Beds as Emotional Spaces

In my last blog post, I looked at beds as physical spaces – spaces to be dressed, and protected.  Today I would like to delve into the idea of beds as emotional spaces.  If (as I suggested in my last post) beds were the stages upon which the dramas of family life were played out then they were also containers for the emotions that these dramas created.  Many of these emotions were intensely conflicting.  As a married couple, for example, much of your love and intimacy would be contained within the bed curtains.  This would be where you prayed together, where you talked through the business of the day, and of course, where you had sex.  Yet, the bed could also be the location for arguments, marital violence and rape.  The popular contemporary term ‘curtain lecture’ suggests that the bed was associated as much with marital discord as it was with marital bliss.

The childbed was no less emotionally conflicting than the marriage bed.  It was the place in which you held your child for the first time, the place that you nursed your infant, the place where you might watch your child sleep, where they would open their eyes for the first time to see your face.  It would be a mistake to assume that mothers in history did not experience these events as emotionally as we do now.  Yet, even the positive emotions of motherhood must have been tempered by the memories of other emotional events that had taken place within the curtains of that bed.  The relatively high likelihood that the infant gripping your finger for the first time would not survive to see its first birthday can only have heightened the complicated emotions that were experienced within the childbed.

Of course, the childbed itself could be viewed with fear and trepidation as well as anticipation.  As much as pregnant women and their families looked forward to the arrival of their ‘little stranger’ many also wrote wills as their delivery time approached in case they ‘were call’d away in giving birth to another’.[1]  The vast majority of women would have known at least one close friend or family member who had died in childbed.  The autobiography of Yorkshire gentlewoman Alice Thornton really brings home the complexity of interweaving emotions in the early modern birth process.[2]  Alice wrote in great detail about the birth of her fifth child, Robert, in 1662.  Robert was her third son, her first son had been born breech (feet first) and had died within half an hour of being delivered.  Her second, William, survived only two weeks before succumbing to smallpox.  Of her other four pregnancies (one of which had ended in miscarriage) only two of Alice’s babies were still alive when she went into labour with Robert.  Already, then, Alice’s childbed must have been the container for a maelstrom of conflicting emotions.

Sometime after the delivery Alice began to haemorrhage violently.  Her autobiography records that there were ‘such excessive floods all that night, that it was terrible to behold to those about me.’  Alice was so ill that she was ‘without hopes of life; spirits, soule and strength seemed all gone from me.’  So certain were they that she was going die, Alice’s ‘deare husband, and children, and friends had taken theire last farewell.’  Alice’s childbed, where she had recently brought a new life into the world, was about to become her deathbed.  Nor was this an unusual situation.  Alice was, in fact, saved by a powder that she had prepared herself and had used on other women in the same situation as she now found herself in.

The bed contained all of these emotions.  It was already a symbolic object – the bedstead, the mattress and the bed dressings signified adulthood, household, and family.  Yet, as family members were conceived, born, nursed through illness or died within its curtains the bed acquired layer upon layer of emotional significance.  The memories of saying goodbye to a parent within its curtains, as Alice Thornton’s children had, the memories of nursing a child better from smallpox, of losing another child, of a marital consummation, or a marriage-changing row – these memories and their associated emotions were contained within the bed curtains.  And these are just the exceptional memories.  The bed also had potential to be the site of much more everyday memories and emotions – of warmth and comfort, of worry and bone-aching weariness.  The bed was not just the largest and most expensive piece of furniture that most people owned, it was the emotional heart of the household.

Recommended Reading

Sasha Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England (London: Yale University Press, 2016) particularly chapter four ‘Sleeping at Home’

[1] Will of Rebekah Bateman, dated 8 April 1787 (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University).

[2] The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton of East Newton, Co.York (Elibron Classics, 2005).

Setting the Stage: The Childbed

I know, I know.  It’s been ages (again).  I would offer you the usual excuses (post-doc applications, job hunting, life, etc.) but you’ve heard them all before.

In my last blog post, I wrote about locating birth within the household – just where did women give birth to their children?  This time, I am going to narrow the focus a bit by writing about the childbed.  Now, those of you that have attended any of my recent public talks will know that I am a little obsessive about beds and their different manifestations.  In almost all houses, beds were the stages upon which the dramas of family life were played out.  Birth, death, sickness, sex, intimacy, arguments, violence – all could be played out within the curtains of the same bed.  Beds signified status, wealth and even (as you will see if you sign up for the next instalment of this blog!) neighbourly interactions.  Unsurprisingly, then, the bed was central to the process of giving birth in the eighteenth century.

Upon recognising the signs of early labour, the bed needed to be prepared for the messy business of giving birth.  Most professional midwives recommended that women give birth in bed on a complicated arrangement of sheets to protect the expensive mattress from what Professor of Midwifery at Edinburgh University described as the ‘stagnant animal effluvia’ of birth.[1]  Nice.  To many of these writers, it was important not to move the new mother once the infant was delivered, so the layers of sheets were designed to pull out from under her to keep the bed clean.  Our old friend William Smellie recommended that:

The London method is very convenient in natural and easy labours; the patient lies in bed upon one side, the knees being contracted to the belly and a pillow put between them to keep them asunder. But the most commodious method is to prepare a bed and a couch in the same room, a piece of oiled cloth or dressed sheep skin is laid across the middle of each, over the undersheet, and above this are spread several folds of linen, pinned, or tied with tape to each side of the bed and couch; these are designed to spunge up moisture in time of labour and after delivery, while the oiled cloths or sheep-skins below, preserve the feather bed from being wetted or spoiled: for this purpose, some people lay besides upon the bed, several undersheets over one another, so that by sliding out the uppermost every day, they can keep the bed dry and comfortable.[2]

Alexander Hamilton’s method of preparing the bed required no less than six sheets in addition to an oil cloth, a hair mattress and a coarse blanket.[3]  Clearly, both men had their wealthy patients in mind in making these recommendations.

Despite their wealth, however, Hamilton’s and Smellie’s clients were as likely to borrow their childbed linen as purchase it.  Research by Janelle Jenstad has suggested that borrowing childbed linen from your social superiors articulated the breadth of your social connections to the many visitors that would be present in your birthroom in the weeks that followed the birth. [4]  This may have been falling out of fashion as the eighteenth century progressed and textiles became cheaper to acquire.  Amongst Yorkshire Viscountess Frances Irwin’s papers, for example, is a printed advertisement for ‘Elliott’s Plume of Feathers’ in Covent Garden who could provide, amongst other things, ‘all Sorts of Child bed Linnen, Baskets, Blankets, Mantles & Robes’.  I don’t know if Frances made any purchases from Elliott’s – but the fact that Elliott placed childbed linen at the head of his advert does suggest that it was one of his best sellers.

Madame Bagge and her husband receiving visitors after giving birth, 1772.

 

Many women did not, however, give birth in their beds. Middling and lower status women gave birth on temporary beds that could be hygienically disposed once the messiest bit was over.  William Hey – obstetrician, surgeon and founder of the Leeds General Infirmary – recorded how, in 1760, he ‘placed [his patient] on the Hands and Knees upon another Bed laid on the floor’ having been unable to deliver her London-style.  Pierre Dionis, a French man-midwife, suggested in his General Treatise of Midwifery that ‘the Woman is plac’d upon a little Palate-Bed’ to allow the midwife better access to the business end of things as labour progressed.   A palate bed was a mattress placed on the floor and tucked away when not in use.

Low status women used straw in place of a pallet bed, as suggested by the term ‘lady in the straw’ to describe a women giving birth.  This straw might have been woven into a mattress as part of the wider preparations for childbirth.  Dr Sasha Handley generously drew my attention to this rather fine specimen (now at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading) that had been used as loft insulation in a house in Titchfield, Hampshire.

www.reading.ac.uk/TheMERL/Research/CollectionOverview/CollectionA-Z/DomesticandPersonalObjects/TheMERL-61.242_Mattress.aspx

Mattresses like this had the added benefit of being burned once they had been soiled. Once these women had been delivered, they could carefully be moved to their beds to recover.

As I suggested in my opening paragraph, however, beds were more than simply spaces in which birth took place.  They were emotional and spiritual spaces and, as such, provided the focus for the wider social and cultural experiences of childbirth.  My next blog post (hopefully in just two weeks so long as stick to my only new year’s resolution) will explore this emotional and symbolic role in a bit more detail.

[1] Hamilton, The Female Family Physician, p.216.

[2] Smellie, Treatise on Midwifery, p.124

[3] Hamilton, The Female Family Physician, p.216.

[4] Janelle Day Jenstad, ‘Lying-in like a Countess: The Lisle Letters, the Cecil Family, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34, 2, (2004), pp.373-403,  p.374.

Locating Birth within the Household

I’m back!  Turns out the final stages of a PhD are really hard work and take up all of your time.  Who knew?!

Anyway, today’s blog is about the location of childbirth in the household.  Throughout the eighteenth century, most women laboured and gave birth at home.  Lying-in hospitals did make an appearance in the second half of the century (1749 in London, 1790 in Manchester) but these were slow to move northwards, and generally had rigorous entry requirements.  Lying-in hospitals therefore catered to a very small number of lying-in women.  For most families it was necessary to carve a birth space from the domestic space that they had available.

A designated birth space was a crucial element of a woman’s preparations for birth as her delivery date drew near.  Birth in the eighteenth century was a lengthy process of labouring, delivery and lying-in and all but the very poorest women observed each stage of this process.  During labour and delivery, access to the birth space was restricted to the labouring woman, her midwife, her mother, and her birth attendants.  The birth space therefore had to be contained, it needed a fireplace from which to heat the room and make caudle, and it needed a bed in which the new mother could lie-in after the birth for a period of around four weeks.

In elite and middling houses, the acquisition of birth space was reasonably easy.  Very wealthy women could have a suite of chambers that incorporated a birth room, a nursery and, sometimes, chambers to accommodate the midwife and the nurse.  These individuals might take up residence in their rooms some time before the anticipated date of delivery.  When Frances Irwin of Temple Newsam in Leeds gave birth to her second daughter in 1762, for example, she was delivered by her nurse.  Frances wrote to her friend, Susan Stewart, that her daughter was ‘in such a Hurry that the performer [the midwife] could not arrive time enough.’  Being already resident in the household when Frances began to labour, Nurse Tyson was able to ‘act the part of Sage Femme with the utmost skill and propriety’ until the midwife arrived.

Temple Newsam House, Leeds

Women of middling status might not be able to requisition a suite of chambers in which to give birth, but they generally had their own sleeping chamber that fulfilled the requirements of a birth space.  Reasonably prosperous urban families lived in a townhouse-style terrace – several stories high and accommodating two or three rooms on each floor – in which the creation of birth space was not hugely disruptive.

Creative thinking was required, however to create a birth space in smaller properties.  In more modest middling homes, domestic space was arranged around the family business.  This could mean that space within the property was shared with journeymen, apprentices as well as domestic servants.  Space in these households was more flexible – temporary beds turned shops into sleeping spaces for example on a regular basis.   In these houses, the main room of the house might be acquired for the purposes of giving birth, but only during the labour and delivery of the infant.  Once the child had been born, and both mother and child washed, bound and placed into bed, the room would resume its usual domestic function.

Early 19thC slum dwelling in Manchester

The diary of Edmund Harrold, a Manchester wigmaker and bookseller, describes this type of temporary birth space during the delivery of his fourth daughter (and seventh child), Sarah, in 1712.  The exact location of Harrold’s property during the period he kept his diary is not known, but it was somewhere in central Manchester.  The accommodation was small, consisting of a shop and at least one chamber.  Harrold lived there with his wife, also Sarah, and at least some of his six children as well as occasionally taking in lodgers.  On the 22 November 1712, Harrold noted that Sarah had ‘made al her Mark’ in the house.  This meant that she had rearranged the domestic space in order to create a space in which she could give birth.  The following morning she was delivered of their daughter.  Sadly, Sarah did not survive her lying-in period.  Her recovery initially looked promising, but she quickly worsened and died less than four weeks after giving birth.  Her decline was recorded in great detail by Harrold who, it appears, spent much of his time in the birth room with her.  It can be inferred from Harrold’s diary entries that Sarah Harrold’s birthroom had resumed many of its domestic functions once the child had been delivered.

The bed was therefore central to ensuring that women of lower social status observed their lying-in.  For women like Sarah Harrold, the bed was a place in which they could rest and recuperate from their travails whilst also enabling family life and business to continue with minimal disruptions.  The bed itself could be contained by the bed curtains creating a small but sufficient birth space, and was generally situated in the main family living area so was close to the fire.  What is more, all but the very poorest households had a bedstead making it an accessible birth space to all social levels.  The childbed therefore framed most women’s experiences of childbirth and, as such, will be the topic of my next blog post – watch this space!

 

Further reading

Susan Broomhall, ‘Imagined Domesticities in Early Modern Dutch Dollshouses’, Parergon 24:2 (2007), 47-67.

Dan Cruickshank and Peter Wyld, Georgian Townhouses and their Details (London: Butterworth, 1990).

Rosemary Sweet, The English Town, 1680-1840: Government, Society and Culture (London: Longman, 1999).

Transition Day; Or The Emotions of Parenting

Today is a big day in our household – it’s Transition Day.  For those not in the know, it is the day when school children test out next year’s teachers and classrooms.  In our house, it is also the day that my baby goes to school for the first time.  I know that those of you without children will be rolling your eyes at me, as I would have done seven years ago, but it’s a big thing.  Even though I’ve done it once before with my older child, even though she already spends three days a week at pre-school, even though she skipped into the classroom with barely a backwards glance towards me, I felt a bit funny as I walked home.  The closest word I can think of to describe it is ‘bittersweet’ but that doesn’t really capture the mixed emotions that I am currently experiencing.  I am happy – that my daughter wasn’t upset, that she’s excited to learn new stuff, that between us we have managed to get her to school age despite her frankly suicidal tendencies on climbing frames.  But I am also sad and quite painfully so, that she needs me just a little bit less.

Why do I feel the need to share this with you?  Well, I’m currently thrashing my way through the historiography of the history of emotions.  It makes me overthink just about everything .  When the swimming teacher suggested to my eldest that she should launch herself into the deep end of the swimming pool without flotation devices (that was Wednesday’s emotional crisis) were my emotions culturally constructed?  Or were they universalist?  Would a parent in the depths of the Amazon jungle have felt the same panic and fear about the very real possibility of their precious first born sinking like a stone to the bottom of a pool as I did?  Would they have experienced a different emotion?  What might it have been?  If they did feel panic and fear, would they experience it in the same way that I did?  Would their tummy flip and their heart beat faster?  Or would their bodies react differently.

The same question must be asked of my eighteenth-century parents.  Did they feel sad and happy at the same time when their children went off to school, or to foster parents, or to get married?  Did they cry? Did they feel a little bit distracted and hollow afterwards?  Did they go home and inflict their emotions on everyone else through their blog?  Probably not, but they did write to their friends about it.  My historical crush (don’t laugh – we all have one) Frances Irwin wrote a little of her intense parental emotions to her friend Susan Stewart when her daughters (pictured above) were toddlers:

‘I hate and abominate the thoughts of stirring & cannot bear to think of untwisting the two little Tendrils which twine round my neck as well as my heart.’[1]

In using the words ‘twist’, ‘tendrils’ and ‘twine’ Frances conjures an image of a clinging interdependence – two people that are so close that they are difficult to untangle.  Nor does she want to be untangled – she ‘hates and abominates’ the thought of being separated from her daughter.  I recognise that feeling.  In another of her letters, Frances wrote to Susan:

‘I must pity the Duchess of Argyle for loving so delightful an animal as a Daughter & daresay her wing will feel very cold and uncomfortable without her, the eldest Daughter too! What man in the World can deserve ones eldest Daughter?[2]

Again, there is a dread of separation.  In the tone of this paragraph I can hear Frances’ empathy.  She who can’t bear to disentangle herself from her daughter’s arms knows that she will eventually be in the same situation as the Duchess of Argyle.  I recognise that feeling too and here’s the thing that is concerning as I try to analyse the emotions in these letters.  Am I imposing my own feelings upon Frances?  Am I confusing my own emotions as my daughters grow up with hers?  Does the affinity that I feel with Frances make be a better historian, or a worse one?  When I blogged about William Hey’s casebooks, my own emotions made me a bad historian.  I judged him for his actions based upon my own feelings and experiences.  When I went back to him a couple of weeks later, I tried to be more objective and understand his actions from a broader perspective (see my second blog post on the subject).  Is parental love a universalist emotion?  Do we all and have we always experienced these intense emotions as part of being a parent?  Or do we feel them because we are expected to?  Perhaps some of the answer lies in the way that people that do not express this intense parental love are treated.  These days, it is medicalised – considered a clear sign of depression –  but the eighteenth century understood emotionally cold parenting in a number of different ways.  Cruelty was a possibility, as was poor psychological health, some actively disliked their offspring, whilst others imitated the parenting techniques of their own parents.  Something  to think about as I revisit my infanticide cases in the coming months – watch this space!

[1] PRO 30/29/4/2/23

[2] PRO 30/29/4/2/44

Time, touch, emotion and swaddling

I have a bee in my bonnet about swaddling. Really, I should currently be tearing my hair out trying to finish a document entitled ‘What is my thesis about?’, but the bee is buzzing quite loudly so I have given in.   The history of early infancy has traditionally been one of (at best) benign neglect (though this has obviously been challenged in more recent scholarship). High levels of infant mortality, economic pressures, and large families were just some of the reasons that infants might be swaddled tightly and either slung over mum’s shoulder, hung from the rafters or handed over to the care of a child not much older than itself. Karin Calvert has written about how swaddling made a child idiot-proof by holding it rigid and supporting the neck.[1] Where a swaddling board was used, the child could even be protected from falls or being dropped (she cites cases of infants being injured whilst being thrown back and forth between two carers like a rugby ball). Traditional accounts of swaddling talk of infants screaming from the restriction, accidentally stuck with pins and rarely changed. The authors that wrote these tracts undoubtedly had an axe to grind yet this the view of swaddling has remained remarkably persistent. I should like to offer an alternative.

Firstly, I would like to draw upon my own experiences of parenthood and the sore bottoms of infants. Neither of my babies suffered from particularly sensitive skin, but one of them went through a phase of dirtying her nappy at night but not waking up to inform me. Within two nights, the skin on her bottom was red, sore and beginning to break down. I became so concerned about septicaemia, that I began setting my alarm at intervals during the night so that I could check her nappy and change it where necessary. I must add that I value my sleep. I only did this because I felt there was a serious risk of blood poisoning if I didn’t. If babies in history had been left in their own faecal matter for long periods of time, I seriously doubt that the human race would have survived.

Let’s assume, then, that an early modern child was changed at least twice in any twenty-four hour period. I have plucked this figure from mid-air and I feel that it is pretty conservative. Even with environmentally unfriendly but extremely absorbent modern disposable nappies, babies require changing every four hours or so during the day. I did use fabric nappies with my children when they were at home, and these needed changing AT LEAST every two hours to prevent ‘incidents’. With this in mind, read this brilliantly detailed description of the process of swaddling that was recently blogged by Katy Canales of the V&A Museum.[2]

There was also much concern that babies were more vulnerable to the cold and carers would dress the child with a plethora of layers. These layers included a rectangular shaped clout or napkin (nappy). The nappy would be folded in two and inside they would put a bed of sphagnum moss or soft rags to absorb the waste, which could then be rinsed out and reused. There would be a ‘bellyband’ or a binder which was a strip of linen cloth which would be wrapped around the baby’s stomach to support the abdomen and protect the bellybutton. On top of that would be a front or back opening, linen shirt. On the baby’s head would be a triangular shaped cloth and one to two caps. The first cap was usually rather plain with the second one being rather more decorative. Then a ‘bed’ which was a rectangular shaped cloth with pleats at the top, would be wrapped around the baby and folded over its feet. This would effectively make a tidy bundle of the baby and hold down its limbs. Over this a three metre long swaddleband (a band of linen) would be wrapped or swaddled around the child in a variety of diagonal or herringbone patterns. A bib could then be added on top. The last layer was a ‘stayband’ whose function was to keep the head stable. This band was placed under the cap and pinned to the clothes at shoulder level.

Now let’s think about the physicality of this description. Imagine that you were changing this infant – it’s going to be a girl because I’m used to changing nappies on girls! You would need a stable surface upon which to place her – maybe your lap while you sat on a chair, maybe on the floor, or maybe on a bed or settle. You would have to be on the same level as her, sat next to her on the bed, knelt on the floor in front of her. Then you would need to unwrap her. You would have to be quite close, bent over her, in order to make sure that you removed all of the pins. She would have her eyes fixed on your face, because babies love faces. I know I would be talking to her, or pulling funny faces, or singing songs. As soon as you had taken the wrapping off, she would move. The extent of her movement would depend on her age but she would stretch, flex her fingers and her toes, arch her back. You would have to clean her. Water is still considered the best thing to use on newborn skin, so you would use a cloth dipped in water to wipe her.   Again, even with the advent of modern ‘nappy technology’ it is amazing how far babies can spread bodily substances. This would not be a quick job. If you don’t do it well, it accelerates skin breakdown. You might apply a homemade balm to her skin (the production of which, in itself, may have taken no small amount of time), stretching and straightening her limbs as you applied it. Then, you would start the process of wrapping her back up again.

Swaddling has gone down in history as a cruel and restrictive practice. It has become associated with uninterested and neglectful parenting. Yet, we know that early modern parents loved their children, you only have to look at Foundling Hospital tokens to understand the strength of their emotion. Examined from a physical perspective, swaddling practices could present the opportunity for touch, time and emotion to be shared between a child and it’s carer as well as representing an attempt to preserve their safety in infancy by restricting their movement.

[1] Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood 1600-1900 (1992).

[2] I am sorry that I not sufficiently technological to have worked out how to hyperlink to her blog. Here is the full web address if it helps! http://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-of-childhood/swaddling-babies-in-a-tight-bind

Where were the servants?!

In my recent supervision, my supervisors (@SashaHandley and @HistoryHannahB) asked me a question that I couldn’t answer. Those of you that know them will understand that this is not an unusual occurrence, despite my best efforts. This particular question, however, has haunted me – partly because I can’t answer it, and partly because I don’t know how to go about finding the answer. It arose as part of a discussion around the chapter I am currently writing on family and childbirth, specifically, the individuals that populated birthrooms in the eighteenth century. The question was this:

“Where were the servants?”

Um.

Good question.

Where WERE they?

My research relies heavily upon personal accounts of birth and the various events and rituals that surrounded it, and I can’t think of a single instance where a daily servant has been mentioned. Frances Irwin talked of her Nurse, who stepped into the breach and delivered her child when the midwife was detained, but Nurses weren’t really servants. Not in the traditional sense of the term, anyway. They were employed for a short period of time, to assist with the birth and the lying-in. As such, their duties were clearly defined. Their relationship to their employer differed to that between daily servants and their mistress.

The principle of Occam’s razor would suggest that the servants simply weren’t there, but I can’t believe that. In a large proportion of cases, the relationship between mistress and servant was intimate, at least in terms of physical proximity and knowledge if not emotionally. Depending upon the social status of both employer and employee, a servant would have changed and washed bed linen, dressed her employer, brought her food and drink, helped her with her work. She may even have shared a bed chamber with her. Is it realistic to believe that she would be excluded from the household, or banished to the kitchen while the birth took place? Or is it more likely that she would be required to assist: to make caudle, to change and launder sheets, prepare clothes and compresses? Would she care for older children? Who emptied the water? Who disposed of the pallet bed upon which the birth may have taken place? Who brought logs for the fire? Even if caudle was prepared by the birthroom attendants, who procured the ingredients? Who brought them to the birthroom when they were required? For poor women, these jobs may have been done by the friends and neighbours that attended the birth, but would this still have been the case in houses where help was employed? I simply can’t believe that daily servants weren’t involved in the process of a birth.

So. Why can’t I find them?

One explanation is that they were invisible. The jobs that they undertook were not mentioned in letters and diaries because it was assumed that they would be done. If this was the case, however, I would expect to find instances in which servants had not performed appropriately, or had performed particularly exceptionally during a birth and (so far) I haven’t.

Is it connected to social status? Very poor women would not have employed daily servants. Middling and elite women would have had lots of servants, and were used to seeing (or deliberately not-seeing) them therefore may not mention their actions in their writings. The women that I would expect to find writing about their servants would be those who employed only one or two, and who shared living and working space with them. Women of this status are under-represented in my research, though not totally absent. Yet I have still to find any reference to servants in the birthroom, though daily servants are occasionally mentioned.

Perhaps it is due to source survival. Despite my best efforts, accounts of an actual delivery (excluding those written by medical men) are difficult to find. Perhaps, by the time women were sufficiently recovered to provide me with written sources again (after their lying-in was completed) the servants had returned to their usual duties. As with my first point, however, if it was simply about source survival I would still expect to find an occasional mention of good/bad servant behaviour during the birth.

Age may have had an impact, as my research suggests that knowledge about birth was strictly confined to married women, and preferably those that had given birth themselves. Would unmarried servants have been excluded from the birthroom after all, particularly when delivery became imminent? It is possible, yet women of varied status worked as daily servants. Marriage did not necessarily constitute a bar to this type of employment in the eighteenth-century, particularly where husbands were away at sea/war, or were in employment elsewhere. Daily servants may therefore have been mothers many times over.

All of which leaves me puzzled. WHERE WERE THE FLAMING SERVANTS?! Do you have any ideas?

The Ideal Woman (eighteenth-century style)…

This month, I have been mainly thinking about breastfeeding. Not for fun, you understand, but for a chapter I’m working on.  This is an interesting topic for me to study, because I have experienced it in all its gloriousness and goriness. It adds a new dimension to some of my women’s letters because, occasionally, their descriptions of breastfeeding make my own body ache in recognition and sympathy.  I also recognise some of the pressures that are placed upon newly delivered women, and the sensation that your body no longer belongs to you.

In today’s blog post, I’m going to pick up an idea of Aminatta Forna’s about the ‘primitive woman’.[1]  The ‘primitive woman’ is often offered to modern women as an idealised image of birth and motherhood.  She is bandied around by friends, relations and, occasionally, medical professionals.  You may recognise her.  She is the ahistorical figure that gave birth in a field then carried on working.  She slung her child on her back, went about her usual duties, and breastfed on demand.  Within the realms of my knowledge (western, medieval onwards) she didn’t exist.  As I will (hopefully) argue in my thesis, the lengthy process of confinement, delivery and lying-in was pretty much a constant throughout history and across social class.  The invocation of the ‘primitive woman’ is used to tell modern women that delivery and motherhood is not difficult.  The inference is that we should not make a fuss, we should just get on with things.

Whilst ‘primitive woman’ is a relatively new phenomenon, I have been spending a lot of time with her eighteenth-century equivalent – ‘simple country woman’.   Here’s an extract from William Moss’s 1781 book on midwifery.

The benefits attending a simplicity of diet are very fully displayed in country women, who enjoy good health themselves, and have the comfort and satisfaction of dispensing that invaluable blessing to their offspring; – the best gift that can be bestowed by a parent! – and which parents of this class are indebted to for this simplicity, which their stations and situations impose upon them; aided by exercise and pure air, to be immediately spoken of.^[2]

James Gillray, The Fashionable Mamma

The distinction is even more explicit in James Gillray’s The Fashionable Mother. Look in the background.  Can you see ‘simple country woman’?  She is plump, and her breasts are exposed as she gazes adoringly at her babe.  The contrast between her and the woman in the foreground are clear, as is the message.  The ‘simple country woman’ sacrifices herself to her maternal role and, as a result, finds the whole mothering lark a piece of cake.  Her curvaceous figure lends itself to childbearing, making her deliveries quick and easy.  Her diet makes her milk flow easily.  Here is William Cadogan’s pronouncements on ‘simple country woman’.

‘In the lower class of Mankind, especially in the country, disease and mortality are not so frequent, either among the adult or their children. Health and posterity are the portion of the poor, I mean the laborious. ‘The Mother who has only a few rags to cover her child loosely, and little more than her own breast to feed it, sees it healthy and strong, and very soon able to shift for itself; while the puny insect, the heir and hope of a rich family, lies languishing under a load of finery that overpowers his limbs, abhorring and rejecting the dainties he is crammed with, till he dies a victim to the mistaken care and tenderness of his fond Mother.[3]

Really?! Now contrast this with David Davies’ description of ‘simple country woman’ in 1796.

In visiting the labouring families in my parish as my duty led me, I could not but observe with concern their mean and distressed condition. I found them in general but indifferently fed; badly clothed; some children without shoes and stockings; very few put to school; and most families in debt to little shopkeepers. In short, there was scarcely any appearance of comfort about their dwellings, except that the children looked tolerably healthy….[4]

‘Simple country woman’ was not a common figure in eighteenth-century England, yet she was commonly invoked by (sorry to get all gendered about this) mainly male writers.  She was young, curvaceous, innocent, yet also sexually active.  Paintings of her usually have something of the voyeur about them.  She represented an increasingly dominating ideal of passive eighteenth-century femininity which led, inexorably, to the Victorian ‘Angel of the Hearth’.

[1] Aminatta Forna, Mother of all Myths: How Society Moulds and Constrains Mothers, (London, Harper Collins: 1999).

[2] William Moss, An essay on the management and nursing of children in the earlier periods of infancy: and on the treatment and rule of conduct requisite for the mother during pregnancy, and in lying-in., (London: 1781), p.281.

[3] William Cadogan, An essay upon nursing and the management of children, from their birth to three years of age, By W Cadogan, Fellow of the College of Physicians, late Physician to the Foundling Hospital, 10^th Ed. (1772).

[4] David Davies, The case of labourers in husbandry stated and considered, in three parts. Part I. A view of their distressed condition. Part II. The principal causes of their growing distress and number, and of the consequent increase of the poor-rate. Part III. Means of relief proposed. With an appendix; containing a collection of accounts, shewing the earnings and expences of labouring families, in different parts of the kingdom. By David Davies, rector of Barkham, Berks. (P Byrne, Dublin, 1796)

The creation of knowledge; or, the ramblings of a mad woman…

I realise that this is a bad way to introduce this post but I’m struggling to write today.  I have various jobs to do including article re-writes, minor edits to a chapter for my panel review meeting and the rapid yet high-quality expansion of my most recently started chapter – all before the children come out of school at 3.30pm.  Unfortunately, I have spent much of the day re-reading my primary sources and deciding NOT to add a paragraph to the ‘nearly finished chapter’.  The very kind @tomod14 has suggested via Twitter that the process of ‘not adding’ is just as important as ‘adding’ but I’m afraid that this will not cut the mustard with my (rather formidable) panel of supervisors next week.  You have, therefore, become the unwitting victims of my attempts to get the brain juices flowing.

It is relevant, however, to the topic of today’s blog post because I want to talk about the ‘creation of knowledge’.  I have entirely stolen this idea from an edited collection of articles that I read (and thoroughly enjoyed) last week: Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge.[1] The collection covers a wide variety of subjects including dyeing, plant cultivation and transportation, and cabinetmaking in the early modern period.  It considers the links between artisanal knowledge and intellectual knowledge and, particularly, the way in which engagement with the material world created ‘tacit’ knowledge. I realised that this idea could be neatly applied to my own favourite subject: childbirth.

Knowledge of childbirth and midwifery before the early decades of the eighteenth century was almost entirely artisanal.  It was created through touch, manipulation, apprenticeship and personal experience.  To a certain extent, it still is as midwives must spend much of their degree course ‘on placement’ with experienced professionals.  In the early modern period, a great deal of importance was also placed upon a personal bodily experience of pregnancy and birth.  All of the birth attendants would have been mothers themselves.  They would therefore all recognise the first pangs of labour, would have opinions of the length of labour, the level of manipulation that was necessary, the shape of the stomach during each contraction. They would probably recognise the primal change of a woman in the transitional stage of labour and would understand the stinging pain of the final stages delivery.  Their knowledge was created by their own bodily experiences and those of their friends and neighbours whose births they may also have witnessed.

In all likelihood, the attending midwife would also have this type of bodily knowledge.  It was extremely rare for a midwife to be childless, the exceptions to this rule being the daughters of midwives that had been attending births with their mothers for many years.  She would also have the ‘tacit’ knowledge mentioned by Smith, Meyers and Cook in their introduction to their volume: that is knowledge through experimentation.  The successful navigation of a difficult situation created knowledge for the next time.  To a certain extent, this is why we see the rise of ‘case study’ medicine during the eighteenth century, as an acknowledgement of the value of tacit knowledge.

It would be easy to conclude here that these types of knowledge were gendered –  that male midwives arrived with their anatomically correct drawings, their assertions of superior scientific knowledge and set about appropriating female bodies upon which to apply their knowledge – but that would not be right.  For a start, male practitioners had tacit knowledge through their surgical involvement in difficult births – their longstanding role in childbirth was the (gory) extraction of infants, usually that had died in the womb or as a result of their intervention.  Once male practitioners became more widespread however, they acknowledged their difficulties of obtaining access to female bodies upon which to practice their intellectual knowledge, gained in lecture theatres and anatomy schools.  They knew the importance of tacit knowledge through practical application.

Perhaps the point of gendered difference here is the way in which these three types of knowledge were used and created in others.  For women, knowledge was created through bodily experience and ‘hands-on’ proficiency.  It was then shared with other women, by direct instruction, or through observation and might be altered or adapted as the situation or the experience of others demanded.  For men, knowledge was created intellectually as well as tacitly.  It originated (to some extent) in the brain before being practically tested.  It was often delivered to others from a position of authority and therefore became less malleable to individual situations.  Despite differing approaches to the creation and sharing of knowledge, however, both male and female practitioners remained dependent upon bodily experience as the test of their skill.  The value of their knowledge (and therefore their ability to find rich and generous patrons) was deeply rooted in the survival (or not) of their clients.

[1] Edited by Pamela H Smith, Amy Meyers and Harold Cook, University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 2014.

Solve the mystery of the Lady Abbess!

Meet ‘The Lady Abbess’.

As far as I can tell, she has hung near the Chapel at Bramall Hall since the late nineteenth century at the very least, and probably much longer. It has been assumed that she is a member of the Davenport family, as all of the portraits that hang in the house are of family members.   I need your help to find out a bit more about her.

As many of you know, it is impossible that she could have been an English Abbess in 1616 as cloistered communities had been abolished as a result of the Reformation.  I have to assume that, in order to pursue her religious vocation, she must have travelled to the continent – probably either France or Spain though this is pure supposition.

The family retained a strong association with the Catholic faith following the reformation.  William Davenport IV was mentioned in the 1580 State Papers for ‘popery’ and in 1584, his widow Margaret was investigated for recusancy.[1]  One of William and Margaret’s sons went on to become a Catholic Priest.[2]  Indeed, the date of the painting suggests that the Lady Abbess could also have been a child of William and Margaret if she was a member of the immediate family.

Despite their confessional tendencies, the Davenport family at this time were immensely rich and powerful.  William and Margaret’s eldest son (also William) was knighted by James I in the first few weeks of his reign and served as the High Sheriff of Cheshire.  Along with his wife, Dorothy, they threw great parties at Bramall Hall to entertain their similarly rich and powerful friends.

I did wonder if the Lady Abbess might, in fact, be a Vowess.  Those of you that went to the Social History Society Conference in Portsmouth this year may have heard Laura Wood speak about these wealthy women who managed to both avoid marriage and retain their family lands by taking on a liminal social role. They would take vows of chastity and could live in cloisters, but they did not give up their worldly possessions to the Church, essentially protecting the family lands. Unfortunately, Laura thinks that my Lady Abbess is too late to be a vowess, as the last vow she has researched took place in 1536.

So, I am stumped.  And annoyed.  I want to know who she is!  Can you help?  Have you seen or heard of anything similar? Does the symbol in the top right of the painting look familiar?  Do you recognise her habit?  Any and all suggestions are welcome (full credit will, of course, be given!).

[1] Reginald Dean, The Davenport Heraldic Tapestry at Bramall Hall, (1955).

[2] Barbara Dean, The Story of an Elizabethan Manor House, (Stockport: 1999).

Bramall Hall: “one of the treasures of England”

Having finally confessed to both of my supervisors, I feel able to blog about my new summer job – Researcher in Residence at Bramall Hall in Stockport.  My role (along with my friend and excellent researcher @BPWilcock) is to delve into the archives to find documentation and material objects that will help to tell the story of this fabulous building as they complete a huge refurbishment and restoration funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.  I am only just starting out on this project having been at the excellent-as-ever Social History Society Conference in Portsmouth but I have already taken a fancy to seventeenth-century mistress of the house Dorothy Davenport.  You will no doubt get slight sick of reading my blog posts on this subject, but here are a few photographs taken last week, to whet your appetite.

Pretty impressive eh?!

These four photos are details of the main hall.  The bottom left is a view into the Chapel – I’m saving this for a later blog post because it is quite incredible.

The Upper Banqueting Hall is another room that I’m saving for a blog post all of it’s own.  It has the most fabulous wall paintings: of musicians, and monsters, and angels.  Words started to fail me at this point of our private tour of the house last week.  Below are some pictures of Mary Neville’s bedroom.  She took over the house in the late nineteenth century with her husband Charles and essentially saved the place from collapsing in on itself.  Luckily, they were very aware of the importance of preservation and kept detailed records of their alterations and additions to the hall.

I suppose I’d best get started! Watch this space!