Winner of the 2005 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize
Winner of the Sierra Prize of the Western Association of Women Historians 2005
Winner of the Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society Best First Book Award
Shortlisted for The Whitfield Book Prize 2005
Birthing the Nation
Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons
Lisa Forman Cody
Price: £76.00 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-926864-1
Publication date: 3 February 2005
374 pages, 55 b/w illus., 234x156 mm
A sample of this book is available in PDF format
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| Reviews |
| - 'Cody's most important achievement is to show that birth is a tool for historical analysis, a tool which brings to light struggles over issues as key as gender relations, national identity, racism and the growth of the modern state.' - Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, Book Prize Committee
- 'Cody straddles some of the most significant and distinctive themes of the long eighteenth century ... [she] teases out a novel interpretation of a well-rehearsed medical development, and presents it in a way which cannot help but have impact on the reader.' - Alysa Levene, Reviews in History
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| Description | | - Examines why male obstetricians triumphed over female midwives
- Many provocative and strange illustrations and examples
- Emphasizes the construction of masculinity and men's relationships to women, family, and other men, rather than primarily viewing the history of birth as strictly women's history
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How could the professional triumph of man-midwifery and contemporary tales of pregnant men, rabbit-breeding mothers, and meddling midwives in eighteenth-century Britain help construct the emergence of modern corporate and individual identities? By uncovering long-lost tales and artefacts about sexuality, birth, and popular culture, Lisa Forman Cody argues that Enlightenment Britons understood
themselves and their relationship to others through their experiences and beliefs about the reproductive body. Birthing the Nation
traces two intertwined narratives that shaped eighteenth-century British life: the development of the modern British nation, and the emergence of the male expert as the pre-eminent authority over matters of sexual behaviour, reproduction, and childbirth. By taking
seriously contemporary caricatures, jokes, and rumours that used gender, birth, and family to make claims about religious, ethnic and national identity, Cody illuminates an entirely new view of the eighteenth-century public sphere as focused on the bodily and the bizarre.
In a monarchy arbitrated by its official religion, regulation of reproduction and childbirth was vital to the very stability
of British political authority and the coherence of British culture, challenged as it was by Catholicism, the French Revolution, and social change. In the late seventeenth century, the English feared the power of female midwives to control the destiny of the royal family, yet men-midwives and male experts had hardly proved their superiority to manage the successful birth of children. By the
mid-eighteenth century, however, male midwives became experts over the domestic world of pregnancy and childbirth, largely replacing female midwives among the middling and elite families. Cody suggests that these new professionals provided a new model for masculine comportment and emergent intimate relationships within the middle-class and elite home.
Most surprisingly, Cody has discovered many
interconnections between obstetrics and politics, and shows how male experts transformed what had once been the private, feminine domain of birth and midwifery into topics of public importance and universal interest, leading even Adam Smith and Edmund Burke to attend lectures on obstetrical anatomy. This is the first book to place the eighteenth-century shift from female midwives to male midwives
as the dominant experts over childbirth in a larger cultural and political context. Cody illuminates how eighteenth-century Britons understood and symbolized political, national, and religious affiliation through the experiences of the body, sex, and birth. In turn, she takes seriously how the political arguments and rhetoric of the age were not always made on disembodied, rational terms, but
instead referenced deep cultural beliefs about gender, reproduction, and the family.
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Readership: Students and scholars of women's and gender history, the history of medicine, and the body and sexuality; historians of eighteenth-century Britain.
| Contents |
1.
Introduction
2.
Mothers, Midwives, and Mysteries
3.
Abortions, Witches, and Catholics: Reproduction and Revolution
4.
'Is not your Lordship with child too?': Pregnant Fathers and Fathers of Science
5.
Imagining Mothers
6.
Breeding Scottish Obstetrics in Doctor Smellie's London
7.
Revolutionary Bodies in the Britain of George III
8.
Sex, Science, and Race
9.
The State Takes Charge: Conceived, Consummated, and Counted
10.
Epilogue
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Lisa Forman Cody, Associate Professor of History, Claremont McKenna College
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The specification in this catalogue, including without
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and month of publication, was as accurate as
possible at the time the catalogue was compiled.
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