The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  How convincing then is the argument that the eighteenth century saw the discovery of organic difference between men and women? Academic medical theory apart, there is plenty of evidence that men and women had seen themselves as quintessentially physically different from each other for centuries. The long-standing taboos surrounding menstruation, for instance, bespeak an enduring vision of woman as the mysterious other – unclean and in lifelong thrall to her unpredictable womb.26 Nor can a belief in natural feminine virtue be confined to the eighteenth century. Fenela Childs argues that although a fresh wave of cloying idealization set in from about 1710, the idealization of women was nothing new; visions of female nature had oscillated for centuries between the virtuous and the vicious. For all the early eighteenth-century praise of female purity and softness, there was no change whatsoever in the fundamental qualities expected of women. Whether the vision of the Madonna or the Magdalene was uppermost in male imaginings, the same modest demeanour was prescribed for women.27

  All of which is not to deny the sheer glamour of the images of tender motherhood which proliferated in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century media, but it is to suggest that these precedents should raise suspicions about a case which argues from silence for ideological revolution. What distinguishes the eighteenth-century discourse of motherhood from its predecessors is not a sudden idealization, but rather the overlaying of a range of secular celebrations on the ancient religious solemnizations. When Samuel Richardson singled out the breast-feeding mother in Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4), one of the most popular novels of the century, he presented a traditional duty in a haze of beguiling limelight. Witness the scene when the once naughty Lady G. is surprised with her babe at the breast by her estranged husband:

  Never was a man in greater rapture. For lady Gertrude had taught him to wish that a mother would be a mother: He Threw himself at my feet, clasping me and the little varlet together in his arms. Brute! said I, will you smother my Harriet – I was half-ashamed of my tenderness – Dearest, dearest, dearest Lady G. – Shaking his head, between every dear and est, every muscle of his face working; how you transport me! – Never, never, never, saw I so delightful a sight!28

  As the mother who determined to be a mother gained in romantic profile, so fashionable maternalism presented fresh rhetorical opportunities. Feminists exploited the discourse of maternity for political ends. In 1697 Mary Astell cited the mother's crucial influence over men in childhood as reason enough to support any scheme to improve female education. Provincial mothers joked that their healthy production of able-bodied boys was a patriotic act, geared to ‘enlarging his [majesty's] forces both by sea & land’, and eighteenth-century actresses carefully accentuated their maternity to refurbish their reputations.29 But the rhetorical claims of motherhood were not unlimited, after all, the divorced wife always risked the loss of her children however exemplary she had been in the nursery. Further, while the ecstatic embrace of maternal romance may have made for compelling reading, or artful self-promotion, sentimental glamour is not the mantle which attached to motherhood as most genteel women described it. The experience was too cruel, unpredictable and unremittingly physical to be decently covered by such a sugary wrapping.

  For modern women, childbirth and child-rearing is usually the key collision between them and the medical establishment, which probably accounts for much of the contemporary interest in this encounter in centuries past. While there are many useful individual studies of contraception, wet-nursing, maternal breast-feeding and so on, the most cohesive and polemical interpretation of the confrontation between female patients and male practitioners has been offered by those who dispute traditional accounts of the glorious rise of scientific medicine. To this end, it is argued that childbirth was a female domain in early modern England. Mother-to-be, midwife and gossips combined to make labour a ritualized affirmatory experience from which men were excluded. Some would go so far as to claim the lying-in chamber as a site of collective female resistance to patriarchal power.30 Given such a positive vision of ‘traditional’ childbirth, the eighteenth-century man-midwife or surgeon can only be seen as a villain who displaced the midwife, de-ritualized the ultimate rite of passage and generally imposed his authority upon women in an effort to establish professional identity. By this view, the patriarchal victory over teeming women and traditional midwifery reached its zenith in nineteenth-century obstetrics, with its careerism, unnecessary and often dangerous interventionism, and profoundly unsympathetic ethos.31

  That the medical profession established itself between 1660 and 1850 is not in question. In addition, most social historians would accept that the delegitimization of the skills of the midwife was a function of this rise, and few would claim the obstetrician as an unambiguous life-saver.32 However, some scholars would be less inclined to celebrate the joyousness of the birth experience before the efficient use of the forceps, podalic version, antiseptic, antibiotics and analgesia (despite the much-cited reassurance that probably as many as twenty-nine out of thirty births were spontaneous and uncomplicated, and that the vast majority of women looked happily forward to ‘a safe deliverance’.)33 Others refuse to see women as simple victims of male professionals, incapable of an informed choice about their own welfare. The notion that the obstetric surgeon was but one conspirator in a wider patriarchal plot has been questioned most directly. Reconstructing the contemporary debates around the rise of the man-midwife, Roy Porter reveals a vocal strain of husbandly horror. He conjures a substantial section of male public opinion in the later eighteenth century which did not regard female employment of male accoucheurs as a victory for men, rather ‘as a chapter in the emergence of female licence, and an insidious challenge to male authority.’34 Indeed, it is in female choices not male, Adrian Wilson argues, that we should seek the explanation for the rising stature of the man-midwife at mid-century. As mothers became aware that a male practitioner could deliver a living child in an obstructed delivery (without resort to the gruesome hooks and crochets), they called on them earlier in labour and more frequently. The fact that these emergency practitioners soon eclipsed the traditional midwife at even straightforward births amongst the fashionable, he attributes to the desires of polite accomplished ladies who sought to distance themselves from the old-fashioned collectivity of midwifes and gossips in the name of fashionable gentility. Thus, ‘the making of man midwifery was the work of women’.35 Simplistic conspiracy theories are also impugned by Judith Lewis's thoughtful work on the decisions made by pregnant noblewomen between 1760 and 1860. For these ladies of quality the accoucheur was almost invariably the practitioner of choice. Indeed, he proved a useful ally to his patient in her battles with convention, duty and demanding relatives; ‘their voice of authority could be used to approve or disapprove much that women wanted to do – or avoid doing’.36 Nor should we take it for granted that professional–client relationships before the obstetrician were automatically harmonious, given the recorded evidence of conflicts between mothers, midwives and gossips in the early modern lying-in chamber.37 It is quite possible that the rich female collectivity romanticized by some was experienced as an alarming and oppressive cacophony by young mothers struggling to exercise their own maternal judgement. Community was not without its costs. In any case, it seems anachronistic to indict mothers for feminist betrayal if they chose a practitioner of the opposite sex, or failed to entertain half the village at the bedside.

  Important as these debates are, the questions posed derive largely from late twentieth-century anxieties and conflicts about birth, motherhood and childhood. One can almost hear the echo of modern slogans – pregnancy is not an illness, male intervention is problematic, breast is best, and so on. This may go some way to explaining why seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mothers often appear in tabloid guise, as either cold, unnatural sophisticates, or communitarian, breast-feeding heroines. But our battles were not necessarily theirs. This chapter reconstructs maternal desires and difficulties in the ter
ms set out in their own letters by genteel women in the Georgian period. It offers a varied picture which allows for human diversity, indecision and ambivalence, pleasure as well as pain. Overall, the discussion emphasizes the impact of childbirth – seen as both natural fulfilment and an inescapable duty – on genteel women's private lives and public profile. The sentimental prestige of parenthood and a celebration of the pet-like appeal of the progeny is detectable, yet far more striking are the sheer blood and guts of bearing and raising children. When a woman conceived she was launched on a roaring wave of fate. No one could predict how easily she would bear pregnancy, how safely she would deliver, how robust would be her infant, or how long and healthy the life of her child. Cumulatively the discussion stresses the mammoth emotional, physical and social costs of that passage: a studied resignation and willed endurance helped women pay the price. Christian stoicism was the philosophy of the genteel mother, just as inner strength and self-control were the qualities that defined eighteenth-century adult manhood. However, to be brave in suffering and resigned to the weight of one's biological burdens is not necessarily to be supine in the face of custom and authority. Mothers were particularly suspicious of medical opinion when it came to deciding what was best for their children: the feeding of infants and the inoculation of children were two fields over which the doctor's word was far from law. Experience gave women credentials of their own, but despite the measureless emotion and energy spent on children, women never described motherhood in terms of work. For all that genteel women were positively immersed in the business of child-bearing and child-rearing, they lacked a vocabulary with which to grasp the character of their reproductive labour. Trifling fears, pestering interruptions and a thousand little nothings were the inadequate phrases called upon to describe the infinite practical demands of motherhood. The sum and substance of motherhood lay in multitudinous details.

  For fertile women, motherhood could absorb almost all reserves of physical and emotional energy for at least a decade, and was an anxious backdrop for a lifetime. The ‘average’ mother in this period bore six to seven live children. It was a truth universally recognized that a childless marriage was a sad marriage and most mothers paid lip-service to this maxim.38 Yet recitations of the trials and disappointments that children brought threatened to subvert the assumption. Female ambivalence about dutiful motherhood found its most explicit expression in the letters of the Whitaker network. In 1814 newly wed Eliza Whitaker shared what appear common apprehensions with her young husband:

  My aunt has had a letter from Mrs Morgan … the subject you may guess. She gives many reasons why we should not be anxious to possess a family, She says she was 3 or 4 yrs before the birth of her daughter, which was an ecstasy of delight to herself and her husband. The little creature sickened and a month after its birth died, and for many months they were miserable and wished they had no family. How little we know whether the attainment of our wishes will bring us happiness.39

  Eliza Whitaker's early failure to conceive was appreciated by her friends, but given her comparative youth, women correspondents were unperturbed, as Elizabeth Addison's ambiguous commiseration indicates:

  I should be one of those to rejoice with you, if your illness proceeded from the common cause for once they come they are such a comfort, though I cannot help feeling thankful to have escaped so long. I should like to have several more yet if I had my choice. I do not know if I dare to choose to have them, but I am a terrible coward even in trifles.40

  The burden of such counsel was clear enough. A mother paid for the comfort of children in anxiety and pain.

  The manuscripts of the Parker, Barcroft and Whitaker networks are littered with references to unfortunate women who had undergone a fatal labour; expectant mothers could not but be acquainted with the potential hazards they faced. ‘I attempt to be Witty in vain,’ wrote Jane Scrimshire in 1749, ‘as at this [moment] the Bell is tolling for the funeral of poor Mrs Wilkinson who Dyed in Childbed last Friday …’41 Recent revisionism may stress that the average woman ran only a 6–7 per cent risk of dying in her reproductive career, and was as likely to die by infectious disease or accident, but such statistics do not justify the claim that childbirth was seen as an insignificant cause of death. Even by the revised figures, perinatal complication was probably the single most common cause of death in women aged twenty-five to thirty-four, accounting for one in five of all deaths in this age group. As the expert says himself, in a large village a woman might see a contemporary die in childbed every third year.42 But statistics, in themselves offer only a tangential guide to meaning and mentalité. Even today, when the risks of sudden infant death in England are a moderate one in four hundred, it is hard to find a new mother who has not walked to the cot with a fleeting dread. Human fears are rarely based on a rational calculation of probabilities, but on the appreciation of the gravity of the possible outcome. In any case, statistics, good or bad, were unknown to eighteenth-century women; they would have judged the possiblities on the basis of anecdotal report. Doubtless, all pregnant women knew of someone who had died in childbed, and no one could guarantee that they would not be the next. Expectant mothers had limited control over the quality of their labour, could do virtually nothing to prevent an unborn child becoming obstructed by the head, and, as Linda Pollock has remarked, they had many long months to contemplate the event.43 Unsurprisingly, morbid fears surface in the letters of Georgian women, as they do in seventeenth-century documents. While pregnant in the 1750s Jane Scrimshire grimly joked about the new polite fashions she would adopt ‘If I Live till Spring’, and morosely observed ‘I hear of nothing but Dying’.44 Indeed, it was still not uncommon for pregnant women to prepare themselves for death to the extent of drawing up conduct letters for children, yet unborn or still in leading strings. As one gloomy expectant mother prophesied in 1801, ‘My dearest child, When this is delivered unto you, the hand that writes it will be mouldered in dust’.45 Even without the mortal risks (however ‘low’), labour was a painful and often prolonged ordeal for both mother and unborn child. In consequence, it was an extremely forbidding prospect; a point underlined by Jane Scrimshire's plaint of 1756: ‘I do assure you I dread the approaching time very much as I suffer'd so greatly before & I am afraid Mr Scrimshire will be oblig'd to be at York about that time.’46 Even if, on the basis of rational calculation, a pregnant woman might resolve not to worry about the comparatively small risk to her own life, she could still be prey to anxiety about the pain and physical trauma of birth and not unnaturally about the health and wholeness of the child in the womb. Tragically, Jane Scrimshire's eldest daughter was born blind. Experienced mothers often dreaded repetitions and the consequences for their children, first-time mothers feared the unknown.

  In addition to mental misgivings, the Parker and Whitaker correspondents catalogued the attendant physical discomforts. Surprisingly, however, there is but one surviving reference to nausea – a dramatic sign which now looms so large in the popular impression of early pregnancy. Perhaps vomiting was seen as both normal and healthy given the universal reliance on purging as a prophylactic and general cure-all. In any case, more striking to eighteenth-century letter-writers were the accompanying melancholy, aches and immobility of pregnancy. Elizabeth Parker, Jane Scrimshire and Eliza Whitaker all complained particularly of lameness. In fact, the gamut of side effects endured by Eliza Whitaker in 1816 ran to headaches, abdominal pain, dizziness, fainting fits and palpitations.47 Emotional confusion, blunted concentration and depressed spirits were routinely associated with pregnancy. ‘Do all in yr power to keep up your spirrits’, Ann Pellet urged her niece, ‘for the want of spirits is the greatest misery that can be felt this side of the grave.’ In fact, she claimed her own ‘labour was but a triffle when compared to weak nerves’. Similarly, John Parker bolstered his pregnant daughter: ‘I am glad my Dr you keep up yr Spirits, which is [the] only thing to support us in this life …’48 In the 1750s Jane Scrimshire was plunged into despondency
and felt her powers of concentration slip away: ‘My abilities decrease & I have no more notion of Penning a smart letter than I now have of making a smart cap … both body and mind disorder'd but have never been well since I came from Harrogate & what is worse my complaint is of the Encreasing kind & nothing but time can cure …’49 In the 1810s an unusually torpid Elizabeth Addison felt unequal to polite conversation and even her lifeline – letter-writing: ‘I cannot bear the thought of being among strangers … you know my awkward bashfulness at all times. But when I am in my present way it is doubly perceptible … I shall write no more for I am in a sad, stupid humour, this hot weather stultifies me.’50

  By the third trimester of pregnancy, several women within the Parker, Barcroft and Whitaker networks were practically immobilized and thereby socially isolated. The pregnant Elizabeth Parker felt she could not stir from Colne; a Leeds merchant's wife, Mrs Ridsdale, had to catch up with her friends after a winter's ‘long Confinement’; while Mrs Addison of Liverpool admitted, ‘I was so entirely confined to the house for the two months before that I could not even walk around the garden & I have always been active to the last before’.51

  Of course, the experience of pregnancy differed from woman to woman, and as the last comment suggests, from pregnancy to pregnancy. A useful leavening is provided by the robust commentary of school-master's wife Bessy Ramsden. In the 1760s and 1770s she suffered little or no discomfort, was resolutely humorous throughout her four pregnancies, and even contemplated ‘the fatal moment’ with apparent equanimity. Although incommoded by her sheer size, she refused to forgo the pleasure of visiting, shopping and card-playing in the metropolis.