney Taylor recalled how the former Jewish Quarter ‘depended’ on its popular midwife, in his words, ‘you know the “heimeshe” people, they always have somebody that they know from the “heim” that is always at [their] beck and call’. Émigré Jewish women in Manchester continued this tradition of birthing with ‘heimishe’ midwives, though Sidney described his (anglicised) generation as having ‘newer ideas’ by instead electing to labour in local hospitals. He said, ‘you progress here’, which captures how the emerging generation of English-born Jews were assimilating to the ideal that hospital care was the ‘modern’ way to birth in the early decades of the twentieth century.

External links

• Article mentioning Dora Black in Shifra: a Jewish Feminist Magazine (1984)