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

The author of the anonymous 1772 pamphlet The danger and immodesty of the present too general custom of unnecessarily employing men-midwives focused his or her passionate denunciation neither on the practitioners themselves nor on their female clientele. Rather, “men of fashion” were to blame: they have “bid Adieu to THINKING” (3). Their shocking tolerance of men-midwives’ assault on their wives’ modesty is but one strand of a larger condemnation of “our gay young Men” whose “Happiness” culpably is not “centered within the narrow Circle of Home” (4). Libertinism, gluttony, drunkenness, idleness, dueling, debt, gambling, and bribery: tolerance of men-midwifery is figured as but the newest evidence of the improper masculinity that is sapping the strength of contemporary Britain. The blame for the lamentably increasing visibility of men-midwives should not be laid at the feet of these entrepreneurs, whose pursuit of profit is understandable. No more are ladies, “swayed” by the fashion for these “darling Doctors,” “these ‘sweet men’” and “their immodest, obscene practices,” to blame: it is their husbands who are guilty, having failed both to guide their dependent wives and to defend them against the encroachment of other men (8).

The supplanting of midwives by men-midwives, or accoucheurs, over the course of the long eighteenth century is the central focus of Lisa Forman Cody’s compelling and wide-ranging Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons. As The danger and immodesty suggests, the lenses through which eighteenth-century commentators perceived male-midwifery may defy expectation. Rather than an opposition of female tradition and intuition to male science and technology, Cody gives us a multiply, even contradictorily gendered long eighteenth century, both cause and effect of the gradual rise to normativity of professionalized male authority over sexuality and reproduction. Cody argues persuasively that even as models of reproduction were marshaled throughout the period both to create difference and to stabilize various categories of politics, nationalism, religion, natural history, race, and class, the man-midwife owed his ultimate success to his ambiguously gendered professional identity, being perceived as both feminine in his sympathy and masculine in his logic and expertise. She demonstrates relatedly that the conceptual challenge to the status quo posed by the man-midwife—by the once unthinkable thought of public, male, rational control of birth—was central to the emergence and transformation of eighteenth-century heterosociality. She thus contests Thomas Laqueur’s influential view that the era saw the establishment of a recognizably modern, dichotomizing gender system. Cody’s subtle method is itself a signal achievement of this rich book: she tracks both ways that cultural anxieties informed the reception of the man-midwife and the recurrence and significance of images of birthing and delivery in seemingly unrelated political, religious, and popular discourse. Throughout, she attends carefully to “alternative, and sometimes resistant views” (ix).

The book’s introduction and first chapter describe the seventeenth-century status quo, in which midwives had near total control of birth as an event both private (the delivery room, from which men were largely excluded) and public (the juries of matrons, on which midwives gave evidence in cases of dropping of babies and infanticide as well as pleading the belly, that is, when female criminals condemned to death who were pregnant sought to delay their executions until their babies were born). Cody ably analyzes the social segregation of the sexes that correlated with the derivation of authority over birth in experience and sympathy. In part because conception, for which orgasm was believed a prerequisite, was regarded as a mystery, detached public scrutiny of birth was deemed inappropriate. Though the Chamberlen family had invented the obstetric forceps in the early seventeenth century, male-midwives were called only for emergencies. This gendering of space was accompanied by worry about the potential for secret female cabals to undermine men and institutions, fears that shaped public perceptions of the...