On Women’s Relationships in Call the Midwife

Since I caught up with the first few seasons of Call the Midwife on Netflix and then started watching live on Masterpiece, I’ve gone from liking to really loving this series.  Compelling drama, great characters, frothy humor, more than that, I’ve really come to love how the women on this show lean on one another (some series 5 spoilers.)

The reason I started Call the Midwife in the first place was because I heard that it was a great show for complex, rootable female characters; in a large ensemble of what’s current a dozen-plus regular characters, the series has never had more than three or four prominent men at any one time, and those terrific women are delivered in spades.  As individuals, I love pretty much everyone, but it’s in how they relate to each other, as well as to their many patients, that we get the real magic. 

Although I always appreciated this Bechdel-Test-acing aspect of the show, something really crystalized for me in the series 5 Christmas special.  One of the one-shot Poplar residents we meet in that episode is Iris, a church member in her mid-40s who lost her only child years ago in infancy and was never able to conceive again.  Her niece’s pregnancy has brought all that grief up afresh, and she’s struggling through the holiday season.  In a small scene that doesn’t even involve any of the main characters, Iris is in Violet’s haberdashery, and Vi brings up her recollections of Iris’s daughter.  Iris is touched that, though it’s been years, Vi still remembers the little girl’s name and has specific reminiscences about this child who was only a baby when she died.  I was so struck by this little scene of one woman comforting another, unsolicited, over a long-lingering tragedy.  I love that Vi remembers all this and that she reaches out without needing to be told that Iris is having a hard time.  For whatever reason, that’s when it really hit me.

It’s only natural that women giving support to one another would be the lifeblood of the show, given the subject matter, but what the series does with it is just gorgeous.  The midwives empathize tenderly with the wide range of women they care for, despite differences in circumstance, race, experience, and socially-perceived “moral failings,” and when one of their own is suffering – often because of something they’ve witnessed on the job – they step in to comfort her in any way they can.  So many women are in stories that revolve around men, and so many of the women with their own stories are surrounded mainly be men, so it really is something special to see these soft moments where women provide strength to one another with no men present. 

Some of the loveliest something-in-my-eye moments from this past season including Patsy providing understanding to Nurse Crane over an “improper” relationship (drawing from her own unspoken experience,) Sisters Monica Joan and Mary Cynthia praying with Sister Julienne after the brutal death of the thalidomide baby, Nurse Crane trying to make young Mrs. Dawley believe that she’s worth being loved, and, most heartwrenchingly, Sister Monica Joan gently bathing Sister Mary Cynthia in the aftermath of her attack.  All of these women have had to weather incredible storms, and they get through them, not because they’re made of steel, but because they have friends and colleagues who stand by them and help carry them through when they’re too buffeted to do it alone.  How exquisite is that?