Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in 17th-Century England (review)

Reviews 197 Parergon 21.2 (2004) Gowing, Laura, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in 17th -Century England, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003; hardback; pp. 304; 7 b/w figures; RRP US$38, £25; ISBN 0300100965. The book is a major contribution to our understanding of the experiences of Early Modern women, their lack of agency, control over their own bodies and concepts of their own physical experiences. Gowing’s work makes it very clear that biological sex and social gender are both cultural constructions in the Early Modern world, requiring a more circumspect view of the work of representations which Early Modern people understood, rather than cultural historians’ neglect of the ways these representations were accomplished. Popular discourses on the body are the focus; the stated remit of the work a study about the wider definition of the body, encompassing medical discourses, popular beliefs and common practices. Emphasising the theoretical, Gowing has produced a competent and thought-provoking work, but the popular beliefs and common practices alluded to are not perhaps prominent enough. Though case studies are presented, there are times when these could have been used very effectively to underline concepts but are left relatively unexplored. Gowing outlines the Galenic idea of perceptions of the body: male and female bodies were considered complementary, both were structurally equivalent, and the woman’s body just that of a man internalised. Knowledge was uncertain, compiled from an interaction between print and oral culture, seeking to generate information. Within the confines of Early Modern culture, women were defined as constitutionally unable to keep their own boundaries, particularly on marriage where a woman lost her name, property and identity. The cultural definition of the body as private, transposed with the social context of sex and reproduction as public, made the nature of female identity conflictual. Gowing focuses on the tropes of women’s sexual experience in Early Modern England, exploring expressions of consent and desire within the framework of sexual order. Texts emphasised that conception was dependent upon female pleasure, spending considerable time on outlining the means whereby both parties could achieve it. Women’s agency was displaced by the basic assumption that men initiated sexual activity; representation of sex in legal contexts emphasised the passivity of women’s nature and sexual experiences. Surviving case records, disciplinary by nature, clearly show the problems which such displaced agency created for victims of rape or sex without consent. Rape was considered a crime against property, hence single women were extremely disadvantaged. Bodily 198 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) proof was not enough and pregnancy was thought to occur only with orgasm: if a rape victim became pregnant, consent was assumed because ‘pleasure’ was involved. Any untoward indication of a woman’s desire or active female sexual agency could be associated with sin, harlotry, whorishness and witchcraft. Female consent was limited politically, culturally, socially and legally but the enforced internalisation of such limits undermined female desire and agency and validated male violence. Perceiving pregnancy, by the seventeenth century, was hedged by political implications surrounding male and female contributions to reproduction. Gowing dissects how patriarchal thought took the father’s natural authority as the basis of all political authority and how the questions of male and female roles in reproduction impacted upon concepts of the state. The experience of pregnancy was thus highly culturally specific since its progression brought into focus the politics of reproduction based on how much influence the mother and her environment had on the developing foetus. Experiencing pregnancy as a married woman was validated by social and economic support, all validations that the unmarried went without. Pregnant married women offered society a future whereas unmarried women offered a threat, presenting probable economic and social burdens. The Infanticide Act of 1624 made concealment of pregnancy a crime, presuming guilt because women’s bodies were so unreadable and evidence was difficult to find.The concept of women regulating each other is profound in the communal evidence provided with regard to concealed pregnancies, which makes grim reading. In contrast to some recent historical reconstructions of childbirth in Early Modern England, Gowing offers a less optimistic reading of...