Pregnancy and childbirth

Pregnancy and childbirth stirred powerful emotions in parents, families, and communities in a period of high infant mortality. The most dominant individual and familial feelings were apprehension, fear, and pain, hope, joy, and gratitude. For much of the period medical intervention was limited to difficult births, but by the later eighteenth century, medical practitioners were taking over elite women’s childbirth from midwives in Britain. This changed landscape of birth created cultural anxieties about man-midwives as sexual predators since their role meant they touched women’s sexual organs. All these feelings shaped perception and experience and exploring pregnancy and childbirth through the lens of emotions thus offers new insights into their history.