Interview with Nursing Clio Prize 2024 Honorable Mention Cara Delay
For Nursing Clio’s fifth annual best article prize competition, we awarded an honorable mention to Cara Delay, Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina, for her article, “In All Circumstances’: Home Births and Collaborative Health Care in Ireland, 1900-1950.” I had the pleasure of interviewing Cara about her fascinating work on the history of domestic health care and home birth in twentieth-century Ireland.
Courtney: Congratulations on receiving an honorable mention for Nursing Clio’s award for best article! Could you tell our readers more about your research interests in general?
Cara: Thank you so much. I’ve been a part of NC for so long, and it’s such an honor to be recognized. My research broadly focuses on reproduction, past and present, in Ireland and the American South. I’m a historian but also work on current issues, such as the effects of the Dobbs decision on abortion access in the American southeast.
Courtney: You have published a number of topics related to women’s history, most notably your first book, Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism, 1850-1950 (2019). Your work has recently turned to reproductive health history and activism, as exemplified by your co-written book Birth Control: What Everyone Needs to Know (2020), and your co-edited volume Catching Fire: Women’s Health Activism in Ireland and the Global Movement for Reproductive Justice (2023), as well as your recent articles on menstruation, contraception, and abortion. What led you from women’s religious history to reproductive health history?
Cara: While researching Irish Catholic women’s rituals, I came across several related to pregnancy and birth, and realized there wasn’t much research on such topics. At the same time, when I taught women’s history, students were always most interested in reproduction. I was always conscious of current issues/activism but, as my interest grew, I became more involved in research on today’s world. It took me a while to realize that I could research what I was interested in and passionate about personally!
Courtney: Your article explores the development of home birth in Ireland in the early twentieth century, painting a complex picture of the domestic reproductive health care and the intersecting work of different kinds of practitioners, especially “handywomen.” Could you say more about the role of handywomen in the Irish medical marketplace, and how you came to center them in your story?
Cara: There’s been some great work on handywomen lately by scholars such as Ciara Breathnach, so I didn’t initially intend to center handywomen in the article. But then the sources kept speaking to their importance, and I started to realize that their interactions with birthing people and other practitioners were key to understanding what birth was like at the time–in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Also, handywomen kept appearing in sources like newspapers that no one else has really looked at before. You’re exactly right that they were part of the Irish medical marketplace, but they’re often not recognized as such.
Courtney: In your essay, there are some very striking and poignant accounts of the work of handywomen and their encounters with their patients pulled from your sources. Can you tell our readers about these sources?
Cara: In the article, I use sources from nursing journals/annual reports; letters/correspondence from nurses, midwives, and even priests; memoirs; and newspapers. The newspapers were surprising; I didn’t expect to find information about handywomen and collaborative care in them, but some newspapers summarized legal cases in which handywomen themselves spoke in court, so those ended up being valuable. When you’re researching a topic like this, I discovered, you need to mine a variety of archives and sources.
Courtney: Are there any interesting tidbits that you couldn’t fit into the article?
Cara: There were! I wanted to add a section about the material culture of childbirth—the things related to birth—that all practitioners and birthing people were really committed to, but it just didn’t fit. Some handywomen or midwives brought towels for women to pull on during labor, and some women preferred to give birth on straw. Some even brought devotional items such as scapulars to birthing spaces. Maybe that’s another article!
Courtney: Is this article part of a bigger project? What’s next for you on the research front?
Cara: It’s actually not part of a bigger project right now (although you never know!). Right now I’m finishing a monograph on the history of abortion in Ireland and am editing the multi-volume Bloomsbury Cultural History of Pregnancy and Childbirth. Both should be out in 2026, so stay tuned!
Featured image caption: “Pioneer birth scene,” engraving, ca. 1887. (Gustave Joseph Witkowski/US National Library of Medicine | Public domain)
Courtney E. Thompson is an assistant professor in the history of science and medicine and gender and women’s history at Mississippi State University.
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