by Lucy Worsley
The Tudors knew what proponents of natural birth still know today: gravity helps. Sixteenth-century queens sat in a seatless throne called the ‘groaning chair’, upholstered in gold cloth and complete with a copper bowl to catch the afterbirth. Cruder, seatless stools were in the possession of midwives serving all ranks of society. Some had fancier features such as leather seats, ratcheted backs or handles for the woman to grip as she pushed.
The final few weeks of their pregnancies were filled with elaborate rituals for Tudor and Stuart women of high status. A well-prepared woman would have entered her marriage already equipped with her set of ‘childbed linen’, of both ceremonial as well as practical purpose. Now the various cloths and sheets lovingly prepared and stored in a chest would be brought out for use. The effort spent upon their preparation showed that a woman was ready to become a mother both physically and psychologically.
During the later stages of her pregnancy, a Tudor or Stuart woman would literally withdraw from the world. Sixteenth-century households sealed their pregnant women into darkened, well-furnished rooms for a whole month before the birth to minimise the risks of a miscarriage-inducing fall or fright. The darkness and stuffiness was to reduce the entry of bad ‘airs’, which, according to contemporary medicine, carried disease.
This theory that an evil ‘miasma’ carried illness through the ether was terribly important in the history of house-planning, and we will hear much more about it. It also caused great attention to be paid to the aspect of a house; a dangerously damp or valley site would have bad air, and therefore disease. You can understand why people thought like this. Malaria, for example, was common in the swamps of Tudor England. But it was spread by mosquitoes, not an imaginary ‘miasma’.
Even after the great event, the new Tudor mother was not allowed to escape from her birthing chamber. She would be revived there with ‘caudle’, a sort of alcoholic porridge. Only two weeks later was she washed, her soiled straw mattress changed and she herself allowed to sit up. The ‘upsitting’ and the ‘footing’ a fortnight later when she got out of bed were celebrated by the women of the household with all-female parties. These rituals were taken over to New England as well: Mary Holyoke of Salem’s eighteenth-century diary records how she ‘kept chamber’ before being ‘brought to bed’, hosting a party for five female friends two weeks later.
Being locked up for a period of enforced rest after giving birth may sound rather horrible, but it took women through the really dangerous days during which so many of them died from loss of blood or from puerperal fever (septicaemia; basically caused by dirty hands, and incurable). Lying-in continued until the conclusive ceremony of ‘churching’ a month after the birth, when the woman left the house to return to church (and came home to return to her husband’s bed).
The gathering of the women, the gossiping, the pleasure they took in their shared experience made giving birth a much more sociable event than it is today, when it’s chiefly an individual drama. In fact, the bonding nature of childbirth explains why the users of the ‘molly-houses’ (male brothels) of early eighteenth-century London replicated its rituals: homosexual men pretended to give birth, and celebrated with the traditional party afterwards. The first known piece of printed gay porn was entitled A Lying-In Conversation with a Curious Adventure (1748), and it describes a man in drag infiltrating a lying-in chamber. Fetishising childbirth is not common in modern male gay society, and that’s probably because lying in bed alone in a hospital is not nearly so much fun.
Babies made their first appearance amid a world of women, with males being kept out of the birthing chamber until deep into the eighteenth century. ‘My wife’s mother came to me with tears in her eyes,’ wrote Nicholas Gilman in 1740. ‘O, says she, I don’t know how it will fare with your poor wife, hinting withal her extreme danger.’ Mr Gilman was entirely in the hands of his mother-in-law for information about the life or death of his spouse, and childbirth was the one part of household life over which men had no control.
Even expectant husbands paid due respect to the wise women called in to advise upon such occasions. Midwives were figures of enormous and mysterious power, well able to diagnose difficulties through years of practical experience. Because of the hold they held over the emotions of hopeful parents, they were able to use ‘magic’ to predict and to protect in a manner at which science would scoff. For aristocrats, the gender of the baby was of huge significance, and a male heir for the estates was always desperately sought after. A seventeenth-century midwife would try to win a bigger fee by predicting a boy rather than a girl. Clues would be provided by the condition of the mother’s breasts: ‘ye Nipple red, rising like a strawberry’ was a good sign.
While childbirth was often a communal experience, sometimes harrowing, sometimes joyful, there could be other people present in the birthing room for reasons of surveillance rather than support. For example, events that took place in the bedchamber of Mary of Modena, the wife of the unpopular King James II, led to a revolution. James II had long been annoying his subjects with his despotic and Catholic policies, and when his young Italian wife gave birth in 1688 to a healthy baby boy, the king’s enemies were chagrined that his position had been so strengthened. To discredit him, they put it about that Mary’s baby had in fact died and that an imposter had instead been smuggled into her bed in a warming pan.
The rumour grew into a long-lasting and damaging smear against James II, and the baby would never be king. James II was overthrown soon afterwards, and his son grew up to be the ‘Pretender’, a rival, Catholic and unsuccessful bidder for the throne now seized instead by James II’s firmly Protestant daughters.
There are two reasons for mistrusting the story of the warming pan, which is said to have taken place in the velvet bed now standing in the Queen’s Bedchamber at Kensington Palace (plate 5). Firstly, a warming pan itself, a kind of frying pan containing hot coals to warm cold sheets, is hardly big enough to hold a baby. Secondly, to avoid any such monkey business a royal confinement was attended by many members of the court and church acting as witnesses. Mary of Modena gave birth with at least fifty-one other people present, plus ‘pages of the backstairs and priests’, and it seems unlikely that such a large number could have maintained a conspiracy with success.
This concern about the birth of a true heir to the British monarchy persisted into the twentieth century. When the Queen Mother gave birth to our current queen in 1926, the Home Secretary came to the house to wait and watch (though he wasn’t actually in the room itself). This undignified custom was only suspended by George VI, who thought it ‘archaic’.
At lower levels in society, the midwife could spill the secrets of her clients, and feminine betrayal took place in some bedchambers. A midwife could detect a woman’s adultery, infanticide or pre-marital sex. A ‘monstrous’ birth or malformed foetus would suggest that immoral behaviour had taken place: the seventeenth-century governor of New England, Sir Henry Vane, for example, had two women servants in his household; ‘he debauched both, & both were delivered of monsters’.
During the course of the seventeenth century, men finally began to penetrate the birthing chamber and its mysteries. They brought with them a healthy dose of scepticism about many of the ancient customs surrounding childbirth, and they also introduced a new and important piece of birthing-chamber equipment: the forceps. These iron tongs were invented around 1600 by one Peter Chamberlen, but he kept them as a family secret, thereby building up an extremely impressive reputation for the dynasty of doctors that he founded. But it’s William Smellie of Scotland (1697–1763) who’s usually given credit for bringing the forceps into wider use.
The forceps which revolutionised childbirth: the original set belonging to the Chamberlen family
There’s no doubt that using them saved many lives. Previously, an iron hook had been used to drag out babies reluctant to emerge, which inevitably killed them. Yet midwives had misgivings about the forceps. The Ladies Dispensatory, or Every Women H
er Own Physician (1739) recommended they be employed only in extreme circumstances, defined as cases where labour had lasted for four or five days.
The male physician began steadily to usurp the midwife’s ground, even if he had much less practical experience, and gradually took control over childbirth away from women. A minister named Hugh Adams, of Durham, New Hampshire, claimed to have sorted out a very difficult confinement in 1724. He was called in after a midwife had despaired of a three-and-a-half-day labour, even though he had never delivered a child before. He performed his miracle only with some ‘strong Hysterick medicines’ and the knowledge he had gleaned from reading a few books.
Circumstances like these caused ‘Old Wives’ Tales’ to begin to take on their modern reputation for inaccuracy and fallibility. Yet the male midwife would remain a figure of much suspicion throughout the Georgian period. The idea that another man would see his wife’s private parts was troubling to many husbands. In satirical caricatures, the male midwife was often depicted with his ranks of medicine bottles, many of them containing sedatives which he used to knock out women in order to have his wicked way with them (plate 9).
As male doctors gradually took over more of the responsibility for delivering babies from the midwife, the design of the birthing chair began to change. A lower chair is better for a woman giving birth, as she can brace her feet against the floor. Its drawback is that the midwife has to bend down low, ‘always leaning forward and bent over, with hands stretched out, watching for the foetus to appear’. But from around 1700, when doctors began to take over, birth chairs started to have longer legs. These higher chairs meant the physicians didn’t need to stoop, but they were less comfortable for the woman. Eventually mothers were encouraged to lie down flat on their beds and push, instead of to sit and use gravity. It strikes one as being more to the benefit of doctor than patient.
A seventeenth-century birthing chair from the Wellcome Collection, London
Pain relief in Tudor times lay in the power of prayer. Westminster Abbey’s ‘Girdle of Our Lady’ was sometimes lent by its abbot to ladies in labour, such as Henry VIII’s sister Mary Tudor. They might also turn to recipes such as John Partridge’s optimistically named herbal potion ‘to make women have a quick and speedy deliverance of their children, and without pain, or at least very little’. Georgian ladies could rely on the rather more efficacious ‘liquid laudanum’ – opium dissolved in alcohol. It was completely legal, and Dr John Jones’s The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d called the drug ‘a sage and noble panacea’. Queen Victoria popularised the use of chloroform during birth, but did so in the face of enormous moral pressure not to ‘succumb’ to this ‘weakness’. Many of her subjects thought that ‘to be insensible from whisky, gin, and brandy, and wine, and beer and ether and chloroform, is to be what in the world is called Dead-drunk’, something shameful whatever the circumstances. However, the rational and scientific Charles Darwin administered chloroform to his own wife himself during her labours.
Even after people began to understand that invisible germs might be carried into a bedroom upon seemingly clean hands, there was great opposition among doctors to changing their habits. In 1865, the Female Medical Society asked that doctors refrain from coming straight from the dissecting room to the birthing room, but a riposte in The Lancet claimed that it was entirely unnecessary: it was not infection but a woman’s ‘mental emotion’ or overexcitement that caused puerperal fever. The Tudor practice of remaining in bed after the birth was still followed: a book entitled Advice to a Wife, published in 1853, recommended that a new mother should spend nine days on her back before she ‘may sit up for half an hour’. Only after a fortnight might she ‘change the chamber for the sitting room’.
There was, of course, a distasteful class aspect to all this resting up and seclusion. Another Victorian advice book claims that it is ‘utterly impossible for the wife of a labouring man to give up work … Nor is it necessary. The back is made for its burthen.’ For working women, or among the settlers in the New World, there was an unresolved tension between motherly and wifely duties. A mother-to-be was medically advised not to lift her arms above head height, yet reaching upwards was essential for the typical New England wife’s task of daubing an unfinished or leaking house with clay. When Margaret Prince of Gloucester, Massachusetts, appeared in court to accuse a neighbour of casting a harmful spell upon her stillborn child, the ‘daubing’ accusation was thrown back at her. Yes, she had done ‘wrong in carrying clay at such a time’, Margaret admitted, but ‘she had to, her husband would not, and her house lay open’. There was clearly a need, in rural societies, for pregnant women to carry on just as usual.
The squeamish attitudes of the nineteenth century introduced a novel reluctance to talk about pregnancy. As early as 1791, a writer in The Gentleman’s Magazine noticed a growing trend for references to pregnancy to be seen as errors of taste. ‘Our mothers and grandmothers, used in course of time to become with child,’ he wrote, but ‘no female, above the degree of chambermaid or laundress, has been with child these ten years past … nor is she ever brought to bed, or delivered’. The genteel lady should merely inform ‘her friends that at a certain time she will be confined’. The downside of all this tasteful gentility was that women began to think of pregnancy as an illness, and Victorian books about childbirth began to refer to it among ‘the diseases of women’. In the bedchamber, as in society at large, women began to be seen as fragile, vulnerable and incompetent at looking after themselves.
This was a great change from the more robust attitudes of the Georgian period, which saw a cruder but in some ways more assertive attitude amongst women to matters of sex and reproduction. Queen Caroline, wife of George II, would openly discuss her sexual relationships with the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and stated that she minded her husband’s infidelity ‘no more than his going to the closestool’.
One cannot imagine prissy Queen Victoria ever discussing such a matter with her prime ministers. She herself was horrified by the experience of giving birth to children – ‘the first two years of my married life [were] utterly spoilt by this occupation!’ – and she almost certainly suffered from post-natal depression. Secrecy about childbirth only heightened the fears of the uninformed, first-time, nineteenth-century mother, and a reticence about women’s bodies could be inconvenient if not downright dangerous. From the 1830s, for example, doctors knew that the mucosa of the vagina changed colour after conception, and this signal provided the earliest reliable indicator that a woman was pregnant. This would have been enormously useful for women to know. But the information was kept quiet because it implied that a doctor might actually examine a woman’s private parts. The doctor who finally broke ranks and published the news was struck off the medical register as a punishment.
Alongside the idea that pregnancy was an illness, the lying-in hospital began to grow in popularity. Slowly childbirth was taken out of the bedroom, out of the home altogether, and into the public realm.
A rather sinister account of childbirth written in 1937 describes what happened, in ideal circumstances, when the expectant mother arrived at the twentieth-century hospital. She was ‘immediately given the benefit of one of the modern analgesics or pain-killers. Soon she is in a dreamy, half-conscious state … she knows nothing about being taken to a spotlessly clean delivery room … she does not hear the cry of the baby when first he feels the chill of this cold world.’ It didn’t work out like this for Mira, the heroine of the The Women’s Room (1978): ‘It was not the labor that was agonizing her … it was the scene – the coldness and sterility of it, the contempt of the nurses and the doctor, the humiliation of being in stirrups and having people peer at her exposed genitals whenever they chose.’
Today, as a result of this sort of experience, many people would like to see childbirth return to the domestic realm. But New York midwives are, at the time of writing, not legally allowed to deliver babies in people’s homes.
Another matern
al duty that Queen Victoria avoided was the task of breastfeeding. In fact, it was much less common than you might assume in historic bedrooms, as a result of the once widespread practice of wet-nursing.
3 – Was Breast Always Best?
I am quite at a loss to account for the general practice of sending infants out of doors, to be suckled … by another woman.
William Cadogan, 1748
For many centuries, breast was not best for upper-class women, and newborn babies were often quickly expelled from their mothers’ bedrooms.
The early care of infants was considered vital, of course, to their future well-being, and well-brought-up children required a huge amount of clobber. Hannah Glasse, the eighteenth-century Gina Ford, recommended that a baby wear a minimum of a shirt, a petticoat, a set of buckram stays, a robe and two caps. It seems almost cruel to squeeze a baby into tight stays, but it was intended to ensure a straight spine. Those who grew up crooked were thought to owe ‘their misfortune to the disingenuity of those who attended them in their infancy’, who’d shamefully failed to lace them tightly enough.
Childcare was clearly a matter requiring expert skill and attention. And yet, for centuries, mothers did not consider that they were the best people to care for their children.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a golden age of wet-nursing.
Much of the evidence for this comes from one very vocal campaign group that complained vociferously about the almost universal use of wet nurses, and there was great debate on the issue (just as there is for breast-and bottle-feeding today). Only a very few ladies of ‘courage and resolution’ nursed their own children, it was said in the seventeenth century, and a nursing mother ‘is become as unfashionable and ungenteel as a gentleman that will not drink, swear and be profane’.
