Pregnancy, Delivery, Childbirth

A Gender and Cultural History from Antiquity to the Test Tube in Europe

Nadia Filippini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429560477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Gynecology, Obstetrics & Midwifery

This book reconstructs the history of conception, pregnancy and childbirth in Europe from antiquity to the 20th century, focusing on its most significant turning points: the emergence of a medical-scientific approach to delivery in Ancient Greece, the impact of Christianity, the establishment of the man-midwife in the 18th century, the medicalisation of childbirth, the emergence of a new representation of the foetus as "unborn citizen", and, finally, the revolution of reproductive technologies.

The book explores a history that, far from being linear, progressive or homogeneous, is characterised by significant continuities as well as transformations. The ways in which a woman gives birth and lives her pregnancy and the postpartum period are the result of a complex series of factors. The book therefore places these events in their wider cultural, social and religious contexts, which influenced the forms taken by rituals and therapeutic practices, religious and civil prescriptions and the regulation of the female body.

The investigation of this complex experience represents a crucial contribution to cultural, social and gender history, as well as an indispensable tool for understanding today's reality. It will be of great use to undergraduates studying the history of childbirth, the history of medicine, the history of the body, as well as women's and gender history more broadly.

PART I
Cultural representations

1
GENDER DICHOTOMIES

1 Introduction

We are all born from a woman’s body, men and women: there is no birth without a woman’s pregnancy and labour. This evidence (in the etymological sense of the word, from the Latin video) highlights another piece of evidence: only the female body is able to divide itself and give birth while remaining whole. In Western culture, however, this fact has not been given a symbolic representation of adequate significance, at least not since Indo-European society imposed its own male gods, downgrading the mother goddesses of more ancient tradition, such as Isis, Ishtar and Demeter.¹

On the contrary, a substantial cultural construct, rooted in Greek culture, has consistently played down its value in a variety of ways, for example, by overstating men’s contribution to generation, or by contrasting it with other abilities and generative powers in a subtle game of hierarchies and supremacy, which ended up causing a “philosophical removal” of birth.² Women’s capacity to give birth has been countered by men’s capacity to “generate”; the capacity to produce bodies by the superior one to produce thoughts; the capacity to give life by the ability to bring death, as we shall see in the following paragraphs.

These cultural constructs, as several feminist scholars have highlighted, reveal the unconscious envy of an exclusively female prerogative, as well as an attempt to inscribe this difference within a hierarchical scale, an asymmetric gender codification that would reinforce and consolidate male supremacy, extolling its peculiarities.³

The outcome has been a dichotomy, to a large extent influenced by Greek thought, between generation and birth, body and mind, motherhood and war, which has permeated the whole of Western culture, characterising gender and fostering a system with many additional oppositions: matter/form, nature/culture, body/spirit.⁴

From the symbolic point of view, Christianity brought about a profound change, but in ambivalent and contradictory ways. The mystery of the incarnation put birth, which was totally marginal in the ancient world, at the centre of the sacred representation, and extolled the figure of the Virgin Mary. But this became intertwined with a theological construct aimed at removing any trace of physical childbirth from her image, exonerating her from the pains of childbirth, from blood and suffering, reserved instead for Eve and her descendants. It was the scene of the birth that was glorified; it was all about the child who was coming into the world, and not about his mother in the act of giving birth to him, with a focus connoting every level of this representation, including the pictorial one. With increasing emphasis in the transition between the medieval and early modern ages, what Christianity valued about motherhood was, above all, the spiritual aspect or the maternal function. The very term “maternitas” emerged with this meaning: it was coined in the ecclesiastic circles of the 12th century to refer to the symbolic motherhood linking the Church, Christ’s bride, to the wretched.⁵ The physical aspects of motherhood were increasingly left in the shadows and laden with negative connotations, as something animalistic or shameful; childbirth was surrounded by the taint of impurity.

It is a concept already articulated by various philosophers in Roman times, but taken up and reworked by Christian theologians, to the extent that it became a real medieval trope.⁶

A rift was therefore established, destined to continue for centuries, although with different emphases and re-elaborations, between two aspects of the same event. These were given different relevance, with a celebration of the role and function of motherhood on the one hand, and a devaluation of the physical aspects of motherhood and therefore of childbirth on the other.

In this chapter, we shall analyse some of these representations, being well aware that they are not the only ones and that others were added over time, but, equally, that they have deeply marked our culture, with important repercussions in women’s lives.

2 The earth and the sower

Let us begin with the concept of generation and look first of all at its representations and metaphors. An analogy which is deeply rooted in Western culture (but also found outside Europe) has linked a woman’s body to earth in terms of fertility: a woman was earth, field, furrow; like the earth, she welcomed and cared for the seed, fed it and made it germinate in a continuous generative cycle; she was a tree bearing fruits. She was also a vase (made of earth as well), where the male-deposited seed was protected and helped to develop, or even an oven, where the food placed within rose and cooked.⁷

In turn, the earth was often represented as a mother who guarded the seeds in her womb, who bore fruits to men and nourished them.⁸ From its innermost self came living beings, just as the dead would return to it when buried for their eternal sleep. The earth was a mother, as was Nature (Mother Nature) in the widest sense of the word, which included celestial and terrestrial bodies, animate and inanimate ones. And, by analogy, since the Middle Ages, in some European languages, such as French and Italian, even female genitalia were referred to as “nature”: for example, by Italian physician Michele Savonarola (1384–1466) in his Ad mulieres ferrarienses De regimine pregnantium (circa 1460)⁹ or Scipione Mercurio (1540?–1615) in La Comare o Ricoglitrice (The Midwife) (1596).¹⁰

We are dealing with a strong metaphoric element running continuously through the centuries, reclaimed and reworked over time in various fields and disciplines with different emphases and meanings, like a symbolic alphabet forming the weft and weave of different articulations of discourse. Beyond their apparent uniformity, in the various historical contexts, analogies and metaphors obviously took on specific meanings in relation to the general ideas of nature and its holiness at that time, the interconnections established between macro- and microcosms and the narratives and correspondences that linked the human body and its parts to the sky, the stars and the planets. This is why analogies and metaphors are important indicators of continuity and change, as Carolyn Merchant has shown when discussing the ideas of Organicism and Mechanism, or as I have sought to highlight concerning 18th-century Vitalism and its implications in the field of obstetrics.¹¹

When analysing the analogies related to the female body and to generation, Page duBois has identified an important metaphoric rewriting in 5th-century Greece, destined to endure through the centuries. While in earlier centuries the earth, as a representation of the female body, was frequently described as a virgin territory that spontaneously produced every nourishment for mankind, in subsequent writings, this had become “a field, a(s) space marked off by culture and by human labour [..] the space in which he labours” (cited by duBois 1988: 65–77). This is the metaphor that took shape in Greek literature: Deianeira, according to Sophocles (Trach., 31–33), is “an outlying field”, that her husband Heracles “sees (it) only when he sows and when he reaps” (cited by duBois 1988: 73).

On the one hand, this important rewriting assigned women a more passive role in procreation, and, on the other, it presented them as property of a farmer-husband, who tills and sows ‘his’ field to produce fruits that belong to him: the earth opens up under his labour, welcomes the seeds, grows them and makes them germinate. This metaphoric variation accounts for a profound change in Greek society, in an imperialistic sense. The implicit consequences furthermore highlight the supremacy of the patrilineal relationship compared to the matrilineal one, namely the greater significance of the father–son/daughter relationship. Aeschylus stated this very clearly in the Eumenides, the third and final part of the Oresteia trilogy, a work symbolic of the changes that marked the passage from pre-Indo-European matrilineal society to the Indo-European patriarchal and patrilineal one.

In his reply to the Erinyes (ancient goddesses wishing to avenge his mother), and speaking before Athens’ Areopagus council for Orestes’ acquittal of his mother’s murder, the god Apollo uses precisely this analogy which sees a father as the ‘sower’, and therefore the main ‘procreator’ (procreator is he who sows the seed) and a mother as the mere ‘host’ of the embryo:

The mother of what is called her child is not the parent, but the nurse of the newly-sown embryo. The one who mounts is the parent, whereas she, as a stranger for a stranger, preserves the young plant, if the god does not harm it.

(Eum., 657–661)¹²

This reiterates the blood tie directly uniting children to their father, and not their mother who gave birth to them, in practice, the superiority of the paternal bond, as Aristotle claimed, giving a scientific base to this representation.¹³

The metaphor of the earth and the sower was used repeatedly not only in literature,¹⁴ but also in medicine and philosophy. For Plato, for example, men “sow upon the womb, as in a field, animals unseen by reason of their smallness and without form” (Tim. 91 d).¹⁵

From ancient Greece, through the Roman Empire, this metaphor reached medieval and early modern times. Soranus of Ephesus (98–138 AD), author of the Gynaecia, one of the most important ancient texts on obstetrics, considered the founder of scientific obstetric...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Cultural representations
• Part II Giving birth and being born from antiquity to the 18th century
• Part III The 18th-century juncture
• Part IV The contemporary age
• Bibliography
• Index