For many women, childbirth is transformative. For Dr Erin Maglaque from our Department of History, it also sparked an exploration into how history has shaped understanding, expectation and perceptions of the female body.
In her new book, Erin combines archival research with personal experience to offer a powerful new perspective on women's bodies through time. Here, we speak to Erin about the work.
Q. Erin, blending archival research and lived experience is an unusual approach to a historical book - tell us more about it.
A. I had the idea for the book on the postnatal ward, in the days after my son was born. He had been delivered by forceps, and as a gender historian, I knew that forceps were invented in the eighteenth century. I had this sense that I had gained a different kind of proximity to the past; I was in touching distance.
Before, my understanding of the history of female experience had been constructed entirely through archives and libraries - that is, through words. I wondered if it was possible to write a history of the female body that took embodied experience seriously as a way of knowing the past.
Q. What did your research reveal and what surprised you most.
A. I am fascinated by the patterns of change and continuity that I found in the ways that people imagined the female body. So much changed in the eighteenth century: medical understandings of sex and gender; ideas about foetal life, conception, and abortion; practices of midwifery and obstetrics, breastfeeding and wet-nursing. But there's continuity, too. Even while medical language and scientific writing changed rapidly, women's own language for describing their bodies often stayed the same - like the vagina as a 'Rose half-blown,' in the seventeenth-century English midwife Jane Sharp's lovely phrase. I loved tracing these changes and continuities.
Q. What sort of changes in understanding did this involve?
A. One really interesting shift is in the understanding of the foetal body. For most of the sixteenth-century, a foetus became a human at the moment of animation: when a clump of flesh was endowed with a human soul. This mapped onto the quickening, the moment when women first felt pregnant - when they first felt foetal movement. This meant miscarriage or abortion before animation (or the quickening) was not seen as the loss of a life, or of a possible life. In a way, this was a much gentler understanding of foetal life; one that encompassed pregnancy loss, as well as the need, sometimes, for termination.
But this changed across the early modern period. Developments in obstetrics and embryology in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries contributed to this, with some medical writers arguing that life began soon after conception. By the end of the eighteenth century, attitudes towards abortion had hardened quite severely.
Q. Why are these insights so important to understanding women's experiences today?
A. Sometimes, these histories show that the way we currently understand the female body is not the only way. We often think of the past as harsher, especially the early modern past, where religious ideas about the body and sex played such a central role. But that misses out some of the complexity of pre-modernity, and that deep faith could (at times!) coexist with gentler ideas about sexuality and reproduction. I think that's useful to remember today, when there is a general trend towards greater authoritarianism concerning women's reproductive lives.
By using memoir and writing about my own experience, I also wanted to reanimate a past that is partly lost to us: eating, sleeping, washing, caring, desiring. I wanted to make the past not only intelligible, but present, and immediate in the writing. I think all of that matters too.
Q. What excites you about this book?
A. I'm excited for the book to find its readers. I've learned so much from readers who have told me about their own experiences, and this has by far been the best part of publishing a book like this one.
