Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons - Softcover

Cody, Lisa Forman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 019954140X ISBN 13: 9780199541409

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008

Synopsis

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 artifacts 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 behavior, reproduction, and childbirth. By taking seriously contemporary caricatures, jokes, and rumors 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.

About this title

About the Author

Lisa Forman Cody is Associate Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019954140X
• ISBN 13: 9780199541409
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 376