Chronicles of confinement: Reactions to childbirth in British women's diaries

Abstract

This article points out that because we have failed to find material in traditional sources about the personal and emotional dimensions of childbirth in nineteenth-century Britain, the fictional mythos of woman as devil or angel has persisted. But the personal accounts in manuscript diaries housed throughout Great Britain undermine this simplistic distortion. Victorian women utilized their diaries to record the details of pregnancy and childbirth, practices which helped establish and maintain bonding among women. They also kept their diaries as a future reference for details of parturition and disease and employed their writings to mold their role in the network of nursing women. Composing a diary also helped women cope with idleness, and consequently the examination of manuscript diaries allows us to reassess women's social contributions and their reactions to the central ritual of motherhood, childbirth, and to reconsider our conception of women's role in the last century.