Birthing Tray - Wishbone

Based on a print illustrating the birth of Julius Caesar included in an early modern manuscript of Roman history, Les Faits des Romains.

‘Birthing Tray – Wishbone, also based on a fifteenth-century print, shows the male surgeon extracting the baby from the mother’s side, while a female assistant, on the right, holds out a cloth to receive the child. But while Dixie has included the outline of a woman who kneels in prayer at the far side of the bed, the midwife – a marginal figure partly obscured by the doctor in the fifteenth-century source – is excluded entirely. In Birthing Tray – Wishbone, then, Dixie offers a stark juxtaposition of the active male medical practitioner and the female assistant who simply submits to his authority, thus exposing – even more than in the print that served as her source – a process of divesting women of participation in obstetrics and gynaecology that had begun to be implemented in the fifteenth century.’ (Extract from Figuring Maternity: Christine Dixie’s Parturient Prospects by Prof. Brenda Schmahmann, Dearte n75_a4)