This episode is all about the experience of getting and being pregnant, as well as the process of childbirth. Lots of fantastic insight from Lorna Giltrow-Shaw, Dr. Hannah Lilley, Amie Bolissian, Dr. Sara Read, Lesley Smith and Dr. Tara Hamling. Featuring the beautiful voices of Richard Bunn, Sarah Horner and Tim Atkinson.
This episode is all about the experience of getting and being pregnant, as well as the process of childbirth. Lots of fantastic insight from Lorna Giltrow-Shaw, Dr. Hannah Lilley, Amie Bolissian, Dr. Sara Read, Lesley Smith and Dr. Tara Hamling. Featuring the beautiful voices of Richard Bunn, Sarah Horner and Tim Atkinson.
[music]
[00:00:02] Anjna Chouhan: Welcome to Shakespeare's Pants, the podcast that explores the ins and outs of English domestic activity during the life and times of William Shakespeare. My name is Anjna, and I'm a Shakespearian, which is a strange thing to do with one’s life. But, in my attempt to be useful for a change, I'm using my otherwise pointless superpower to make history and literature come together for you, my lovely listeners; and so without further ado, here with my podcast, Shakespeare's Pants.
[gong]
[00:00:37] Jingle: Shakespeare's Pants.
[00:00:41] Anjna: In this episode, I'm delving into the world of pregnancy and exploring the ways in which people understood getting pregnant, the actual experience of pregnancy itself, and finally the process and paraphernalia of childbirth. So let's to it with Episode Five: Pregnancy and Childbirth.
The primary function of sex was to conceive, and so naturally, advice about how to do this with ubiquitous in terms of hand-me-down knowledge as well as household manuals and medical texts. In the previous episode of Shakespeare's Pants, we learned about church, state and medical attitudes towards sex, what was both moral and appropriate for the young and older bodies. In addition, we learned that sex was advocated within Protestant marriage for the primary purpose of procreation. Reams of material was written, published, republished, and passed down the ages to help women conceive. The most famous and oldest being the Trotula from the 12th Century. We'll return to published work shortly, but first, we have to understand that domestic medicine was primarily a female territory. This is Amie Bolissian who is going to explain more.
[00:02:00] Amie: The vast majority of treatment would have been dispensed by somebody in your own household or somebody in your community. There were men involved as well in what some people called domestic medicine, but I would say the vast majority were women, and this network of information, of remedies, medicine, advice, and then women who simply went through their communities dispensing medical knowledge, expertise, caring, and the hands-on physical work of caring for patients.
[00:02:40] Anjna: Women who helped out in the birthing department, were known as gossips. Dr. Sara Read explains more.
[00:02:48] Sara: The idea of a gossip, it derives etymologically from God's helper. The same way as godparents. What I like most about the idea of gossip is how reciprocal it was. I'd be your gossip and you'd be my gossip. It's all about this female companionship and helping you through the process.
[00:03:05] Anjna: Negative connotations of the word gossip, derived from this process of women sharing ideas and news amongst themselves.
[00:03:15] Dr. Read: The idea is that in the gossiping, no holds barred women, female only space we could talk about anything we wanted to. One of the things you get in the misogynistic satires on marriage is talking about in the gossiping chamber, about women bitching about the quality of linen and other people. Always you find a hole in some [unintelligible 00:03:32] hold it up and show it off round the room and make fun of them, things like that.
There is definitely this idea that women are talking about men and sexual prowess and things like that, and that's exactly where the negative connotations of gossip come from.
[00:03:46] Anjna: As well as domestic medicine being about caring and sharing of knowledge within female communities, hand-me-down knowledge of conception ranged from sexual positions through to the temperature in the room. There were certain things that you could do to ensure that a healthy child was conceived. This is historian, Leslie Smith.
[00:04:08] Leslie Smith: If you want to have a boy, you need heat. If you keep having a girl, you're getting wet and cold. Women were cold, wet, lacking morality. If they were born under Aquarius, they'd even more [unintelligible 00:04:21]. If they're born under a hot sign, and they had red hair, they'd be masculine, because it's heat.
[00:04:30] Anjna: By the mid 1500's, conception was widely understood to take place only after both parties reached climax, and this is because both men and women were understood to have seed. Female seed was linked to periods, and much anxiety about and indeed after conception, was centered around periods, because menstrual blood was thought to be important to nourish a baby inside the womb.
Now this is in large part why older women men who took younger husbands were considered selfish and indulgent, because they had either ended or were nearing the end of their courses, they were considered unworthy recipients of a young man's seed, but because menstrual blood left the body once a month, this was considered a categorical no go for sexy times. This is Dr. Sarah Reed.
[00:05:24] Dr. Reed: The best time to conceive was thought to be after a period was finished, in the days just afterwards. The idea was, because the womb was nice and clean at that point, and it was fresh and ready to receive the conception. There was no concept of ovulation at all for another 100 years or so. Sex during a period, not only was it forbidden in the Bible, also culturally or medically, it was thought that it would cause deformities on the child that was conceived.
It wasn't that you couldn't conceive during the period, it's just that the signs will be there for all to see, and it could be something as simple as your child being born with red hair or with strawberry birthmarks, or even to something as dire as being born with leprosy.
John Evelyn, the late century diarist, he writes a letter to his son when he gets married and tells him to not do that, because then the whole world will see that, "You couldn't control yourself just for a few days every month, and it would be there for everybody to see. These ideas were really deeply culturally embedded.
[00:06:30] Anjna: As well as having domestic culturally embedded rules and remedies for getting pregnant, medical texts, namely midwifery manuals expounded on medicalized understandings of conception. Swiss physician Jacob Rueff, published a midwifery handbook in 1554. It didn't make it into an English translation until 1637, but it was known as The Expert Midwife, and in it he explains the popular understanding of seed.
[00:07:00] Male Reader: After the womb, which is a generative member of the female sex, have conceived the seed of man, it doth add mix and mingle her seed also to it so that of both the seeds of both sex, they may be made one mixture.
[00:07:19] Anjna: Pseudo-medical, and indeed official medical texts like Rueff's were in abundance throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. One such was a midwifery manual called The Birth of Mankind, translated by Thomas Reynolds from the 1545 version, Sarah Reed mentioned it in Episode One. Sara also tells me that such books were incredibly commonplace.
[00:07:43] Dr. Reed: We do know that young people were looking at these reproduction guides to find out how to do things and what went on. They were often quite inexpensive, low-quality versions, mass production versions, going through hundreds of editions. The Birth of Mankind stays in print for 100 years, and it's fascinating really, isn't it, to think that a medical textbook as it purports to be when it comes out in 1540, would still be in print largely unchanged in in the 1630's.
[00:08:15] Anjna: Reynold's groundbreaking translation contained birth figures or illustrations of the birth canal, never before published in English texts, but more unusually for the period, Reynolds was explicit about the experience of female arousal.
[00:08:33] Male Reader: In women, having great and fervent desire to any man, this seed doth issue from this foresaid place, down along to the woman's preview passage moisturizing all that part as it were with a dew.
[00:08:46] Anjna: Inevitably, in publishing guidance about how to achieve a female orgasm, along with diagrams of wombs and vaginal pathways, such books became a form of soft pornography to the point where authors felt obliged to tack on disclaimers to their work. Here's an extract from the preface of Reynolds' translation.
[00:09:08] Male Reader: Where for, considering that there is nothing in this world so necessary, nor so good, holy or virtuous, but that it may, by wickedness, be abused, it shall be no great wonder though this little book also made written and set for for a good purpose, yet by light and lewd persons be used contrary to godliness, honesty or the intent of the writer.
Therefore, less that some ill disposed person should wickedly abuse such medicines as be here declared for a good purpose to some devilish and lewd use. What I mean by the lewd use of them, they that have understanding right soon will perceive.
[00:09:59] Anjna: Similarly, Jacob Rueff's midwifery book had this, in its preface.
[00:10:04] Male Reader: Some perhaps say it is unfit that such matters as these should be published in a vulgar tongue for young heads to pry into. True, if by other means it might be affected. To conclude, I say only this, my intentions herein are honest and just, but young and raw heads, idle serving men, profane fiddlers, scoffers, jesters, rogues, [unintelligible 00:10:34], pack [unintelligible 00:10:37], I neither meant it to you, neither is it fit for you.
[00:10:44] Anjna: Notwithstanding the more salacious uses of these books, they proved invaluable for physicians and the enormous network of women and midwives for whom childbirth was a communal and important bonding experience. Let's turn to Sara
for an explanation about who midwives were and what their duties involved.
[00:11:09] Dr. Reed: Midwives are apprentice trained. Often, mother, daughter and midwives called their apprentice their deputies and they did a pair of three, six years of training and then they were licensed by the church. They do the equivalent of the DMV, the background check and see if you're a good repute, you're a good Christian woman and your testimonials stack up. If all that's true, then the bishop who are licensing you to take an oath in church. There's various versions of it, but one published version from mid-century, there's 15 points that you agree to.
They include things like if the child is stillborn, that it's up to the midwife to give it a decent burial. Obviously, it can't go in consecrated ground because they'd be baptized, but they must bury it in a suitable place where it can't be dug up by dogs or hogs and things like this. This is actually mentioned in the oath and that you won't do any harm and this type of thing. They were very much seen as professionals.
[00:12:08] Anjna: Midwives were qualified, if not medically, then at least administratively, and their duties were clearly laid out and commonly understood. Assuming that a woman got pregnant and that she was happy about it, what was the actual experience of pregnancy like? Noted writer and indeed playwright Thomas Dekker in his prose satire, The Bachelor's Banquet from 1603 mocked the many cravings that a pregnant woman experienced and lamented the inevitable woes and expenses incumbent upon her husband to cater to her appetites.
[00:12:45] Male Reader: She can brook no common meats but longs for strange and rare things and whether they be it be hard or no, yet she must have them. There is no remedy. She must have cherries, though for a pound he pay 10 shillings or green peas cods at four nibbles a pick. Yay, he must take a horse and ride into the country to get her green codlings when they are scarcely so big as a scotch button. In this trouble and vexation of mind and body lives the silly man for six or seven months, all which time his wife does nothing but complain.
[00:13:19] Anjna: This characterization of the woman as lazy and demanding was very much a satirical bachelorhood assessment, but humor aside, it does throw some much-needed light on the supportive and nurturing role that men played in the whole process of pregnancy. They were perhaps a little more hands-on in their care giving than we might somewhat lazily assume. Generally speaking, women were advised to undertake moderate exercise, avoid raw fruits and take extra care during times of plague. This is Lorna [unintelligible 00:13:54], who at the time of this recording was herself pregnant.
[00:14:00] Lorna: They did take into account that there would be pregnant women during these various plague epidemics, so they needed to cater for that. There was one specific preservative for a woman with child, and I'm quoting here, sorry so, "Or such as to be delicate and tender and cannot away with the taking of medicines."
It essentially recommends toast made with white bread with a little good quality rose vinegar sprinkled on it, but it just state that if good vinegar isn't available, then just put a little bit of butter on your toast, which who doesn't want that? It does also say, if you're a vulnerable person or a pregnant lady and if you do have to venture outside, you can smell or chew the root of Angelica or Valaria. These are all kind of really accessible things that a woman could do.
[00:14:55] Anjna: If you were a woman of status and wealth, there might have been a desire to document and celebrate your pregnancy, and this gave rise to what has recently been termed pregnancy portraits. To explain more about this, here's Dr. Tara Hamling.
[00:15:13] Tara Hamling: The pregnancy portraits have been recovered really recently. They were entirely neglected or unrecognized. They were recognized by Karen Hearn who was then curator at the Tate Museum, and she noticed that some of the women in some of the early portraits in her collection looked pregnant. Some of the examples of women are very obviously pregnant, and this convinced her that this was a thing in the early modern period. It seems to have come in the first decades of the 17th century.
There are a limited number of these portraits because, in order to have an oil painting in the early modern period, you needed to be very wealthy, so this is something that middling sorts would not be able to commission. I think they do tell us quite a lot about changing attitudes towards pregnancy. On the one hand, it's something to commemorate a mark with a significant condition of the portrait. The woman that's pregnant is being celebrated.
Her sexuality is being celebrated. Her ability to conceive is being celebrated, which is quite a move away from the Catholic emphasis on virginity. Obviously, the Virgin Mary was pregnant, but it was a very particular situation, so these women are being celebrated for being actively sexual and it was their jobs ultimately.
[00:16:30] Anjna: The experience of being pregnant is best documented by Shakespeare in The Winter's Tale, where the first half of the play is dominated by the Queen, Hermione's, pregnancy. Everything about her is celebrated and cherished until she's thrown into prison for alleged infidelity whilst still pregnant. Once a woman was ready to give birth, she was confined to a room for her own safety. There were things that she might do to ease her discomfort depending on her sort and the resources to which she had access, one of which was the medicinal bath.
[00:17:08] Dr. Reed: For a woman expected to give birth, she was advising some midwifery guys to take a bath, but it was a herbal bath with specific herbs added to it that would make her body more pliant and make the birth easier, so rather than just being-- because she'd feel nice after she's had a bath.
[00:17:26] Anjna: Safely confined and ready to give birth, a woman would rely on her network of gossips to step in for support.
[00:17:36] Dr. Reed: Gossiping is quite a physical thing to do. It must have been really exhausting because you would hold the woman up, you'd be mopping her brow, you'd be giving her any food and drink that the midwife said she could have. It was a really active role.
[00:17:50] Anjna: Actually, giving birth was obviously not risk-free, but the process itself was fairly ritualized.
[00:17:59] Dr. Reed: People always gave birth upright unless you were out. Upright means either in a chair, a special birth chair, which is very much like a closed stool. It's a chair with a hole cut out of it, but instead of it being a circle, it was a horseshoe, and then midwife would kneel in front of you. The chairs are about 10 to 13 inches off the ground so that the woman could brace when the contractions came and the gossip sitting behind you, supporting you, holding your arms.
If you didn't have access to a birth chair, you would sit on the edge of your bed, most likely with your gossip sitting behind you, so you were sitting between her legs and using her as backrest, which is a much better position to give birth in than lying flat on your back. That was the way women gave birth back in ancient times, it's in the Bible.
There's evidence from ancient Egypt about special birth stones that have been set up in pretty much the configuration of a birth chair. So it just seems to be that physiologically throughout the ages, that is the way that women always gave birth.
[00:18:53] Anjna: Once the baby was born, the mother was still expected to remain in confinement, and this is exactly what doesn't happen much to everyone's horror, in The Winter's Tale. After Hermione gives birth to a baby girl in prison, she is immediately hauled into a courtroom and charged with treason. She laments that amongst other injustices, she is denied her childbed privilege. "My third comfort starred most unluckily is from my breast, the innocent milk in its most innocent mouth held out to murder. Myself on every post proclaimed as trumpet with a modest hatred, the childbed privilege denied, which longs to women of all fashion."
[00:19:44] Dr. Reed: One interesting thing in The Winter's Tale is where Shakespeare talks about the woman's month, the period after birth which was highly ritualized, so you're expected to stay in bed for a month after giving birth, but not laying there. There was a routine to it. You would lay flat, for the first couple of days. Then you were allowed to sit up, the up sitting after a few days you were well enough. After a bit more you could [unintelligible 00:20:10] around your chamber. It get's to a stage, towards the end of the month, where you're going around the house doing bits and pieces of light housework and things like that. It's very much a staged recovery.
There were lots of stories about gentle-- gentry, laying in for six weeks or longer, but working women [unintelligible 00:20:30] dresses being back at the trade within three weeks because they couldn't afford to take a month off because it's not just you taking the month off. Working-class women have always worked, it means your husband, because you'll be working, probably from home, in the same trade together and he would have to take a lot of time off or not be as productive because he'd be minding the children while you were laying in.
There'd be an awful lot of pressure on lower-ranking women to get up a bit sooner and be back at work. There are case notes of women being back and certainly [unintelligible 00:21:04] being back at their trade within three weeks of giving birth.
[00:21:09] Anjna: Earlier on, Sara mentioned how gossips were sometimes mocked for comparing childbirth linen and the bathing chamber. To explain more about what childbed linin was, here is Dr. Hannah Lilly.
[00:21:23] Hannah: Child's bed linen is a collection of clothing and clothes which was used during and just after labor. Childbirth demanded a lot of clothes and clothing for both the baby ad the mother as it does today. New mothers need a lot of new clothes. These items were often gifted to pregnant women or they were left to women by their female relatives in wills or borrowed from friends and family as well.
Because buying new clothes for every child would have been out of the financial reach of many women. within 16th Century society. [unintelligible 00:22:00] status, materially, child bed linens would have to be quite resilient because they were being reused again and again by mothers who might have a lot of children and they could also be passed on across generations until they wore out.
[00:22:19] Dr. Reed: The ability to commission, bequeath, and reuse such linen, was part of a wider attempt to savor and pass on narratives from mother to daughter or daughter-in-law. To take some ownership of the materials one owned and cherished as a woman, this is Tara, again.
[00:22:39] Tara: What these women were worried about was the high infant and indeed mortality rate for childbirth. There was always a sense, when you're pregnant, of whether or not you and your child would survive. Women, while they were pregnant, would write a series of guidance notes to their unborn child of how they would like them to be raised, and sometimes they are addressed directly at the child. Sometimes they are addressed to the child and the husband as to how the mother would like the child raised.
Some of these women's legacies went on to get published because they didn't survive. It gives a voice to these women who didn't survive childbirth but wanted to be a mother. I think that they're incredibly moving documents. I think the investment in the event of childbirth is a really interesting question because it's difficult to tell from documents like inventories and wills just exactly the nature of items.
Sometimes they don't go into enough detail, obviously, that knowledge would have been obvious to them, but what we know about preparations for childbirth would involve this closure of the chamber to close off [unintelligible 00:23:43] and keep out my asthmas. That would have involved hangings around the chamber. It's possible that some of these textiles were actually, again, among the wealthier shots were commissioned specifically for that event and then reused. Obviously, the hope was, you don't want several children and then again, perhaps become [unintelligible 00:24:03] to be passed on to your children and their children.
That kind of investment at the point childbirth could be seen as very long-term, I think. There's an example in the Shakespeare birthplace trust collection of some painted clothes that are all about a marriage, a biblical marriage. That would seem to me to be obviously linked either to marriage or to childbirth. These sort of items were usually either usually either commissioned or acquired in relation to a particular event, but the idea is to stretch out that event for as long as possible. The early modern ideas of the lifecycle were loops. There was no sense of beginning, middle, middle end.
It was continuous, birth and marriage and death are all conflated partly because [unintelligible 00:24:50] evolved her marriage would lead to childbirth that would lead to death. That could all happen very closely together, but in an ideal situation where those rituals, those events are actually marked by a long passage of time, but still, there's connections between them to express through material culture. It comes back to that idea of always thinking about your mortality, your lifecycle in relation to your afterlife. The fact that this is just a temporary state.
[00:25:17] Anjna: Whether or not biblical imagery on hanging clothes around the birthings too were helpful to a woman in labor, might be open to speculation, but the ritualization of birth, I think, certainly reminds us that our female ancestors were heavily reliant on one another as well as on each other's advice and experiences in addition to the medicalized narratives around conception the experience of pregnancy and childbirth itself. Remember to stay temperate. Eat lots of buttered toast, and definitely assemble your womenfolk for wisdom in any crisis.
That's the end of this episode of Shakespeare's Pants. Join me next time as I navigate the realms of hair and beauty in early modern England.
In this episode, you heard from Dr. Sara Read, Amie Bolissian, Leslie Smith, Dr. Hannah Lilly, Dr. Tara Hamling, and me, Dr. Anjna Chouhan. You also head the voices of Richard Burn, Tim Atkinson, and Sarah Horner. Thanks ever so for listening, Adieu!
[00:26:30] Automated Voice: Shakespear's Pants.
[00:26:35] [END OF AUDIO]