2. Birth and the household

The environment in which a birth took place had the capacity to affect both the emotions and the behaviours of the individuals who were present. Various factors fed into the creation of this affective environment, such as several material indications that a birth was about to take place; the manipulation of the sensory environment of birth through light, sound and smell; and the interactions between the birthing woman’s family, birth attendants and neighbours.1 This environment, in turn, both generated and reinforced the embodied experiences of the women who were present in the birthing chamber. These women performed and maintained birth practices and routines learned tacitly through their own experiences of childbirth and during their attendances on birthing women in the neighbourhood or within their family.2 In performing these routines of childbirth, and stirred by their sensory and material surroundings, these individuals had their own embodied experience of each birth rooted in their minds, memories and movements. This set of memories and implicit knowledge of childbirth was hugely valued in the eighteenth-century processes of birthing. The birthing chamber was therefore an important space in eighteenth-century England. Not only did it provide an arena in which communities were both built and maintained, as we shall see later in this book, but it also contained the tacit and embodied knowledge of birthing practices and the experiences and memories of the women who were present.

This chapter therefore explores the material nature of birthing and the role of the birth environment in both shaping and managing embodied experiences of birthing. Remarkably, given the importance of birthing and the birthing chamber in the creation of both individual and group identities, these materialities are almost entirely transient and temporary. As we shall see in this chapter, birthing chambers were carved from domestic space, birthing bodies were clothed in repurposed garments, and infant clothing was reused, borrowed or fashioned from the clothing of adults, even in high-status households. As a result, the material record of birth and birthing is, as Catriona Fisk has suggested, both everywhere and nowhere, embodied in everyday objects that give no visible clue to their role in birthing.3 A similar suggestion has been made in Karen Hearn’s research on what she calls ‘pregnancy portraits’. For much of history, Hearn argues, pregnancy has been an important moment to record through portraiture, yet portraits of pregnant bodies are rare with the exception of a short period in the early seventeenth-century.4 Hearn has recovered pregnant bodies through the correlation of portrait dates and the sitters’ biographical information. Fisk has recovered them through the close examination and recreation of clothing alteration. Using letters, this chapter recovers the transient material environment of birthing both for the body and for the household.

Emplaced birthing and affect theory

Emplacement is, essentially, the direct relationship between an event (childbirth) and its physical and social environment. Childbirth in the eighteenth century was contained and managed within the household. That household was, in turn, tied to a sense of place by the involvement of the immediate community – what I refer to in Chapter 5 as a ‘community of neighbours’. In this sense, birthing was what the ethnologist Sarah Pink has called a ‘place-event’.5 Pink’s concept of place-event is founded in the geographer Doreen Massey’s exploration of the concept of ‘home’. Massey argued that ‘home’ was more than simply a building or a geographical location: it was a ‘constellation of processes’, of which a crucial element was the movement of people.6 In Massey’s theory of place, the bodies that moved to and through a place were crucial to the way in which that place was experienced. Pink’s 2011 study of Spanish bullfighters extended these theories, arguing that place was also the entanglement of ‘geological (or physical) forms, weather, human socialities, material objects, buildings and animals’.7 Not only were these elements all present in Pink’s theory of place, but they were also changing – producing intensities of activity and presence that shifted and altered each time the place was created. Given this, Pink argued, each bullfight was a new and different entanglement of people and processes than the one before, creating a recognizable but entirely new place-event each time.

Adapting these theories of place for the eighteenth century, this book explores childbirth as a place-process – a constantly changing, yet familiar and recognizable, series of rituals, behaviours and events that were firmly rooted in the social and physical environment in which they took place. Pink’s bullfights changed location. Each fight focused on a new bull and an individual fighter. It took place in different locations, at different times and in front of a different crowd, yet as a place-process it remained recognizable as a bullfight. The same theory is applicable to the process of birthing in eighteenth-century England. There were numerous material indicators in the household when a birth was imminent. These indicators (discussed in this chapter) provided a consistent backdrop against which women laboured and were delivered. Lending and borrowing practices could mean that the material elements of a birthing chamber – the cradle, the linens – provided the backdrop for multiple births across different households. Yet these spaces for birthing were created out of domestic space. They were at once familiar and different, as chambers within the household were rearranged to accommodate the birthing woman, her attendants and the new infant. We can therefore view birthing as a combination of physical environment, material objects and people that created a framework that was flexible and therefore difficult to displace. This chapter extends Hannah Newton’s work on the embodied experience of the sickroom.8 Emplacement helps us to understand the broader role of the birthing chamber as a social space and its role in the transmission of reproductive knowledge and the articulation of social networks, as well as a site of haptic knowledge.

Bodies, and the way in which they engaged with each other and with the birthing environment, were an important part of the physical and emotional impact of the birthing chamber. Each birthing chamber was not only a new material space but also a new affective space. Affect, Grigg and Seigworth suggest, ‘arises in the in-betweeness’ of bodies and the environment that they are in.9 It is the intensities of feeling as a body moves through the world – where an individual is in relation to an event, and the encounters with both people and things through which that event is experienced.10 The birthing chamber itself had the potential to create a wide variety of emotions in the women who were present. As we shall see, birthing chambers were carved from domestic space. That space was often also the location for sleeping and could therefore also be associated with rest and recovery, birth and death, intimacy and violence.11 As a birthing chamber, it contained the emotional experiences of past, present and imagined future birthing experiences for all of the women present. The smells, sights and sounds of the birthing chamber; the interactions of the people present; and memories of previous births or of stories heard and repeated all changed what Sara Ahmed has described as the ‘angle’ of each arrival in the room – the affective state or mood in which each individual enters the room.12 Moreover, these angles shifted and changed as the birth progressed, as people arrived and left the chamber. Each individual present at a birth experienced it differently. As Jane Hamlett observed in her study of public school spaces, ‘the spatial, physical world represents an important dimension of emotional experience. Enclosure or confinement in a space is also fundamental to emotional life in that its arrangement often determines the positions of bodies and their relationships to each other.’13 The materiality of the birthing chamber, the objects in it and the bodies that moved through it therefore shaped and defined women’s embodied experiences of birthing.

The birthing chamber also had the potential to physically shape and change the bodies of those who were present. The neuro-historiographical turn in the history of emotions has huge relevance to the birthing experiences of eighteenth-century women.14 This approach to the history of emotions explores the idea that humans, and particularly the human brain, are shaped by the world and are therefore ‘biocultural’. If the brain is not a fixed biological entity, if it continues to be made following birth, it becomes newly prominent in understanding human experience. Modern research into physiologic birth emphasizes the relationship between environment and the body’s endogenous systems. This research highlights the ‘inherent mammalian need to feel safe and secure’ in the space designated for birthing.15 What constitutes a safe and secure environment is surely a matter of individual perception, yet there is a remarkable consistency in descriptions of the ideal birthing environment. Maree Stenglin and Maralyn Foureur use understandings of bound and unbound space to describe an ideal birthing environment that is conducive to physiologic birth. Bound space, they suggest, is womb-like, enveloping and quiet. It allows the birthing woman to focus on her body and the business of birthing by dissipating anxiety and creating sensations of security.16 Moreover, the creation of a bound environment, a safe space in which to give birth, promotes the release of the hormones necessary for an uncomplicated delivery.17 While perceptions of ‘too bounded’ or ‘unbounded’ space are individual rather than universal, Stenglin and Foureur’s research shows the physiological impact of the birthing space on bodies. Such conclusions are not restricted to human bodies. Rats have been shown to experience hormonal disruption in response to unbounded space.18 These modern descriptions of the ideal birthing space reflect, to some degree, the birthing chambers of eighteenth-century England. The effects of bounded and unbounded space are not restricted to the birthing woman but can be extended to her midwife and gossips. Athena Hammond and her colleagues have shown that the perception of a calm and safe environment can trigger the release of oxytocin in midwives and birth attendants, as well as in the birthing woman. This boost of oxytocin, a key mediator of human social and emotional behaviour, can have a positive impact on the way midwives behave while at work.19 Giving birth in the eighteenth century, therefore, extended beyond the physical demands of delivering an infant. The birthing chamber, its location in the household, the objects within it and the people who moved through it were important in ensuring successful outcomes for both the new mother and her infant. Childbirth required a combination of physical environment, material objects, practised actions and acquired knowledge to create a framework for managing birthing that was both adaptable and tenacious.

Clothing the birthing body

Clothing was, and continues to be, hugely important to the creation of identity. Clothing interacts intimately with the body, literally shaping physique while also influencing embodied identities and individual experiences of that body.20 Clothing pregnant bodies was particularly difficult. First, the temporary nature of the pregnant body in a period when fabric was expensive, clothes were made by hand, and the repurposing and recycling of garments was common meant that women were unlikely to purchase clothing specifically for their maternity. Instead, as we shall see, clothes were adapted in ways that allowed them to be used long after the pregnancy. The embodied experiences of pregnancy and birth were therefore subsumed into the wearer’s everyday identity. Pregnancy and birth were experienced within and alongside quotidian identities and experiences. Second, the link between the body and clothing during late pregnancy and birthing was disrupted. Heavily pregnant women did not need clothing to emphasize their fertility or femininity. Indeed, their bodies took on a liminal status – neither ill nor well, not masculine but certainly not feminine in size, shape and deportment. Nor were women expected to restrict or shape their body with clothing as the birth approached. Indeed, loose clothes that potentially obscured their pregnant state and prevented them from leaving the house were signs of maternal love and sacrifice that indicated ‘good’ motherhood and a lack of vanity.

It was widely acknowledged in the eighteenth century that tightly laced stays could have a detrimental effect on the chances of carrying a child to full term.21 Eighteenth-century clothing was reasonably adaptable to the pregnant figure.22 Stomachers could be widened to accommodate the growing gap at the front of the kirtle as the figure changed.23 Aprons were also used to cover gaps in clothing caused by an expanding waistline.24 Stays, however, required greater revision. Research by Harriet Waterhouse has shown that side lacing was the most comfortable way in which stays could be adjusted for late pregnancy.25 Waterhouse suggests that normal stays could be altered to incorporate side laces relatively easily, but that many women commissioned soft stays as part of their preparations in early pregnancy.26 These stays had lacing at the sides as well as at the front, and many were also less rigidly boned than ordinary stays. The stays in figure 2.1, thought to date from the early nineteenth century, were probably commissioned in anticipation of a pregnancy and show the key features of soft stays.27 They are laced at the front and side, shaped to accommodate a heavily pregnant stomach, and also have a supportive band that goes below the stomach to prevent uterine haemorrhage. They have less seaming and boning than normal stays to prevent unnecessary discomfort.

2.1 Maternity stays, Maidstone Museum (MNEMG 1963.19(m)). © and reproduced by kind permission of Maidstone Museum.

Wearing soft stays appears to have significantly eased Elizabeth Wilson’s discomfort during her second pregnancy in 1794. She wrote to her sister, ‘I felt nothing of the soreness I complained of at March which I attribute mostly to your easy stays.’28 It is possible that this relaxation of clothing etiquette also restricted her movements, however, as she joked, ‘don’t wonder if I should wear them out but I am not uneasy about that as I believe you will make me welcome if I do’. Emma O’Toole’s research on the material culture of maternity in eighteenth-century Ireland suggests that some women wore bedgowns at home over loosely tied stays in the final stages of their pregnancy, while others did not wear stays at all during their confinement. These levels of comfort, she notes, were permissible only for receiving informal visits at home.29 For middling and upper-status women, a neatly corseted body was a sign of respectability. If they wished to dress comfortably and in a manner that was thought best for the infant, they had to remain at home or make only informal visits to family or close friends. It is possible that Elizabeth’s joke referred to constant wear and tear on the garment causing it to become unwearable rather than to her movements. If so, the soft stays were clearly an indispensable element of her maternity clothing, worn with even greater frequency than her regular stays. Either way, it is clear that her sister’s soft stays significantly improved Elizabeth’s experience of birthing.

As pregnancy advanced, women were expected to collect the textiles necessary for birthing. Known as childbed linen, these textiles could be inherited, borrowed from neighbours or family members, or purchased new or from one of the numerous second-hand clothes dealers operating across northern England in the eighteenth century. Frances Ingram was one of the few women rich enough to purchase a set of childbed linens in preparation for giving birth. An undated list in her archive suggests that she had been giving the matter some thought, though there are no receipts for the eventual purchase of these items:

For the Child

A Sattin Basket & Pincushion

A Brussels [lace] Christening Suit

Six Holland [linen] Shirts

6 Night Caps

4 Day Caps, Two Boys & two Ditto Girls

6 Neckcloths

6 Bigions30

6 Forehead Cloths

Twelve Stays

6 Pairs of Cuffs

A Basket with two Dimithy31 Covers & Dimithy Pincushion & Cover

A Scarlet Wraper [shawl]

A Receiving Blanket

3 Pair of Robe Blankets

6 Dimity Robes

6 Cotton Waistcoats

6 double Pilshes32

Two Rolers Bound with Sattin

One Silk, & two thread Chimney Lines

Two yds of Flannell

A Sattin Robe, & Casting Mantle

Two Dozen of fine Clouts [nappy]

6 Dozen of Clouts

6 Beds

For the Lady

A White Sattin Bed Gown

A Sattin Cloak

6 Half Shifts

4 Waistcoats india Dimity

4 Shirts, & 4 Rolers33

Quilted Sattin Cradle Furniture

Two Mattresses & two pillows

Two Fring’d Dimity Cradle Furnitures

Two Callico34 Quilts

A Pair of Cradle Blankets

Three Pair of Sheets, & three Pillow Cases.35

Much of the clothing ‘For the Lady’ consists of underwear that would have been supplied in linen. Throughout the eighteenth century, linen remained the favoured fabric for use close to the body. It was durable and easy to wash.36 Shirts and half-shifts would have provided loose, comfortable covering that could accommodate a newly delivered body. The volume of these garments listed by Frances shows that she intended to change her linen regularly. Clean linens not only indicated the respectability of their wearer but also felt good against the skin.37 Changing shifts regularly helped to manage the bodily fluids of the lying-in period, removing the smells and fluids of the birthing body. The potential sociability of the birthing chamber may have prompted Frances to include a new bedgown, cloak and waistcoats in her list of necessary linens in anticipation of receiving visitors. Rollers, though often associated with swaddling infants, were also used by new mothers to bind their waists following birth. The midwife Margaret Stephen noted in 1795 that ‘You will find many women who are so solicitous about preserving their shapes, they will have you to bind them round very tight with a broad bandage’, though she recommended caution ‘for if you bind them too hard, it may cause an inflammation of the uterus’.38 Alexander Hamilton suggested that ‘the belly should be made moderately firm, by the application of a table napkin like a compress, and secured by pinning the broad bands of a skirt or petticoat over it’, reflecting the advice of William Smellie twenty years earlier.39 He cautioned against ‘painful pressure, by tight swathing, according to the vulgar and erroneous practice’.40

2.2 Trade card of a Covent Garden draper offering ‘Child bed Linnen, Cradles, Baskets, Blankets, Mantles & Robes’, Irwin family archive (WYAS WYL 100/C23b). © and reproduced by kind permission of West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, Halifax and Wakefield.

Women might also be gifted childbed linen as their pregnancy advanced. In a letter congratulating her on the announcement of a pregnancy, Frances Irwin’s mother-in-law recommended a ‘Woman that makes the Child Bed Linnen [who] knows so well what is proper for you to have’.41 The Ingram family archive includes a trade card for a draper in Covent Garden who offered ‘all Sorts of Child bed Linnen, Baskets, Blankets, Mantles & Robes’, among several other drapery services (fig. 2.2). This element of the business was, however, highlighted in a bold typeface on the trade card, suggesting that childbed linens were among the most lucrative and popular items available from this draper.42

Women also borrowed childbed linens from friends and neighbours.43 At lower social levels this was driven by economic necessity, although (as we shall see in Chapter 5) the borrowing of linens could also signify the extent of a woman’s involvement in her local community. Janelle Jansted’s scholarship has shown that, in previous centuries, borrowed childbed linens could visibly articulate a family’s social networks and elite connections, and it is possible that these borrowing practices were maintained into the eighteenth century.44 Aside from purchasing or borrowing childbed linens, women may have inherited some, if not all, of the linens they needed for this moment in the life cycle. Textiles, and particularly bed linens, could be invested with emotional value and were often bequeathed by women to close female relatives.45 This emotional attachment could be heightened where the textile was associated with early infancy, prompting owners to maintain and store them carefully so that they could be used at the births of their grandchildren. All but the wealthiest of women would also have made elements of their childbed linens, reworking clothes and other textiles to produce clothing for the infant. Reworking old clothing was a particularly intimate and emotional activity, as clothes were extremely personal. Women of middling status might own two or three outfits, with perhaps double that number of shifts, so the decision to rework an item of clothing for childbed linen would have been a considered one.46

Poor women who were seen as suitably industrious and deserving could apply to linen charities to borrow their childbed linens. These charities formed part of a network of outpatient maternity relief, particularly towards the end of the eighteenth century, which might also assist with the payment of the midwife or nursing care. One such charity in Buckingham in 1787 allowed women to borrow ‘three sheets, two blankets, one leathern sheet, two bedgowns, two nightcaps, three bed shifts, three children’s caps, three children’s shirts, one cotton wrapper, and a sufficient quantity of small articles’ for a period of up to four weeks, after which they should be returned clean.47 This list is remarkably similar to that produced by Frances Irwin, given the vast difference in wealth and status between a viscountess and the women supported by such charities. Social difference would have been clearly articulated in the quality and decorative detail of childbed linens, but what constituted a ‘set’ of linens appears to have been reasonably uniform. Very few women were able to access the support of linen charities. Poor women therefore collected scraps of linen to use as baby clothing. Midwives might supply sheets and bed coverings, or it might be possible to borrow such items from neighbours and family members.

Infanticide records offer important insights into the childbed linens acquired by poor mothers. Under the terms of the Infanticide Act of 1624, the provision of linens and clothes for infants in anticipation of their birth was often used as a defence against a charge of infanticide or concealment of a birth.48 Showing that provision had been made for the birth of the child was sufficiently synonymous with maternal love and care to enable some accused women to avoid the gallows, and childbed linens were a regular feature in case depositions. Conversely, linens could also be used to condemn women accused of infanticide. They were central to the case against Mary Thorpe for the murder of her young infant. On Tuesday 19 November 1800, in a township just outside Sheffield, the body of an infant was discovered in and pulled from the river. The first witness deposition in the coroner’s case report was from a man called George Froggat, who noted the way in which the child had been dressed.

His statement, recorded by the coroner’s clerk, reads:

[He] did not observe at the time what sex it was owing to it having a Linen Cloth round its middle, he observed a piece of Linen string commonly called Tape tyed fast round the Childs Neck and a large stone tyed in the same Tape.

The infant was identified by the local women as belonging to Mary Thorpe: according to the statement of her landlady Sarah Hartley, he was recognizable by the formation of his nose, his sore eyes and the marks on his navel. These physical attributes were accompanied by an account of the child’s clothing and the way that it had been produced. Sarah’s statement continued:

A piece of Linen Cloth also now produced by George Fox the Constable this witness says belongs to Mary Thorpe she having cut it off one of Mary Thorpe’s old shifts herself and she saw it round the Childs body on the afternoon of the Monday on which Mary Thorpe left her house.

The last time that Mary left the house, before the discovery of the body, the infant had also been wrapped up in a loose apron, presumably to secure it against the cold and to function as another layer of swaddling. Every female witness in this case mentioned the linen band and the process of cutting it from Mary’s old shift. One – a woman who appears to have been present at the infant’s birth – further recollected a section of the linen wrap that she had torn to fashion a stay band for the child. The casual nature with which these women discuss the refashioning of adult clothing to clothe infants suggests that it was not particularly unusual for women of lower social status. For women in more positive circumstances than Mary Thorpe found herself, this could have been an emotional experience as old shifts, aprons and dresses were taken apart and restitched for new occupants.

The birthing chamber

The commencement of labour provoked a material change in the organization of the home. As the birthing woman recognized the aches and cramps of early labour, the domestic space was reorganized to create a birthing chamber.49 The extent to which this transformation disrupted the household depended on the social status of the family. Elite women might have a suite of chambers that could accommodate the mother and infant, as well as nurses and occasionally midwives.50 The wives of wealthy merchants or solicitors might commandeer a room for the duration of their birthing. In these instances, the birthing woman’s bedchamber was a popular choice for the birth chamber. Betsy Ramsden, for example, gave birth in her own room in 1770. The subsequent celebrations led her husband to complain that ‘Madam has got her Chamber full of Gossips this afternoon’.51 Where space was restricted, however, the creation of a birth chamber required a reorganization of the communal areas of the household. It was not uncommon for the bed itself to become the birth space.52 This could be facilitated by drawing the bed curtains (where possible) to define the boundary between birth space and domestic space.53 Sarah Harrold created a temporary birth space for her labour and delivery before allowing domestic life to resume during her lying-in. On 22 November 1711 her husband Edmund noted that ‘My Wife made al[l] her ma[r]k’ before giving birth at three o’clock the following morning.54 The Harrolds’ limited domestic space and Edmund’s detailed descriptions of Sarah’s postnatal illness suggests that their rooms resumed many of their usual domestic functions after her delivery. Despite these variations in the nature of birth spaces, dictated by economic necessity, all but the very poorest women could expect a dedicated space in which to give birth, although many were required to relinquish it swiftly once the delivery was complete.

There were several material indications that domestic space had been transformed into a birthing chamber. Central to the transformations was the bedstead and its textiles, as it provided a focal point for most stages of the birth process. The bed was the social heart of the household. The expense of buying and furnishing a bed meant that it was a significant economic outlay. While the purchase of the bedstead was significant, it was then necessary to buy cords, multiple mattresses and linens.55 Beds required regular maintenance to remain comfortable and so ongoing costs might have included the aligning of bed frames, the tightening and replacing of cords, and debugging treatments.56 Dressing the bed and caring for bed textiles required a significant investment of both time and money. Curtains and valances enclosed the bed, creating privacy and warmth. These might be purchased fully made up or through the lively eighteenth-century market in second-hand textiles.57 They may have been spun and woven within the home.58 Many women embroidered bed hangings in projects that took incredible periods of time to complete. Dorothy Davenport, the seventeenth-century mistress of Bramall Hall in Stockport, spent the last twenty-five years of her life embroidering worsted dressings for her elaborately carved ‘Paradise Bed’.59 Anne Brereton, a young gentlewoman, spent a similar amount of time embroidering pillowcases and a bedcover (currently on display at Lyme Park in Disley, Cheshire) in anticipation of her marriage, leaving it unfinished when she died in 1750.60

Much care was taken in the choice of colour, textile and decoration to create a familiar and comfortable sleeping environment.61 Sheets were cheap to purchase, and most households would have owned several.62 As with underwear, linen was the preferred textile for its durability and its associations of cleanliness and respectability. The maintenance of even these common textiles again required a significant investment of time and care, with washing and laundering taking four hours per week, in addition to any necessary repairs.63 Blankets and quilts might be purchased new or second-hand, but again would have been regularly made within the household. Patchwork was a valued skill and decorative art, as is evidenced by its regular appearance in accounts of theft, and the quilting of fabrics allowed women to further personalize their bed textiles.64 Distinctions of social status were made in the quality rather than the quantity of bed furnishings. To be without a bed was to be in abject poverty. When in 1824 the pauper Joseph Curchin wrote for help to the parish authorities in Thrapston, Northamptonshire, he emphasized that ‘my wife is quite large in the family-way and I declare I have not a bedstead to lie on’.65 Couples were generally gifted a bed or purchased one in their preparations for marriage; this suggests that Curchin may have pawned the bed in an attempt to raise funds. Similarly, when James Field, a rural labourer, was unable to provide a sheet to cover the body of his wife after she had died giving birth to his sixth child in 1766, his neighbours expressed surprise.66 His lack of even a ‘tablecloth for decency’ suggests again that the household linen may have worn out or been pawned. The bed was central to family life and to the household, as well as to birthing at all social levels.67

The authors of midwifery manuals went into great detail about the correct way to dress the bedstead to protect it from the ‘stagnant animal effluvia’ of childbirth.68 These directions were, without fail, addressed to wealthier clients. William Smellie, the celebrated man-midwife and lecturer, recommended that

a piece of oiled cloth or dressed sheep skin is laid across the middle [of the bed or couch] over the undersheet, and above this are spread several folds of linen, pinned or tied with tape to each side of the bed and couch; these are designed to spunge up moisture in time of labour and after delivery while the oiled cloths or sheep-skins below, preserve the feather bed from being wetted or spoiled.69

Smellie’s contemporary Alexander Hamilton recommended the use of no fewer than six sheets in addition to an oil cloth, a hair mattress and a coarse blanket.70 Dressing the bed so thoroughly provided protection for the expensive mattress and reduced the burden of washing large volumes of heavily soiled linen. Moreover, multiple layers of specialized linen symbolized the transition from domestic space to birthing chamber.

While extra care was taken to dress the bedstead in anticipation of a birth, not all women laboured or were delivered in their bedsteads. Many took the precaution of having a temporary bed brought into the birth chamber. Temporary beds had been ubiquitous in England in the preceding centuries and remained common, particularly for servants and lodgers, in the eighteenth century. Most households would therefore have had access to a truckle bed or a pallet bed that could be requisitioned in the preparations for birth. These temporary beds rarely appear in the publications of accoucheurs but seem to have been commonly used by middling- and lower-status women throughout the century. The unpublished casebooks of William Hey – obstetrician, surgeon and founder of Leeds General Infirmary – occasionally mention the presence of more than one bed in the birth chamber. At the delivery of a patient in 1760 Hey recorded how he ‘placed [his patient] on the Hands and Knees upon another Bed laid on the floor’, having been unsuccessful at delivering her on her bedstead.71 A contemporary of Mauriceau, Pierre Dionis, suggested in his General Treatise of Midwifery that ‘the Woman is plac’d upon a little Palate-Bed, as they call it, that is set up on purpose, in the largest Corner, by the Bed-side’.72 A pallet bed was a bed or mattress, usually placed directly on the floor, which could be put away when not in use. Dionis suggested that this allowed the midwife easier access to the labouring woman. Low-status women valued the absorbent properties of straw in place of a pallet bed, as indicated by the term ‘lady in the straw’ being used to describe a woman giving birth.73 The straw may have been woven into a mattress as part of the wider preparations for childbirth. Figure 2.3 shows a woven mattress found in a house in Titchfield, Hampshire, where it had been used to provide insulation in the roof. This particular example was made from sedge, but the use of straw would have produced a similar effect.74 Once labour and delivery were complete, these temporary beds could be cleaned or, in the case of the straw beds, burned to dispose of the bodily fluids associated with childbirth.

2.3 Carex mattress from Titchfield, Hampshire, Museum of English Rural Life (61/242). © and reproduced by kind permission of Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading.

The dressing of the bed, or the presence of temporary beds, was not the only material indication that birthing was imminent. Linen swaddling bands were hung before the fire to air and warm in anticipation of the infant’s delivery. One of the birth attendant’s first jobs on being summoned to attend the labour was to build a fire on which to heat caudle, preferably in the birthing chamber. Caudle was a thick, spiced alcoholic drink taken to fortify the midwife, the birth attendants and the birthing woman during the long hours of labouring and delivery.75 Caudle was therefore intimately associated with childbirth, and the act of making it, along with its taste and smell, were omnipresent not just during birthing but also in the subsequent weeks of lying-in.

A cradle was dressed and prepared to receive the infant. As with the bed, the cradle was an important piece of furniture. While varying hugely in size, design and construction, cradles generally shared two key features: they all rocked or moved in some way and they all featured a hood to protect the infant’s eyes from bright lights. The Art of Nursing, published anonymously alongside tracts on old age and the treatment of gout in 1733, suggested that it is ‘usual to make a great Arch or Arcade of Twigs on the Top of the Cradle, on which they put a curtain’. Where a cradle could not be acquired, the author suggested that a small pallet could be strung from the beams of the house to ensure the desired rocking motion and to keep the infant away from vermin on the floor.76 The hood was important to prevent light from reaching the infant’s eyes and causing them to squint or to grow crooked from turning their head to avoid the light.77 Rocking was a matter of some discussion among accoucheurs. It was condemned by Alexander Hamilton as ‘a bad habit’, but the persistence of rockers on cradles up to the present day certainly suggests that his advice was largely ignored.78 The ability to soothe a distressed infant by rocking the cradle with a foot while sewing or tending to other children was crucial.

A dedicated infant sleeping space, albeit sometimes in a makeshift bed, appears to have been reasonably common even in low-status households.79 This can be attributed partly to the fear of ‘overlaying’, whereby the sleeping occupant of a bed rolls on top of an infant in the night, crushing or suffocating them. Vicky Holmes’s study of nineteenth-century coroners’ records has shown that, while it was not uncommon for infants to die in the marital bed, most women were aware of the dangers of sharing a bed with their newborn. Where the death was recorded as due to overlaying, the mother offered reasons for the infant having been taken into the marital bed – to feed it or to quieten it. Warmth might be another factor, particularly in winter, though the cradle would have been brought within the bed curtains for both warmth and ease of night-time care. Cradles were also important pieces of furniture for immobilizing the infant and therefore keeping them safe. Sarah Brown, a mother of seven, recounted a story in her 1779 book Letter to a Lady on the Management of the Infant where, having woken early to feed her infant, she had put him to sleep on the bed. She noted that, ‘being used to a cradle, I forgot to pin him to the pillow while I dressed his sister’. Having checked that the infant remained asleep, Brown took the opportunity to dress herself, sending her daughter to check that the child was still sleeping. Her daughter ‘returned and informed me she could not see him, but heard him cry very faintly’. On returning to the room, Brown ‘found the child at the very bottom of the bed’.80 Cradles were a common presence in the birthing chamber as a way of ensuring that the infant was safe and secure in a busy environment.

Beds were liminal spaces, bridges between day and night and also between this life and the next.81 If this is true of beds, it is certainly true of cradles, whose occupants’ hold on life could be extremely fragile. The cradle was thus identified by many nineteenth-century collectors of folklore as a particular site for protective magic, and the birthing chamber could be a site for protective magic and charms. While such practices have no place in the medicalized texts of accoucheurs, they appear to have been practised throughout the eighteenth century. William Hone’s Table Book, originally published in 1828, records the ongoing use of cradle charms as protective magic. One poem reads:

Let the superstitious wife

Neer the child’s heart lay a knife

Point be up, and haft be down

(While she gossips in the towne)

This ’mongst other mystick charms,

Keeps the sleeping child from harmes.82

The earliest record of the customary use of knives in cradles was in John Brand’s Observations of Popular Antiquities, published in 1777, in which he recorded that Danish women guard their children before baptism ‘by placing in the cradle, or over the door, garlic, salt, bread, and steel in the form of some sharp instrument’. ‘Something like this’, he added, ‘obtained in England.’83 William Henderson’s mid-century collection of English folklore also recorded a mid-nineteenth-century practice in the West Riding of Yorkshire: ‘a child was kept safe while sleeping by hanging a carving knife from the head of the cradle with the point suspended near the infant’s face’.84 The custom is recorded as late as 1928 in Eleanor Hull’s Folklore of the British Isles.85 Salt is also recorded as a protective that was more portable than iron knives and cradle charms. It was often suggested that it be sewn into a child’s clothes or even fed to a newborn to ensure its safety.

The presence of a cradle did not automatically indicate the imminent arrival of an infant. Cradles were often shared and inherited, and it was therefore a common piece of furniture in houses where no ‘little stranger’ was anticipated. Care was taken of empty cradles. Elizabeth Wright, a twentieth-century folklorist, records an old Shropshire saying of ‘Rock the cradle empty, you’ll rock babies a plenty’.86 Mabel Peacock’s collection of Lincolnshire customs also notes that ‘a mother should never sit idle or empty-handed when she rocks, lest her arms should soon be occupied by another child’.87 As with the bed, the cradle needed to be dressed to receive the infant as part of the preparations for birthing. Alexander Hamilton recommended stuffing the cradle with straw, ‘which ought to be renewed from time to time. It is preferable to feathers and wool, which readily attract and retain moisture and impurities; and it is more soft than hair.’88 Absorbency was an important property in both swaddling bands and infant bedding as, in humoral terms, infants were understood to be moist and in need of ‘drying out’.89 It is difficult to know the extent to which high-status women heeded Hamilton’s advice. For poorer mothers, however, straw was often the least expensive and most accessible bedding option.

Cot quilts and cradle blankets protected the infant from the cold, damp and chills that had the potential to carry them off before they had even been baptized. Wealthy women like Frances Irwin could afford to purchase these, along with padding and decoration for the cradle as part of her preparations for birthing. Women with sufficient time and leisure would quilt or sew their own cot quilts, investing both time and emotion into them. These might then be treasured as mementos of childhood and of birthing. Elizabeth Shackleton sent her son Robert a number of items from ‘a box with lock and key in the nursery’. Robert never married so it is unlikely that he ever needed the contents of this box, but it was important to Elizabeth that they be passed on to him. Her accompanying letter read: ‘I send you an account of what is in the box I request you may have – and what I sincerely give to you my own Dear Child Robert Parker.’ Among many children’s clothes she included ‘white quilted Holland to cover a cradle, two curtains and Quilt the same; one first pair of stays; one pink coral string, quite new’. These, she noted, ‘are not in the present taste as they were mine – and what you and your Brother’s wore. The materials are good and when you may come to want them may be made fashionable.’90 Women of low social status generally did not have the luxury of keeping textiles that were no longer being used. Beverly Lemire’s work on stolen clothes has shown that textiles could be a ready source of money when times were hard. That is not to say that women of lower social status did not create textiles such as these, which held symbolic and emotional meaning for them as they anticipated a birth, particularly towards the end of the eighteenth century. Rather, those textiles would have been repurposed and reused as necessity dictated.

Birth in the household

The spatial requirements of a birthing chamber were significant. It needed to accommodate the bed, preferably with sufficient space for the midwife or accoucheur to move around freely. Where possible, there would be room on the floor for a temporary bed or for use during delivery. The chamber would need to accommodate a cradle, though this could be brought in once the delivery was complete if space was limited. Preferably, the birthing chamber would also contain a fireplace for warmth and for heating caudle. In addition to the furniture and equipment associated with birthing, the chamber also needed to accommodate several birth attendants, or ‘gossips’. The birthing chamber was a highly social space. In addition to being a space to deliver an infant, it was also somewhere to meet with neighbours and to confirm one’s matronly status. The link between the birthing chamber and socializing is emphasized by the etymology of the word ‘gossip’, which originated as an affectionate term for a woman who attended a birth.91 Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the term became increasingly associated with idle talk and was often used in a derogatory context, yet even the negative use of the word ‘gossip’ emphasized the link between female sociability and the birthing chamber.92 The 1755 edition of Samuel Johnson’s hugely popular Dictionary of the English Language defined a ‘gossip’ as ‘One who runs about tattling like women at a lying-in. To do the office of a neighbour, And be a gossip at his labour, ’Tis sung in ev’ry street, The common chat of gossips when they meet.’93 Gossip, in both its positive and its negative connotations, was associated with female sociability, of which the birthing chamber was an often cited example.94 The birthing chamber therefore also had to accommodate a number of bodies.

Domestic space was far from fixed, even in the huge houses of wealthy families. While women were largely absent from the architectural design of household space, they could be exceedingly influential in determining how the interior space of a building might be used.95 Householders, both male and female, constantly negotiated and renegotiated the use of domestic space to accommodate guests, changing circumstances or personal preferences.96 The practicalities of bed space, comfort and familiarity meant that most wealthy women gave birth in their bedchambers. This practice is rarely discussed explicitly, but the assumption is evident in letters to birthing women. One of Frances Irwin’s many correspondents wrote in May 1765, when she was heavily pregnant, to complain about the ‘unfavourable’ weather but noted that ‘probably you have been confined to your Bed have found it more comfortable for not being quite so warm as we cou’d have wished’.97 References to ‘upstairs’ imply an assumption of birthing chambers being located in bedrooms, sleeping spaces having migrated to the upper levels of most houses by the middle of the eighteenth century.98 Thus, when Elizabeth Shackleton sent her daughter-in-law Elizabeth Parker ‘all my Congratulatory letters’ as ‘a something to do while you are upstairs’, following the delivery of a son, she makes an assumption of confinement to a bedroom. Yet sleeping space was not fixed.99 Seasonality, aspect, warmth and accessibility might play a part in the choice of which room to sleep in for the night. For birthing, the proximity of a chamber for the nurse or nurses and the nursery, or the anticipation of visitors, might play a part in choosing a room in which to give birth. Georgiana Dover, mistress of Castle Howard in Yorkshire, noted down her plans for the use of sleeping space in anticipation of giving birth in 1830. She wrote that ‘Muzy [her eldest son’s tutor] is to have what was George Lamb’s bedroom and Mrs Lamb’s room is to be the study; from which I will turn them out to put in the Griff, as I mean to inhabit the rooms at that time’.100 Griff was the nurse who had attended Georgiana in multiple confinements. Identifying a suitable space in which to labour, give birth and lie in was part of the preparations for birthing for women in large houses.

Domestic space was more limited in the houses of the middling sorts, offering less choice to the birthing woman and causing more disruption within the household. The removal of a sleeping chamber from the use of the household required some creativity and flexibility in sleeping arrangements among both the immediate family and their servants. Elizabeth Wilson, for example, had a moderately sized household in London, consisting of herself, her husband, her daughter and three servants. Sleeping arrangements in the house were flexible, particularly for the servants. In 1792, when her daughter was still nursing, Elizabeth noted that one servant ‘Sarah is now with me & I have got a servant in her room which I hope will suit’.101 Sarah’s change in sleeping arrangements appears to have been connected to a new role of helping with childcare, as her departure from the household two years later necessitated the employment of a nursemaid. These moderate restrictions of space must therefore have been exacerbated by birthing. Elizabeth’s confinement in one chamber, the arrival of her sister Rebekah in anticipation of the birth and the expectation of visitors significantly restricted the space available to the household.

Households of lower status would have had experienced the greatest disruption as a birth became imminent. With only one or two rooms at their disposal, it may have been necessary to require other family members to remove themselves from the house. Moreover, it is unlikely that women of low social status would have been able to maintain the same level of isolation for their entire lying-in period. Once the birth had taken place and the room had been cleaned, it would have been necessary for domestic life to continue around her, potentially with the bed providing a defined lying-in space. This appears to have been the case when Edmund Harrold, a Manchester bookseller and wig-maker, became a father for the seventh time in 1712. The family were not well off, hindered by the uncertain profits of Edmund’s occupations and also by his tendency to drink and gamble away the profits. It is not certain where in central Manchester they were living when Edmund decided to keep a diary, but their lodgings appear to have consisted of two rooms, one of which housed his business and the other of which was domestic space.

On 22 November 1712, Edmund wrote in his diary: ‘My wife has made al[l] her ma[r]k. Its to her mind then.’ His wife, Sarah, had recognized the signs of early labour and had made preparations for her impending delivery. Edmund was therefore excluded from their chamber as Sarah’s labour progressed and the infant was delivered. The following day he complained that ‘At 3 in ye morn: she brought forth a daughter, Sarah. I was ill out of tune for want to sleep.’102 Sarah never recovered from this birth and died before her four-week lying-in period was concluded. Edmund’s diary entries suggest, however, that he had returned to the room once the delivery was concluded and had been active in caring not only for his older children but also for his wife. His diary entries are full of information about Sarah’s failing health, his attempts to prepare her spiritually for death once it became clear that recovery was unlikely, and the progress of the infant. In one entry, just three days after the birth, for example, he noted: ‘Wife very ill, busie in ye house. Can do little but waite on her and shops.’103 Edmund’s return to the domestic areas of the house did not signify the end of Sarah’s lying-in period, however. She followed the strictures of the lying-in period – staying in bed, nursing her infant and entertaining visitors – until she became too ill to continue. For the Harrolds, and others of their status, where domestic space was limited, the bed had the capacity to create a room within a room that enabled women of lower status to observe the practices and customs of giving birth while domestic life continued around them.

While these options were suitable for women who could exercise control over their domestic space, however small, they were not an option for single women or servants. Poor women might make arrangements to return to their families or to stay with the midwife.104 Some women relied on the kindness and support of their neighbours as their time approached, others on the support of strangers. Mary Thorpe, as we saw in Chapter 1, was able to rely on the hospitality of strangers, having travelled some distance from her home to give birth. Similarly, when a poor woman went into labour at Knaresborough market in 1720, she was supported in her lying-in by Richard Coates’s wife for fourteen days (for which he was reimbursed).105 The majority of women were able to acquire a dedicated space in which to give birth, even if only for a few hours. For many, the restrictions of domestic space curtailed the quiet and seclusion of the ideal lying-in.

Conclusion

Access to and the authority to command domestic space was an important element of birthing. One’s experience of the birthing environment was thus shaped by one’s social status, whether one lived in an urban or a rural area, and one’s position within the household. The material experiences of birthing therefore varied hugely. Yet, as we saw in Chapter 2 there was a familiarity across this broad range of material circumstances, facilitated by the flexible processes that constituted birthing. The process of birthing provided a framework of material practices and spatial organization that would be recognized by both a viscountess and a seamstress, despite huge variations in cost and quality. In examining the material nature of birthing, this chapter has explored the ways in which birthing was integrated into eighteenth-century lives through clothing and domestic space. As Catriona Fisk has argued in her quest to find maternity dress in the archives, ‘traces of maternal experience are, it seems, already woven through the clothing in dress collections just as that experience was woven through everyday life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’.106 While birthing marked an important life-cycle shift from maid to mother, it was also a very transient and temporary state. The materiality of birthing was marked by the adaptation of garments and domestic spaces rather than by the creation of specialized ones.

The interplay of physical environment, material objects and birthing bodies – these emplaced and embodied interactions – meant that each birth was different yet also the same, just like the bullfights described by Sarah Pink. Creating what was essentially a ‘new’ physical and affective space for each birth enabled the process of birthing to retain its flexible nature, absorbing changes to individual circumstances (a long labour, a difficult delivery) as well as adapting to the arrival of the accoucheur and the subsequent changes in reproductive knowledge and understandings of the body. This flexibility, which was firmly tied to domestic space and notions of the household, made eighteenth-century birthing practices very difficult to displace. As we shall see in the next chapter, old practices could easily be maintained alongside new ones.