Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France

Hester Pulter’s Childbirth Poetics

“…Lianne McTavish notes that within the chamber the maternal body (and the unborn child) remain hidden from sight and the midwife's sense of touch takes precedence over her vision, an upending of a traditional hierarchy of the senses that privileges a sense culturally associated with the feminine and with women's experiential authority. 51 Access to the lying-in chamber is tightly restricted but if Linda Pollock is correct about a perceived 'right' to attend a neighbour's birth, then the lying-in chamber is both a deeply private but also an emphatically public space. 52 In Adrian Wilson's recent reading of the lying-in process, it is also a site of women's collective practice where the delivered mother is temporarily freed from the expectations of the marriage contract (to provide sexual services to her husband and physical labour for their household) and when her property in her body is returned to herself.…”

Situated technology in reproductive health care: Do we need a new theory of the subject to promote person‐centred care?

“…Starting from this perspective, woman's subjective experience of her bodily states is considered authentic only insofar as it is unmediated and she is regarded as having natural and intuitive competencies that guide her through pregnancy and birth. This perspective is also often associated with the nostalgic reminiscence (or rather the idealized projection) of earlier historical period when pregnancy and childbirth were treated as natural processes that were left to evolve spontaneously, without external intervention and regulation, solely relying on embodied experience of women (Duden, ; Ehrenreich & English, ; McTavish, ). Thus, it is argued that in the contemporary context natural and spontaneous course of pregnancy and childbirth—which earlier generations of women experienced as embodied agents and sole authorities (authority was possibly shared only with other women, midwives that assisted them)—was taken over, alienated and associated with the oppressive masculine practices of institutionalized medicine.…”

Birthing and Mining in John Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed”

“…Given that references to reproduction structure the reader's understanding of the function of sex in the poem, the speaker, who tries to seduce his mis-34 Surgeons were often described as performing "manual labour" (McTavish, 2005).…”

“…21 Eventually, male practitioners displaced midwives. As Lianne McTavish reveals, this shift happened all across Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but occurred "most quickly and completely in England" (McTavish, 2005). 22 Tensions over control of the birthing process are strikingly evident in Donne's poem, suggesting that Donne was aware of the gender politics surrounding the medicalization of childbirth.…”

“…22 Lianne McTavish adds that in England "childbirth became a part of medicine between 1720 and 1770" (McTavish, 2005). 23 This occurred "after the clergy, who provided medical care in the early Middle Ages, were forbidden in the twelfth century by the church to perform procedures that involved shedding blood" (Blumenfeld-Kosinski, 1990).…”