Read more
Zusatztext Cody straddles some of the most significant and distinctive themes of the long eighteenth century ... [she] teases out a novel interpretation of a well-rehearsed medical development, and presents it in a way which cannot help but have impact on the reader. Klappentext 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 artefacts aboutsexuality, 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-centuryBritish life: the development of the modern British nation, and the emergence of the male expert as the pre-eminent authority over matters of sexual behaviour, reproduction, and childbirth. By taking seriously contemporary caricatures, jokes, and rumours that used gender, birth, and family to makeclaims 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 seventeenthcentury, 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 thedomestic world of pregnancy andchildbirth, 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. Most surprisingly, Cody has Zusammenfassung Analyses two intertwined narratives that shaped 18th-century British life: the development of the modern British state, and the emergence of the man-midwife as the pre-eminent authority over sex and childbirth. This work shows how national, religious, ethnic, and gendered identities were experienced through and symbolized by birth and midwifery. Inhaltsverzeichnis 1: Introduction 2: Mothers, Midwives, and Mysteries 3: Abortions, Witches, and Catholics: Reproduction and Revolution 4: 'Is not your Lordship with child too?': Pregnant Fathers and Fathers of Science 5: Imagining Mothers 6: Breeding Scottish Obstetrics in Doctor Smellie's London 7: Revolutionary Bodies in the Britain of George III 8: Sex, Science, and Race 9: The State Takes Charge: Conceived, Consummated, and Counted 10: Epilogue ...
