The campaigns for men to become midwives in the 1970s

The oral testimony of forty men entering nursing (1950-2000) and twenty men entering midwifery (1970-2000) in Australia is littered with descriptions of gender discrimination. Men identify many of the barriers they encountered entering a female dominated profession. The Nurses' Registration Act in the States of Victoria (1958) and Tasmania (1952) explicitly stated no male could be registered as a midwife and this paper focuses on the personal accounts of three men (1974-1976) to change this legal impediment. In twenty-first century Australia the percentage of male midwives, like many countries around the world, remains very small, and depending on the state or territory of Australia is between 1 to 2.7 percent.