In an epilogue, we learn that the midwife’s community grows until Etta is born there over a century later. “Journaling caught on as a fad, then became embedded in the culture.” Near the end of her life, the midwife delivers a live baby who grows up, the first sign that life will go on in the world. Much of the midwife’s story is told through entries in her journal, and when she finds a small community and settles down, she teaches them to keep journals, too. That moment of connection, of being understood that passed easily between equals.” At one point she thinks that “more than food or drink, more than hot showers springing miraculously from the wall in the bathroom, more than television and Internet and the buzz of strangers, almost more than the feeling of safety and not having to constantly be on guard, she missed conversation. This becomes a pattern, and she keeps herself alive and out of bondage to a roving gang of men against overwhelming odds.įor a while the midwife calls herself Dusty and lives with a Mormon couple who have left their community, but while the company is welcome, they don’t have much in common. The first time she meets two men traveling with a woman, she barters for half an hour with her and then proceeds to give her birth control and advice. She has a stock of medicines, including birth control, and a gun she found while scavenging through empty houses. Waking up in the hospital where she worked as a labor and delivery nurse and finding herself one of the very few women left alive, she quickly figures out that she must present herself as male and trust no one, after a few encounters with groups of men. The unnamed midwife is a woman who lives in the San Francisco area before the pandemic and survives the fever.
More than just a dystopian setting for an exploration of human foibles, this particular setting-after a pandemic that kills mostly women and makes childbirth deadly for both mother and infant-is the backdrop for an exploration of feminist power.
All three books are fast and easy reads but thoughtfully constructed. The three-book series that begins with The Book of the Unnamed Midwife is a delight. Went on a Meg Elison rampage recently, and I read everything I could find by her.
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