How could the professional triumph of man-midwifery and
contemporary tales of pregnant men, rabbit-breeding mothers, and
meddling midwives in eighteenth-century Britain help construct the
emergence of modern corporate and individual identities? By
uncovering long-lost tales and artefacts about sexuality, birth,
and popular culture, Lisa Forman Cody argues that Enlightenment
Britons understood themselves and their relationship to others
through their experiences and beliefs about the reproductive body.
Birthing the Nation traces two intertwined narratives that shaped
eighteenth-century British life: the development of the modern
British nation, and the emergence of the male expert as the
pre-eminent authority over matters of sexual behaviour,
reproduction, and childbirth. By taking seriously contemporary
caricatures, jokes, and rumours that used gender, birth, and family
to make claims about religious, ethnic and national identity, Cody
illuminates an entirely new view of the eighteenth-century public
sphere as focused on the bodily and the bizarre.
In a monarchy arbitrated by its official religion, regulation of
reproduction and childbirth was vital to the very stability of
British political authority and the coherence of British culture,
challenged as it was by Catholicism, the French Revolution, and
social change. In the late seventeenth century, the English feared
the power of female midwives to control the destiny of the royal
family, yet men-midwives and male experts had hardly proved their
superiority to manage the successful birth of children. By the
mid-eighteenth century, however, male midwives became experts over
the domestic world of pregnancy and childbirth, largely replacing
female midwives among the middling and elite families. Cody
suggests that these new professionals provided a new model for
masculine comportment and emergent intimate relationships within
the middle-class and elite home.
Most surprisingly, Cody has discovered many interconnections
between obstetrics and politics, and shows how male experts
transformed what had once been the private, feminine domain of
birth and midwifery into topics of public importance and universal
interest, leading even Adam Smith and Edmund Burke to attend
lectures on obstetrical anatomy. This is the first book to place
the eighteenth-century shift from female midwives to male midwives
as the dominant experts over childbirth in a larger cultural and
political context. Cody illuminates how eighteenth-century Britons
understood and symbolized political, national, and religious
affiliation through the experiences of the body, sex, and birth. In
turn, she takes seriously how the political arguments and rhetoric
of the age were not always made on disembodied, rational terms, but
instead referenced deep cultural beliefs about gender,
reproduction, and the family.
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