The Maternal Body: Pregnancy, Child-Rearing and Birth Control

Abstract

This chapter focuses upon Gwyneth’s experience of pregnancy and childbirth, to show how she continued to view herself, and later her child, in distinctly sexualized terms, indicating a conversance with the ideas of Sigmund Freud. She invoked modern techniques of child-rearing as a distinct strategy to distinguish her ideas from the old-fashioned and less scientific ones propounded by her mother. Besides examining the way in which Harry and Gwyneth adopted modern ideas regarding birth control and parenthood, we demonstrate an increasing gulf between the generations, which revises existing notions of the lost generation in wartime Britain.