Margaret Stephen (midwife)

Margaret Stephen was a British midwife, midwifery teacher and author, active in London in the late 18th century, who published Domestic Midwife (1795), one of a handful of textbooks on midwifery from that era that is by a woman. She was trained by a male student of the famous male midwife, William Smellie, and practised for more than thirty years. She may have attended some of Queen Charlotte's births. Her own pupils were all women, and she is the only female midwife recorded to have used an obstetrical machine in her instruction.

Her manual, addressed not only to midwives but to all women who might become pregnant, mixes anatomical and physiological information, instruction about care for the mother during and after labour, and non-medical topics such as strategies for protection against accusations of misconduct. Published against a background of increasing male dominance of the midwifery profession, the book promotes the idea that female midwives, particularly those who were (like Stephen) themselves mothers, were the natural default for normal births. Stephen favoured a non-interventionist approach to labour, and her book strongly criticises some male midwives for an overreliance on the use of forceps. While Domestic Midwife was not particularly well received by critics during her lifetime, the physician and medical historian James Hobson Aveling describes the book in 1872 as "perhaps the best upon the subject that has been written by any woman" in English.