Seattle Pioneer Midwife: Alice Ada Wood Ellis, Midwife, Nurse & Mother to All was written and published in 2023 by Susan E. Fleming, RN PhD Perinatal CNS. Susan was a member of my childhood ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—we’ve both moved since then, but I remember Susan as a cheerful, generous, helpful woman with a great sense of humor. Therefore, while this is an honest review, it cannot possibly be free from bias. I reviewed this book anyway, because I believe in the power of stories, especially stories of women, and especially stories of women who are not famous. Also, I spent much of my childhood in Washington state, so it was interesting to glimpse some of the growth and development of the Seattle from the eyes of a single mother. Alice Ada Wood Ellis was Fleming’s great-grandmother on her father’s side, and presumably was of particular interest to the author due to their mutual professional work in the medical field, specifically that of labor and delivery nursing. However, Alice lived a full and unexpected life that, I believe, makes her life an interesting story to those of us who are not her relations. Lastly, I’ve learned that the biographies of women can give new insight into the details of familiar historical eras. They may even combat some prevailing false beliefs of what the past was like, and highlight the stories of other women. [1] For example, this book speaks extensively about the childbirth experiences of prostitutes during the gold rush, which is not a common topic during society’s current and sanitized “sex work is work” posture.
Alice’s life began full of promise. Fleming reports that Alice came from a stable, happy home in Milwaukee. She had a father, mother, and sister, and her mother sometimes helped women in the family and neighborhood give birth. When she came of age, Alice enrolled in nursing school, but never graduated because, in tale as old as time, she fell in love with the wrong man, married him too quickly, and against her parents’ wishes. In those days, Fleming reports, married women were not permitted in nursing school (or at least that nursing school) so Alice had to drop out. She and her new husband, Gideon, moved from Milwaukee to South Dakota, far from her disapproving parents. Alice got pregnant against the wishes (if not the actions) of her new husband, who put his faith in questionable contraceptives. Fleming used the euphemism “stormy” to describe the volatile marriage after Alice told Gideon of her pregnancy. After Fleming glosses over the conflict, she skips ahead in the story until Alice is on a train back to her parents’ home to give birth.
The birth of Alice’s first daughter, Myrtle, is the first of many birthing stories shared in the pages of this book. During early labor, Alice’s mother turned to some unconventional methods: chores. She began by having Alice fold laundry. When the contractions became more intense, she gave Alice some bread to knead and some butter to churn. While Alice was shocked at her mother’s methods, and even perhaps offended, Fleming added commentary that the modern medical community might call this “evidence-based practice” because the tasks “distracted the mother from the pain and allowed women to move in a rocking motion and remain upright-all while caring [sic] out a meaningful task.” Alice’s sister helped by massaged Alice’s back and made wax paper by melting wax onto brown paper to prepare the bed for delivery and post-delivery clean up.
Five months after Myrtle arrived, Gideon showed up, and whisked Alice and their firstborn back to South Dakota. For a year, none of Alice’s family heard from her until she showed up, pregnant once again, on her parents’ doorstep, with Myrtle in hand. Alice declared to her parents “I will never spend one more minute of my life with Gideon. I am finished. This is not a marriage worth saving. I am done.” Well, as Fleming noted, Alice may have been done with Gideon, but this did not mean her challenges were over. She finalized her divorce with Gideon later in 1900, and he joined the navy. Before he left, he stopped by and asked Alice if he could take Myrtle. Fleming indicates Alice thought “Think again, Gideon! Over my dead body! No way will you take either girl—now or ever!” She did not apparently voice those thoughts, instead carefully explaining that he could not take care of a child while deployed with the navy. He barely looked at the new baby and his second child, Marie, and left.
Soon, Alice’s parents became interested in the Seattle Klondike Gold Rush, sold their home, and moved to Seattle. Alice joined them. While Fleming said adventure and gold motivated the family’s move, she also suggests that the family may have also been trying to save face as Alice lived as a divorced single mother of two in 1900. In some ways this was easier to face in a new place that was crowded and chaotic. The family bought two houses in the Green Lake area of Seattle, one for Alice and her girls and one for Alice’s parents. Alice applied to be a nurse in the hospitals in the area, but because she never graduated from nursing school, she was unemployable as a nurse at a formal institution. However, after a nun at a Catholic hospital told Alice she couldn’t work at the hospital without a nursing degree, the same nun told her to contact Dr. Harry Brown. The doctor lived in the same Green Lake community as Alice and her family, and was looking for nursing support for his practice. When Alice spoke to Dr. Brown, he said he was fine with her incomplete nursing degree, and with the limited experience she had with helping women in childbirth, with her mother. He explained that he was trying to give pre-natal maternal care to the pregnant prostituted women so common in rapidly growing, male-dominated Klondike and Seattle gold rush areas. The nature of prostitution resulted in many pregnancies in the age prior to modern contraceptives. He told her that the Catholic institutions take in the destitute pregnant prostitutes, but that many prostitutes actually had plenty of money and wanted specialized and private birthing care. Because of this, Dr. Brown suggested that Alice create a private birthing practice for these wealthy prostitutes in her home. So she did.
Alice’s new business led to the very best stories of the book—the births and life experiences of some of the prostituted women of Seattle and Alaska, including their names and the names of some of their babies. I’m not sure where else the names and stories of prostitutes are recorded and remembered, besides maybe the census. Many of the women were as tough as the lives they lived, which included abusive and extreme experiences which often resulted in challenging births. Alice used many of the techniques her own mother used to keep the women busy and distracted from the pain of childbirth, and even designed her own tools, like a birthing chair modeled after spinning wheel stools. I suggest you get the book to get the details of their stories! Fleming took the opportunity of this publication to record some childbirth norms and practices and tools contemporary to Alice’s lifetime, and whether those practices are now considered dangerous. Spoiler alert: many of them were. For example, one medical instruction manual suggests using mercury-based corrosive-subliminate tablets as an antiseptic. The same manual suggests potty training babies starting at 3 months old—I wonder how that went for frontier mothers! Washing cloth diapers probably was a major motivation to attempting that timeline.
While Alice’s story was compelling, this book was organized in a way that left me a little confused. After about the first half of the book, the chronology started jumping around, which made it difficult for me as a reader to connect events and relationships. Details, like the premature baby Samuel who was the son of a prostitute and then adopted and raised by Alice’s children, were introduced as a major plot point, and then barely resolved. I felt like scribbling “what else??” in the margins, page after page, because I wanted to know more about each prostituted woman’s story, and the stories of their babies. I wanted to know the details that support Flemings’ claims like that Alice knew her neighbors were concerned about the work she did and the clientele she served in their neighborhood, and that she eventually knew that they came to accept her business. Most of all, I wanted more details about the births and Alice’s birthing process. A few things, like keeping the women busy during early labor, and the equipment Alice may have used, were mentioned once or twice, but I think that after putting “midwife” on the front cover, I would have expected more details of Alice’s experiences helping women give birth. Of course, if the book included every detail I wanted, it would have been a much longer book and more expensive to publish, so I understand why the stories were kept short.
Ultimately, Alice lived through not only an incredible set of life experiences, but also major world events that affected her life and career, including reports of the Bubonic plague in Seattle, the influenza pandemic, the Klondike gold rush, the development of Seattle, World War I, the Great Depression, and more. Fleming’s record of Alice’s life, while not as complete as readers may wish, still adds a great deal of nuance to the history and growth of the Seattle area.
NOTES:
[1] See my SquareTwo review of the autobiography Recollections of a Handcart Pioneer of 1860: A Woman's Life on the Mormon Frontier by Mary Ann Hafen in our Fall 2024 issue here https://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleBellHandcartPioneer.html
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Full Citation for this Article: Bell, Emilee Pugh (2026) "TITLEGOESHERE," SquareTwo, Vol. 19 No. 1 (Spring 2026), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleBellPioneerMidwife.html, accessed <give access date>.
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