Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England, by Sarah Fox

Sarah Fox richly documents the experiences of pregnancy, labour, delivery and recuperation among a northern English eighteenth-century population. Scholars working on the history of human reproduction have tended to emphasise the relationships between mothers and their birth attendants, and consequently have focused on the moment of birth itself. Fox instead steps back to provide a panoramic view of birth not as a single event, but as ‘a process—a series of linked and flexible stages’ (p. 1).

The book thus captures a quite different reproductive world than that represented in studies focusing on the role of the midwife and man-midwife (or accoucheur, as Fox prefers). Fox jettisons the historiographical debates surrounding man-midwifery, emphasising that whether a male practitioner attended a delivery or not, his presence was temporally limited compared to that of female midwives, relatives and neighbours who journeyed with women across their entire pregnancies.

Chapters traverse the experiential stages of birth from conception to baptism and beyond. They also move through a series of concentric rings inhabited by different individuals. The story begins with the mother herself and moves outward towards her midwife, the occasional male practitioner, the community of women, the newborn, the pregnant woman’s own mother and sister, her husband, and the neighbourhood. As Fox travels from the mother’s body outward across the entire experience of pregnancy and recuperation, she effectively shows how birth saturated early modern and eighteenth-century lives and spaces.

Fox gathers disparate social historical materials together, including private texts from well-known correspondents and less-known writers. She also incorporates some northern circuit assize records and Old Bailey accounts of infanticide cases as well as tantalising accounts from folklorists who recorded traditional customs and beliefs. Ultimately, it is correspondence that provides Fox’s most significant material as numerous letter-writers described their physiological experiences, emotions and interpersonal relations.

Fox pays close attention to the pregnant body itself, charting the evidence hinting at women’s knowledge and feelings. She gathers clues from epistolary correspondence and midwifery and obstetrical texts to describe what pregnancy, breastfeeding and labour itself may have been like. However, she cautions that comprehending earlier bodily experiences remains elusive and cannot be presumed to be identical to our own. She notes that the task is even more challenging because very little textual evidence survives of eighteenth-century women describing the immediate physical and emotional experience of birth itself. (Elsewhere, Fox mentions that one of the privileges of pregnancy among middling and elite women was a hiatus from their normal letter-writing duties [pp. 41–2], which may help to explain this lacuna.) Fox works around the absence, partly by including information from print sources and partly by incorporating neurobiology. Her goal here is to develop an ‘embodied’ history of birth from women’s own subjective points of view to shed light on ‘the way in which historical bodies “felt”’ ‘potential sensations’ (p. 14).

In addition to charting the body’s reproductive experiences, Fox addresses the materiality of reproductive lives, including the exchange of childbed linens and breast-feeding advice, the rearrangement of domestic spaces to accommodate birthing mothers, and numerous social practices such as the neighbourly giving of eggs, salt and bread to newborns (pp. 114–15, 175–7). Her thoroughly documented social history of childbearing from conception to lying-in demonstrates how birth was not yet a ‘medical’ category. Her presentation also suggests how male practitioners’ textbook descriptions of reproduction did not always align with the practices and experiences of ordinary eighteenth-century women, whose lives were seemingly perpetually engaged with pregnancy, whether their own or that of their family and friends.

Although the accoucheur does not have a central role in Fox’s project, another man does: the husband. And here, Fox develops valuable insights into both familial relations and the mentality of the eighteenth century. Chapter Four examines different family members’ roles, including that of fathers, whose duty it was to lead prayers and model appropriate spiritual and moral behaviour for the entire household. Fox’s thoughtful examination demonstrates that birth was more than somatic and social; it was also an experience shaped by emotions, feelings and faith. Religious matters were largely ignored by contemporary medical authors (and consequently sidelined by some medical historians of birth) who emphasised the physiological and medical aspects of child delivery. However, by viewing birth as a long, many-months process involving individuals beyond mother and midwife, Fox recovers the vital place of spirituality, religion, hopes, fears and customs and the practices of family members who were also invested in the survival of mother and child. This is an engaging and valuable social historical study, offering insights beyond reproductive processes and practices to shed light on domesticity, the family, neighbourhood custom, eighteenth-century letter writing, and the history of the body more broadly.