By Marianne Scruggs and Judy Pruss Rogers
When a retired midwife friend told me about HOWL and suggested I write something about the beginning of the Association of Radical Midwives, I realized that next year, 2026, it will be 50 years since ARM began. Fortunately, I recently visited Judy Rogers in Ontario from Seattle where I now live, so we were able to resurrect the early days.
I realized that HOWL has a section about becoming a feminist and one on organizations – I am combining them here.
Judy Pruss Rogers and Marianne Scruggs
The Beginnings
It happened like this for me: I moved to the UK from the US in early 1974. For the previous seven months I had lived in Boston (USA) where I became a feminist, primarily due to an association with the work of poet Robin Morgan, and Judy Norsigian and Norma Swenson of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, who wrote the dynamite original book on Women’s reproductive health, Our Bodies Ourselves.* Today this unique book continues to change so much for women all over the world. Before that, there really was nothing from women to educate us about our bodies. The fact that it was done by sharing information between women set the tone for major consciousness raising everywhere.
Before I trained as a midwife, I became involved in reproductive rights and feminism. I went back to the US and volunteered briefly in two feminist women’s health clinics, helping with many types of abortions. I met many midwives and observed their practices.
Back in the UK, I went to some National Women’s conferences, where there was never any discussion of midwifery, or maternity care. By 1978 there were so many feminist factions, that huge national conferences were no longer held.
My direct entry midwifery training (a 24–27-month midwifery course for non-registered nurses) in Birmingham began in 1975. Mid training, I met Judy Pruss (later Judy Pruss Rogers), a lay midwife from Canada, who was just starting direct entry midwifery training. We talked excitedly for days about our ideas of midwifery and maternity care versus the sad reality of it in the UK. At the end of that meeting, Judy tells me I said, ‘If there are two of us, there must be more’. By early summer of 1976, we had our first weekend meeting, with ten student midwives and one staff midwife.
We called ourselves a study and support group; we taught ourselves skills and talked til the wee hours about our dreams of practicing ‘on our own responsibility’. We ranted about things done to women and aspects of our training. There was a lot of going to the pub.
Compared to midwifery as a whole in the UK, in the early days of our tightknit group, we were disproportionately young, more direct entry students than nurse midwifery ones, and perhaps had a bit more post-secondary education and travel experience. We were full of righteous passion, and the confidence of youth. All of us had been touched in varying degrees by the huge cultural changes taking place. We wanted to make a difference for pregnant women and midwifery, either in or outside the NHS, though our original purposes were just to learn skills that we weren’t being taught, and to support each other.
It’s important to understand the midwifery culture at that time. Midwifery was still seen as a vocation, not a profession. It was like the nuns in ‘Call the Midwife’. Midwifery was seen as obstetric nursing, even though we actually delivered most babies. There was absolutely nothing feeding the development of thought or practice. Although there were nursing journals and even a small midwifery publication, there was no serious professional journal for midwives or for that matter, nothing about the latest research or changes in practice. The primary midwifery publication was hopelessly antiquated: news of garden parties with the Queen for the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) leadership, etc. While both nurses and midwives could learn and function adequately without higher education, we were missing skills in critical thinking, as well as being actively discouraged from questioning the status quo.
We had biases, of course. We wanted continuity of care for women, where women would have care from only a small group of midwives they knew rather than whoever was on duty. We believed in more home births (which were less than 1% then), low episiotomy rates, section rates less than 15%, more natural births, ambulant labours, vaginal breech and twin deliveries, as well as lower augmentation rates (less use of both artificial rupture of membranes and Syntocinon, to make contractions stronger), and strong district midwife services. More than that, we wanted women to have more of a voice in their own care and midwives to have more autonomy, rather than being ‘part of a team’ where doctors made the policies and midwives carried them out.
We named our group ARM while walking home from the pub about a year after we began; It was Judy who laughingly said, ‘It HAS to be ARM,’ named after the ubiquitous use of Artificial Rupture of Membranes to accelerate labour.
Organizing for Change
A year after starting, we advertised in The Sunday Times and other places, and our intimate sisterhood inevitably changed, which was a good thing, but also quite sad for many. Like any group, we had growing pains concerning structure, decision-making, membership and direction. In retrospect, we would have greatly benefitted from help in organization building. Decision-making was particularly difficult, as voting, even with a high ‘yay’ rate, was deemed ‘patriarchal’. One time we spent three hours deciding whether to vote on whether to vote on an issue. What was decided at one meeting could be overturned in the next one when different people were present.
We became more involved in trying to influence policy. ARM was the first organization to publish a proposal for significant changes in the UK maternity services, The Vision, in 1986. This was followed by the RCM publishing a similar document, and the eventual creation of an expert panel by the UK government in 1991, which published Changing Childbirth in 1993. It supported many of the changes initially recommended by ARM in1986. Dramatic changes in midwifery education in the 1990s, some of which was due to the work of early ARM members, allowed midwives more possibilities to move into academia and research.
My own vision developed into wanting to keep midwives up to date on peer reviewed research relevant to midwives. The National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, whose groundbreaking meta-analyses on every maternity procedure had revealed that 75% of all the procedures used had never been proven to be efficacious, mentored me.
Originally, I started a subgroup in ARM. Eventually, I felt the project could be developed more quickly outside ARM. The project developed into MIDIRS – the Midwives Information and Resource Service.
By 1984, after I had an MSc in Medical Demography and Population studies, and was no longer practicing midwifery, I developed MIDIRS in my house – with the help of several ARM members.
Three or four times a year we put out about 125 pages of abstracts of research, newspaper clippings, and reprints of research articles we could get permission to copy. We would review 400 national and international publications including those covering obstetrics, nursing, perinatology, midwifery, anesthesiology, health visiting, pediatrics, as well as trends in childbirth in the popular press. I learned more about poorly done and biased research than I thought was possible.
Eventually, MIDIRS got Greater London Council funding for three years. We were a hit: 13,000 members in our first six months from all over the world. ARM still exists; MIDIRS is now housed in the offices of the RCM.
I moved back to the US in 1989 with my husband and twin babies. Judy Rogers moved back to Canada in 1990 and contributed to the legal recognition of midwifery in Ontario, and the creation of the first midwifery degree programme in Canada. She is the only midwife from early ARM (that I know of) who has continued to deliver babies continuously and with true continuity of care, for 50 years – about 2700+ deliveries. She and her daughter have a community practice in rural Ontario. She retires in early 2026. Below are citations of articles from both ARM’s early years and some of Judy’s relevant articles from the 1980s and 90s.
What difference has ARM made? Hard to say, but I think of ripples caused by pebbles in a pond: certainly, ARM members helped to legalize midwifery in Canada, and most likely helped to strengthen the profession in the UK, and perhaps Australia.
Looking back 50 years, early ARM and MIDIRS were peak experiences in my life, and I know in the lives of many others.
Publications by Judy Pruss Rogers
Rogers, J. ‘Birth of a Profession’, Midwifery Matters, vol. 57, Summer 1993, pp. 22-23.
Rogers, J. ‘Practitioner in your own right – myth or reality – your choice’, Midwives Chronicle and Nursing Notes, vol. 104, no. 1240, May 1991, pp. 131-134.
Rogers, J. ‘Midwives or Maternity Nurses?’, Midwives Chronicle and Nursing Notes, vol. 99, no. 1185, 1989, p. 238.
Rogers, J. ‘Getting Closer to the “Vision”’, Nursing Times, vol. 82, no. 37, 1986, p.67.
Rogers, J. Co-author, The Vision – Proposals for the Future of the Maternity Services, Association of Radical Midwives: UK 1986.
ARM: https://www.midwifery.org.uk
*See the HOWL Publications List for Our Bodies Ourselves, including the British edition edited by Angela Phillips and Jill Rakusen