Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons (review)

Lisa Forman Cody argues that changes in the understandings of and practices surrounding "sex and birth helped to define eighteenth-century [British] national, religious, regional, and even class identities" (p. 240). More particularly, she invokes the rise of man-midwifery as the explanatory factor to demonstrate how two modern categories—national identification, and fundamental, oppositional sexual difference—not only emerged in the eighteenth century, but were "constituent of each other" (p. vii).

This is a very ambitious enterprise, and perhaps it is inevitably somewhat speculative and suggestive rather than rigorous, quantitative, or empirical. Most of the analysis consists of Cody's "readings" of contemporary "explorations"—explorations that led to the construction (she argues) of a body of natural and modern facts not only about sex, gender, reproduction, and the family (p. viii), but simultaneously about the nature of political, national, and imperial relations. In the course of the volume she "reads" caricatures, pamphlets, newspapers, and various medical and scientific writings to illustrate her point. At this point I wish to say two things: First, that some of these readings seem to me to be unlikely and overstretched, and it is always worthwhile to remember Papa Freud's dictum that a cigar may just be a good smoke. This I think is particularly apposite to Cody's interpretation of the opening image of the book, "The Happy Deliverance": After explaining that the actions in the depicted scene reveal a strident anti-Catholic, antifeminist, and antiforeign bias (surely not novel in early modern British history), she later identifies the man-midwife who delivers the pregnant male monarch as "an evangelical divine, perhaps the charismatic Methodist preacher George Whitefield" (p. 212). I looked in vain for either an argument for this identification or a footnote—surely even speculation should have more foundation than this.

The second difficulty I encountered was one of "voice." In this history, the only action portrayed is that of the author ("I") reading the lives of "the central actors in this book" (p. ix). Even the audience was "imagined" (see p. xiii). The use of the passive voice is everywhere; when actors are named (unless they are man-midwives), they are usually referred to collectively, as Britons or Georgians. I do not wish to overlabor this point: one does hear a few distinct voices, like Horace Walpole's and Jane Sharp's, but often we must be content with collective descriptions and assertions about what they believed and why. Another indication of the same problem is the frequent use of qualifiers like "perhaps," "probably," or "seemed to" (see, e.g., the analysis of the story of the midwife toad, p. 248, in which three consecutive sentences rely on such unfounded, but possible, conjecture).

One of the main points of Cody's book is that before the advent of male midwives, "childbirth was . . . considered a secret, private affair, left to the management of women alone" (p. 31). This she contrasts with the public discussion surrounding childbirth in the aftermath of its male takeover. There were, of course, many childbirths that were never secret or private—namely, those of royal consorts who thought nothing of having hordes of men and women in the birthing chamber. There were also many public discussions of the importance of childbirth in the voluminous early modern British literature on the value of a growing population for a powerful and wealthy nation, well before the appearance of male midwives.

Historical development is rarely as integrated and monocausal as Cody implies. Furthermore, ideas in the past (as in the present) were rarely as "free-floating" as this book suggests; though it is often difficult to establish "who was doing what to whom, and why," these are surely the historian's debts to the reader.