Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England. Sarah Fox

Abstract

Sarah Fox’s Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England had a long gestational period. It began as an MA thesis, became a PhD thesis and is now a book. Meticulously researched, its central claim is that ‘birthing is a process’ that can last up to 6 weeks and should not be seen as a singular event (p. 1). It includes the late stages of pregnancy, as well as labour and delivery, and the lying-in period after birth. Fox’s work is less concerned with accoucheurs or male midwives, midwifery treatises, lying-in hospitals, and birthing instruments and techniques, though at times each is mentioned. Its primary focus is on the social nature of birth and what happens in and around the birthing chamber. Central to this work are details from the nearly 1,000 letters from the collections of three women: Frances Ingram, an aristocrat who lived outside of London; Elizabeth Shackleton, a gentry woman who lived in Gretna Green, and Rebekah Bateman, the daughter of a congregationalist minister and wife of a cotton dealer in Manchester. These women lived at different times in the eighteenth century, and Fox weaves in details related to pregnancy and childbirth from letters they wrote or received with information from eighteenth-century midwifery treaties, court records from the Northern Circuit, poor law records and primary and secondary research on eighteenth-century childbirth. Attentive to both geography and social class, Fox tells readers that most sources used in the book ‘relate to the north of England’ and that viewing childbirth ‘in non-exceptional ways’ is a main goal of the work (p. 9).