Briefly explain from the conflict and symbolic interactionist perspectives, how physicians were able to eliminate midwives as business competitors

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Although symbolic interactionists acknowledge the political aspect of how physicians, rather than midwives, became responsible for the care of women during childbirth, they stress that the key to understanding this shift from midwife to physician care was the redefinition of pregnancy and childbirth from a natural event to a medical condition. This redefinition transformed pregnancy and childbirth into a condition that required the assistance of an able man and made childbirth "men's work." By redefining this work, the prestige of this work went up as well as the price. Applying the conflict perspective to the shift in responsibility from midwives to physicians involved a gender based power struggle by the predominantly male physicians against the midwives who were virtually exclusively female. The conflict perspective emphasizes the struggle for scarce, but valuable resources by the more powerful physicians and how they utilized political pressure to obtain a monopoly on the practice.