Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Victorian Pregnancy & Childbirth: The Untold History

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

Why did Victorian doctors recommend women to lie still in solitary confinement for days after giving birth? What was the 'sit up and cough' method of contraception? (not the most reliable) And what was the level of infant mortality in the 19th century?Today Kate is Betwixt the Sheets with Jessica Cox to talk about the hidden history of maternal bodies in the Victorian era, everything from fertility and contraception, to labour and child loss.You can find out more about Jessica's book here.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsely, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, but tricksters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. I actually need to give you quite a serious fair do's warning today. I know that I like to mess around with the warning, and you seem to like me doing that as well. But this is quite a serious one,

because today we are talking about the history of pregnancy in the 19th century, and that will mean that we are talking about things like fertility and conception, and inevitably baby loss. And you just might not want to listen to that today, in which case, this is your fair do's warning to just switch us off, go and find something else to listen to, and we will catch you next time.

Join me in a very dark Victorian bedroom, betwixters. We are in the second floor of a house in London in 1897. The shutters are closed, shutting out all daylight. It's hot inside. You can hear the sound of day-to-day life, the hustle and bustle taking place on the street

outside, but in this room, it is quiet, it is hot, it is still, it is stifling. And there is a very tired lady in the bed, the lady of the house, in fact, who has been ordered by her doctors to see nobody. She's also been advised not to move, not to read, not to talk for nine whole days. She just has to lie there being still. The reason for what is ultimately solitary confinement is because she's just given birth. Doctors at the time believed that movement or exposure to light and even company and talking so soon after a baby would cause disaster in their words. Of course if you were poor, there's no way that you could take to your bed for nine days, but being poor and pregnant in the 19th century is a whole different story. Today we are going

betwixt the sheets to look into the hidden history of maternal bodies in Victorian Britain. everything from fertility, contraception, pregnancy to childbirth and the differences between how rich and poor mothers were treated. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing it.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel so done. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. with me, Kate Lister. Giving birth is still a very dangerous and daunting experience for many. But back in Victorian Britain, could you even imagine what these people were going through?

Hygiene was not at its peak, pain control was in the very early stages, and advice for pregnancy and birth was mostly bonkers, things like try to stay as still as possible for as long as possible. Today I am speaking to Jessica Cox all about the Victorian Maternity. experience to try and find out what it was like to grow and birth a baby in Victorian Britain. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Jessica Cox. How are you? Hello, it's lovely to be here. Thank you for having me. As if I couldn't have you with your new shiny, fabulous book that I'm holding up right here in my hands, confinement, the hidden history of maternal bodies in 19th century Britain.

I loved this book. Thank you. It's been a journey and I'm so glad it's out there and people are saying nice things about it. Yeah, hopefully doing what I wanted to kind of tell the stories from these women's perspectives of what it was like to get pregnant or not get pregnant and have babies in 19th century of Britain. It ironically has been a labour of love, hasn't it? It has been a labour of love. Emphasis on labour for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. What made you want to write this book? I suppose the short answer is having babies. an academic. I've taught Victorian literature and culture for a very long time now. I previously have published on, you know, popular fiction and literary criticism. And then I had my own children and I suddenly started to reflect on these women in the 19th century novel initially in relation to their experiences of pregnancy and childbirth and motherhood, which is so obviously absent in most 19th century fiction, you know, but the babies appear at the end of the book and that's it.

No reference to difficult pregnancies or childbirth or anything like that. So I started looking further afield, looking at the advice literature that was out there for women at the time, and really wanted to tell the story through women's perspectives, because so much of it is written, you know, the advice literature is really dominated by male authors and often medical men. So I started then looking at diaries and journals and letters to try and get a little bit of a different perspective, and it just sort of blossomed from there, really. The starting point was the birth of my daughter, which was quite tricky. And afterwards, you know, looking into the 19th century, I thought, gosh, one of us wouldn't have survived, possibly both of us.

And then the more I looked into it, the more you see this kind of huge gap as well, because I thought, well, somebody's written this book already, right? They must have done. You know, you think about the population growth in the 19th century and how many women were having babies. Yeah, I just thought this gap in the market needs filling. Absolutely. I think that's one of the thing that I really loved about your book, you know,

is that it is personal. It's a history book and it's fantastically researched, but you've made personal political. It is bonkers that this book hasn't been written before. There's been articles and bits and pieces published related to various things. There's a lot of work on childhood in the 19th century and stuff like that. But actual, what was it like to be pregnant, to be expected to get pregnant, to not be pregnant? No, there's a kind of an absence.

And these debates are very much with us today, aren't they? Yeah, absolutely. It was a real surprise to me. There was a few great books on the history of birth and pregnancy and motherhood. Sarah Knott's book from a few years ago, a lot of them take a much kind of broader approach. So it's a much longer history. Mine obviously is focused on the 19th century, obviously because I'm a Victorianist, so I wouldn't have known what I was talking about if I tried to go beyond that. But also because everything that was going on, you know, the transformations in medical knowledge and

medical care, the huge population explosion, which, you know, the Industrial Revolution has been covered a gazillion times in the history books. But what's never covered is that maternal labor behind that population explosion, you know, For all of those millions of extra people, there's a birth story there, right? Somewhere. Many of them lost to history, but I really wanted to kind of uncover

how women lived through this time and how they experienced it. It's very happy and joyful book in many ways. There's a lot of like, you're reading it and you're going, bloody hell, you go, go. Oh my God. But there's a lot of sadness in this as well.

I suppose I knew, of course I knew that like you could have enormous families and the infant mortality was really high. But you're kind of almost a bit cavalier with it when you're talking about history, aren't you? you're just like, da-da-da-da-da, but you really drill down it into these stories and some of the anecdotes that you pull out, it's like, Jesus, that's really heartbreaking. Yes. There was one early on when you said that a woman gave birth 30 times and none of her children survived.

Yes. She gave birth not quite 30 times because she had lots of twins, but she had 33 children. And there's a census record which shows her living with, I think she had one child left at that point. I mean, that's obviously a very extreme example in terms of the number of children she had and the number of children. she had and the number of children she lost. But, you know, infant mortality was a reality. If you had a big family, the chances are you would lose a child. You look at Queen Victoria, who was lucky enough to see all of her children grow up to adulthood, but then outlived three of them. And I think as well, you sort of throw around these statistics about infant mortality

and getting behind those statistics. And for me, reading some of the letters from, you know, the mothers who had lost children, just absolutely heartbreaking. And there was Mary Shelley, for example, who wrote Frankenstein, of course, talks about the loss of her infant baby where she'd put it down one night and the baby was fine, she wrote up and the baby was dead. And she talks about it in this way

where she almost feels guilty that she's grieving. She says, like, you know, I can't stop thinking about the child. So there was a sense even for then, I think, that women were supposed to kind of normalise this because it was a normal part of life.

But of course, how can you normalise losing a child? No, it's really hard to get our head around. And I suppose that when I press pause on it, I'm like, well, of course nobody was fine with it. But I suppose I have sort of accepted it of just like, oh, you know, infant mortality is really high, almost as if like mothers would be going, oh, I've lost another one. And then that would be

that. But like the trauma of this, it's intense. Yes, absolutely. And I was exactly the same. You know, you read the statistics. You think it's normalized. I think it's well on some level. I thought, you know, you think about the more widespread Christian beliefs at the time as well. And you think about the sort of religious consolation that perhaps more people had and all of that sort of thing. And you do think it was something that people were used to because they had to be used to it. And then reading through the letters, you know, you see this very, very raw grief. And you see, you know, women who were traumatized years later by the children that they've lost. And just real devastation, as you would expect, really, when you stop to think about it.

But because we've tended to talk about it in terms of numbers and statistics and so forth, those individual stories have been lost a little bit, I think. What are the statistics on it? Because the interesting, well, there's a lot that's interesting. But one of the things that historians are quick to point out is that people often say things like, oh, people only live to the age of 30 or whatever it was. And that's not true. It was the rates of infant mortality that dragged down the averages there. But what kind of statistics are we looking at here when it comes to infant mortality?

So there's huge variation, obviously partly dependent on social status and things like that. In some areas, it was up to 50% infant mortality, which is obviously insane. You know, this idea that you would lose half your children. Obviously, if you're sort of Queen Victoria, then the chances are much better. You know, you've got access to sanitary surroundings and medical care and so on. But, you know, some of the statistics as well are actually quite difficult to verify. So still birth statistics were much higher as well. So somewhere between 3 and 6%, depending on which source you look at.

Obviously, things like miscarriage or late miscarriage and so forth. And then obviously, you know, if you manage to get through birth and the first year, which is the most precarious for various reasons, right up to. the age of five, you're in a very kind of significant risk of something happening. So this is one of the reasons, in fact, why doctors always try to save the life of the mother in difficult births, because there's a good chance if the child survives the birth, they're not going to survive to the age of five anyway, so you may as well save the mother. But yeah, really devastating once you start to kind of dig into it. God. Do we have any sense of fertility rates in the 19th century? That's a really

difficult question to answer, isn't it? But did they have issues with fertility in really deprived and impoverished areas. Could people control their fertility? Was there contraceptions? Yeah, all really interesting issues. And I opened the book by talking about some of these infertility and fertility, because obviously there is pretty much not a whole lot you could do to control whether or not you had babies and how many babies you had. Once you're married, you've signed everything away then because there's no such thing as marital rape. So the marriage is the act of consent. So then you're wholly dependent really on somebody else. If you want to, prevent yourself from falling pregnant.

And then you've got all of the issues, of course, around contraception. So, you know, contraception's been employed to some extent. But of course, knowledge of contraception is very, very limited. Kind of thought, well, perhaps there was this kind of shared oral knowledge, you know, that was being passing woman's woman. But I'd certainly found evidence that there wasn't always the case. I mean, Queen Victoria would have prevented some of her pregnancy if she could have. She didn't like it at all, did she?

Like, reading some of the letters in your book that she wrote to her own children, where she's off on a big rant about how she's, shit children are. And it's like, Vicky. I know, especially her oldest daughter where she's basically like, well,

essentially it just ruined my marriage, you know, I could have had this kind of nice honeymoon period with Albert and instead here you are. You know, it's just very kind of harsh. She did not like being pregnant.

And it's bizarre, but she isn't shy about telling her daughters about how they wrecked her sex life with their dad, basically. Yeah, that's it. That's it. And on one level,

you know, you can feel for her because she didn't have any control. And she had nine children. and, you know, I have three and that was a struggle enough. But to have nine not to want to be pregnant, and she also had periods of postnatal depression, bordering on postnatal psychosis.

So it was not an easy time for her. And then, of course, once she gets to the end of her childbearing years, Albert drops dead. So, you know, she doesn't even get the bit afterwards, really, where perhaps she gets a little bit of the fun back into the relationship because then he's gone. But when she writes to her daughter, and she's just so awful about her birth and her arrival,

you start to lose sympathy a little bit, I think. I know. I mean, that needs a mental health care professional, doesn't it, to sit down with that one. You can really feel as awful as it if she's writing to her daughter. It did sort of bring it home for me. Like many of these people will have been continually pregnant for years. Yes, yeah. Years and years and years. You know, large families were the norm. There were some extreme examples, as we said, the woman who had 33 children.

But, you know, Queen Victoria had nine. The Dickens had 10. The Darwin said 10. This was just pretty standard. And there was little that these women could do about it. you know, Darwin is on record opposing contraception, you know, doesn't seem that bothered about his wife who's completely kind of worn out by all the pregnancies. And then even if that wasn't the case, women still had to know what reliable methods were. And of course, that knowledge is very much limited. If you look at some of the advice literature, most advice literature, of course, doesn't go anywhere near the idea of contraception, you know, just completely ignores the idea that

you might be able to prevent a pregnancy. But towards the end of the century, that begins to change a little bit. And there's a bit more information that becomes accessible to women. But Some of the methods that are recommended are just kind of bad shit crazy that they weren't going to prevent any pregnancies. They were quite fond of a douche, weren't they? Towards the end of the 19th century. That was a big one to try and prevent pregnancy. Yes. And, you know, some of them possibly would have had an effect.

You know, there's lots of sort of putting various things up there to try and stop pregnancy. But there's things like, you know, sit up and cough, which you wouldn't want to rely on as a form of contraception, would you? And then there was one that was, I mean, I think this would have worked actually. a recommendation that if men took small doses of arsenic, it would render them impotent. But it was suggested they shouldn't do that because it could actually damage their health permanently. Wow. I did quite like the idea that maybe there were these sort of Victorian wives sneaking a bit of arsenic into the husband's cup of tea in the morning, you know, because they didn't want any more children.

It would work. That would do the trick. Yeah. Wow. So you're kind of in a situation where like it's the norm for you to get married and probably get married quite young. And when you're thinking about it in terms of pregnancy and labour, like your book shines a light on, that suddenly makes a lot more sense as to why you need to be in a relationship with somebody who's going to support you because you are going to be pregnant for years possibly, years and years.

Yeah. If you think about it, women marrying at 20, it can be 20 years or more of pregnancies. So, you know, I came across various cases. Lady Henrietta Stanley was one where she becomes a grandmother while she's still pregnant, you know, with her, I think, 11th or 12th child. I mean, Queen Victoria, when the Princess Royal married, there were rumours in the press that they were both pregnant at the same time. Victoria was completely horrified. But yeah, I mean, ironically with Queen Victoria,

she had a daughter married off at 17. So, I mean, she could have done more to prevent her daughter going through similar experiences in terms of the multiple pregnancies. There's a lot of interesting debate about whether people in the past knew what sex was. But here's a question. Do people know what birth was? I mean, obviously, you wouldn't have thought the stalk comes along, but the actual mechanics of what is going to happen to your body,

where this thing is going to come out of, what labour is, was that commonly shared information? So when I started research in a book, this is what I thought I would find. Because obviously, you know, it doesn't talk about it in Victorian fiction. It doesn't talk about birth even in advice literature, which is really interesting. Advice literature which is targeting pregnant women. It will go through pregnancy and then it will talk in detail. about infant care and there's this kind of gaping hole in the middle where the birth should be,

you know, where it just skips from sort of late pregnancy to, and then you're there with your baby, you know, and it just completely misses it out. So I thought, well, this information must be shared, right, because it must. And I think to some extent it was, but I did find multiple sources of women where it was very clear that they had no idea, absolutely no idea. So it even went into labour without knowing what was going to happen to them. Yeah. So quite a lot of a few cases where they assumed the baby would come out through the navel or whether they'd have to be cut open. Oh my God. And women writing afterwards as well saying, you know, it was so much more painful than I realised it would be. So yeah, a very limited knowledge and the idea of kind of going

into labour and going through that without knowing what's actually going to happen. I mean, the trauma of it must have just been horrific. There's no Victorian Lamar's class or anything like that. No. Again, you've got a county. There's one woman whose mother is a midwife who still doesn't tell her where the babies come from. Surprise. Oh my God. That really did suffice me was this kind of culture of silence around it because I had assumed the culture of silence was to do with the kind of public discourses around it and not the private. And then when you read these private accounts, you realise, I mean, obviously for some women they would have known and that knowledge would have been shared. But for others, it wasn't and it just must have been quite a horrific experience

I imagine. It must have been. But I mean, mind you, thinking about that, although we're much better and you can access information now. I'm not sure that the actual birth process is that widely spoken about today. In its absolute raw, bloodied, dilated glory, people do tend to still back away from that one, don't they? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, certain bits of it, for sure, that people don't talk about even now. Even with the oversharing on the internet, the sort of more grizzly bits that you perhaps don't want to mention. And yeah, I mean, I remember with my first child, during labour, but I was contracting and I was vomiting everywhere. I'm sure this is oversharing.

No, you overshare. You do it. And yeah, that was one thing. I was like, what is happening? I found out after it's not uncommon. It's not uncommon to vomit your way through labour. And you didn't know that. So no, no.

And no one had mentioned that. So I'm kind of still doing it, aren't we? Yeah, so there's bits and pieces. And then of course you've got all of the, which this is changing, I think, but those cultural sciences, particularly around infertility, miscarriage and things like that, where women are reluctant to talk about their own experiences,

understandably, but it becomes then a thing that we don't acknowledge enough, perhaps, and we don't talk about enough, and you could really see the echoes from the 19th century. So we have a situation where even the people giving birth, they don't really know what's happening, but what about the medical profession? Did they have a good understanding of what childbirth was in the 19th century? And obviously, like 100 years is a long time for things to change, but did they have a good knowledge, or was it all still a bit arse about it? I think with childbirth itself, they did have a reasonable understanding. Things like ovulation and how to prevent pregnancy.

You know, much vaguer. So, you know, again, with some of the sort of recommendations on how to prevent pregnancy, it will say, as long as you avoid having sex just before and just after your period, you'll probably be okay, which obviously that for most women is not going to work because it's not going to include the bit where they're most likely to get pregnant. But with childbirth, yeah, they had a reasonable understanding. Where the limitations were, though, particularly up until the sort of later 19th were around the spread of infection. So no idea really that you should wash your hands before

delivering a baby. No idea that you probably shouldn't perform a post-mortem and then not wash your hands before delivering a baby. Oh, no. So lots of sort of quite grim accounts in that respect. Same with instruments, not really any understanding of the need to keep instruments necessarily very clean. And so that was a perepaural fever was one of the key sources of maternal mortality because a lot of the time women were being infected by doctors in their dirty hands. I'll be back with Jessica after this short break. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and on my podcast, not just the Tudors from History Hit, I try to make sense of everything that baffled our early modern ancestors.

Like, what do you do with your waist? If you put your dung hill up against your neighbour's wall, you're going to cause rising damp. Would Henry the 8th ever? consider executing his wife, the Queen of England, Anne Boleyn. I'm not even sure if the Billins took it seriously because why would they have any reason to suspect Henry the 8th would really get rid of his queen? And why do men grow beards? During puberty, the male body heats up and a smoke rises in the body pushes out the hair

in the face. So the beard is actually a form of excrement. In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. twice a week every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. How women were being advised to give birth, apart from just bite down and push. Were birthing chairs still a thing in the 19th century? Were women advised to be flat on their back or stood up or swinging from the rafters? So the advice that you do get, which, you know, is a bit sort of piecemeal, as I say,

because a lot of the advice that just sort of skips over this bit. But you do get a lot of advice on the birthing chamber, how it should be prepared. chamber. Yeah, so the bedroom essentially. So they're giving birth in bed. So who should be in the room with you? Not a single woman because you don't want to actually let her in on the secrets of where babies come from. Really? It was like no one will ever give birth ever again if they know what's going to happen. Well, I think that was definitely part of it. Let's not tell them what's going to happen because it will just be too horrific for them to stand. So it had to be a married woman, but not the pregnant woman's mother because the, you know, the grandmother would be prone to sort of hysteria if she was to watch her daughter giving birth.

So, you know, very strict of advice in that respect. Advice on pain relief, obviously, very controversial. Lots of people advocating for women giving birth in lots of pain, even after the advent of chloroform, which, to be fair, was sort of quite dangerous. Chloroforming people giving birth. Yeah, I mean, the Queen Victoria did that. Her two youngest children, she had chloroform. And it was very effective as a method of pain relief in that the birthing mother would then be unconscious,

so wouldn't notice. It's not funny. I'm laughing, but it's just, it's so victor. It is. It's very easy to overdose, obviously. Oh, God. And to give too much. So there's sort of quite interesting information about aspects of childbirth. And then the medical sort of procedures around difficult births. I mean, that for me was probably the most traumatic aspect of research in the book was reading about the destructive operations that they used. So, you know, nowadays, if the baby won't come out, they'll just wheel you off for a C-section, but they would never perform C-sections because of

the maternal mortality rate. And as I said earlier, they would always try and save the mother rather than the child. So they would have the baby out using destructive instruments if it couldn't be born in any other way. Holy shit. It's brutal, isn't it? And so I suppose if you are rich, not even like as rich as the queen, but if you are wealthy, you would have, who, a doctor delivering the baby? Where do midwives fit into this? So from about the late 18th century onwards, you've got a sort of shift in that you've got the medical man trying to kind of encroach into the birthing space. So prior to that, it's really seen as an activity that takes place between women, you know, midwife with woman.

But it's almost a kind of opportunist move on the part of the medical men to kind of get in there, you know, and think, oh, we've charged some high fees here for the aristocracy and so on. Partly it's to do as well with sort of developing medical knowledge in the sense that it is a medical procedure, you know, prior to the 19th century, it wasn't really considered as a medical event as such. But the consequence of that sort of increasing medicalisation of childbirth is a kind of demonisation of the figure of the midwife throughout the 19th century. This stereotype emerges of the kind of drunken, criminal, negligent midwife, which is really pushed by doctors who are saying women, you must have a doctor. You know, you don't just want a midwife.

You must have a doctor with you. So amongst the aristocratic upper classes, you'd almost always have a doctor present. Amongst the poorer classes, it might be a midwife. Midwives were typically unqualified for most of the period because they weren't allowed access to trade. training, but then towards the end of the century, there's a kind of gradual increase in the emphasis on allowing them to get some training. But of course, you had very, very experienced midwives who had been doing the job for a very long time, who often had been apprenticed to more senior midwives when they started off. So, you know, from what I can see, nothing too significant

in terms of differing outcomes dependent entirely on whether you've got a medical man or a midwife present. So he's spoken about the side of fertility where people being pregnant for like 20 years and like what that means and birthing children but then they might not survive. I suppose that the other side of that is infertility or women who didn't have kids because I'm 40 and I don't have kids and it's still even today that's a thing. That's a thing that people talk about and a lot of people aren't okay with it. It's a conversation starter.

So what was it like in the 19th century and did you find stories and texts a around involuntary child like infertility people? couldn't get pregnant. And is there any evidence of women that just went, nah, fuck this, I don't want to be a mother, I don't want to do it. The first definitely, so plenty of accounts of sort of childless women. And those stories are often told as these very kind of tragic stories. And for many women, they did experience them in that way. You know, they wanted children. And, you know, as you say, it's a thing even today, for women especially, you know, far less so for men. But if you don't have children, you're on some level, you have to explain yourself.

for, you know, you have to listen to people telling you how you may regret it when you're older. And it's still seen as not being a kind of entirely valid choice. And in 19th century, when women's choices were so much more limited, and when you had this whole kind of ideology, that was their destiny. That's what women did. Women produced children. So if you didn't produce children, then you were perceived as being a kind of failure. And so you've got quite a lot of sort of negative stereotyping around the figure of the spinster, who, of course, is the unmarried, childless woman. But then you've also then got the experience of women who did marry but who for whatever reason couldn't have children.

And of course, there was very little understanding about what the causes might be even less in terms of possible solutions. And so, yeah, I came across a number of women who were clearly very affected by the fact that they hadn't been able to have children. And this was clearly a kind of significant burden. Also in, you know, the medical literature of the time, these sort of great stories from medical men about how to cure infertility, which like the sort of recommendations on birth control are highly questionable.

But, you know, they would come with these kind of amazing success stories. There was also a tendency, as you can imagine, to blame women. Of course. Too many children, that's the woman's fault. No children, also the woman's fault. So there was a case where a woman had not had any children. And then her husband died and she remarried. And lo and behold, she has children. So, you know, there's evidence that she wasn't the issue in that situation. But generally speaking, it was always thought to be the woman that was to blame for these issues. And you did tell a story, an amazing named woman, Lady Gooch, which is just the best name ever, but a very sad story about what happened to her. Yes, so this was reported in the newspapers, I think, around the mid-19th century, and it's not too unusual, although it sounds kind of like it came out of a sort of sensational novel of the time, but she was unable to have children. Her husband was a bit of a wrong, and by all accounts, you know, she was particularly worried that he would abandon her or that

he would die and she would be disinherited. Children were a way for women to sort of secure their future as well. So you're thinking about Mrs. Bennett and her attempts to marry off the daughters, because the reality of Mr. Bennett dies is that, you know, she's in a very precarious financial position, despite the fact that she obviously does have loads of children, but they're all girls, so it's no good. So, yeah, Lady Gooch didn't have any children herself. So decided to take a baby from the founding hospital and pretend that she had given birth, which didn't work out too well because her husband had allegedly had her followed. So a court case was brought against her eventually for deceiving her husband. Yes. And then it all went, you know, rather

badly wrong and then, you know, irreparable damage to her reputation and so forth. But it was far from being the only case like that, you know, this sort of pretending to have had a baby was far more common than you might think as sort of a desperate attempt to avoid the problem of infertility. I mean, I can kind of see that. Like when you explain, I mean, it sounds bonkers. And for God's sake, anyone listening, please don't even try it. But when foundling hospitals and workhouses and things are all piling up with abandoned children and wanted children and children that can't be cared for. And then you've got this huge pressure on women that if you don't have a baby, you are an absolute failure. I can totally see that you might think, I've got a plan here.

Yes, yeah. And in fact, there were agencies that were set up to kind of try and match these unwanted babies with the women who could not have children. But actually, there was no sort of formal legal adoption. which meant those situations. They wouldn't solve the issue of, for example, entailed the states where it had to pass to the sun because the adoption wasn't sort of legally recognised. But there was some attempts, certainly,

to try and solve the problem in that way. But again, I mean, some of those stories are quite heartbreaking because it was very clear from some of the women who were giving up their babies that they didn't really want to give up their babies, but there's no state support, there's no money, you know, there's no space. Yeah, it was pretty sort of depressing research quite a lot of the time. It must have been.

You've touched on it just a bit there. I'm interested in experiences between rich and poor and where you'd give birth, this idea of lying in. And I remember in Oliver Twist, Oliver's mum goes to a workhouse to give birth and then she dies very sadly. Was that, where would you go to give birth? Did you go to give birth somewhere? Or did you just thunk on the floor? That's that. So most women gave birth at home.

Obviously, you know, if you were sort of well off, you could afford to surround yourself with servants and doctors and people to help out. If you were poor, it's much more difficult. You might have a midwife. You might even just have a neighbour presence while you were giving birth. And then, of course, you had the women who, for whatever reason, you know, couldn't give birth at home. So obviously some of them would end up in the workhouse. The workhouse was particularly the destination for unmarried women. So they did have lying in hospitals, which were essentially maternity hospitals,

but you had to be married and respectable in order to have gain access to these hospitals. They were designed for poorer women, but you had to sort of come with a recommendation of respectability. and they would do proper research into your background to make sure you weren't lying, you know, make sure that you were actually married. And if you weren't married, then you couldn't access the care there. So, yeah, it was really not a nice situation for a lot of women who had to give birth. And the workhouse obviously was far from an ideal place. They don't sound like nice maternity wards.

The extracts in your book, anyway. They sound fucking awful places. Yes, I think that's fair to say that, you know, often not particularly clean. sometimes you'd be attended by other inmates rather than anyone with any kind of medical backgrounds. Often you'd be in a room with other women giving birth and given the lack of information about how infection was spread. It was much more dangerous for women to be around other birthing women, especially if you've got sort of a doctor moving from woman to woman doing the examinations and so on without washing his hands in between. So yeah, quite horrific in lots of respects.

What is confinement then? That's the word that I hear used a lot. What is that? Is that something that was accessible to the poor? Or was that a rich person thing? Confinement was just the term that was used to describe the period between sort of giving birth and women then sort of returning to their normal lives, as it were. And so for the upper classes, it really was a kind of period of confinement that essentially just sort of lot women in a room for two weeks. Oh, that doesn't sound good. That doesn't sound very healthy. You kind of think, oh, you know, at least you don't have to deal with the family or whatever. but I mean, I think for a lot of women, it was quite oppressive because it wasn't just about you must rest. It was you must rest completely.

You cannot read a book. You cannot write a letter. These things will be potentially damaging to your physical and your mental health. So you're just lying in a room, eating sort of very plain food, not being allowed to get out of bed, you know, not being allowed visitors, not being allowed any kind of stimulation. For two weeks. Yeah, two weeks. And there is some evidence with Queen Victoria and Catherine Dickens as well. that this period of confinement actually was really detrimental to their mental health.

And they were showing signs of postnatal depression during those two weeks. And then immediately, you know, the signs of recovery once they're allowed to leave the house and talk to people and things like that. Were you allowed the baby or was that taken away from you? If you to just lie there doing nothing. Well, of course, if you're sort of upper class, you don't need to do much with the baby yourself anyway. You just got everyone else to do it for you, including the breastfeeding. So, you know, you wouldn't necessarily see the baby much. but they maybe brought to you a couple of times a day.

So either say you could nurse it if you were feeding yourself or just so you could look upon it, you know, but it certainly wouldn't have that, you know, you think about that really intense period following birth where you've just got this thing stuck to you. That doesn't sound very maternal, but you know what I mean? All of that was sort of there. It was that thing about in terms of the sort of maternal bonding

to not even be spending that intense time with your child straight after birth. No wonder they were mad. Absolutely. Mad as a jarer twat. A lot of them. And no wonder, what kind of system is this? It's very contradictory because on the one hand, as you'd imagine, not too much in the way of sort of postnatal mental health care at the time.

But on the other hand, it's also seen as you mustn't have any stimulation because you might go mad. And then, of course, they went mad from not having any stimulation. So it's all topsy-tively. I was going to say, did this change? Yes, Kate, it's changed because we're not doing this anymore. Throughout the 19th century, did this improve? Presumably there must have been someone at some point that goes, hang on a minute, lads. I don't think this is this is working too well.

How did the care improve? And by the end of the 19th century, where are we up to compared to the start? Yeah, I mean, things did change. Again, it was this strange. So I obviously sort of, I was aware of this idea of confinement and you'd read about it in this sort of Victorian novel and so on. And it was one of those things where I thought, oh, no, but women surely didn't do that because it's crazy, right?

You know, the idea that reading a book will be overstimulating just is so ridiculous. And then when I started looking at these women's diaries, Queen Victoria's and a few others I came across, the diary stop. So, you know, two weeks after the birth, Queen Victoria doesn't write in her diary because she's not supposed to be writing. And then there's another one by Count Ambly where a husband takes over the writing of the diary. So, you know, because they're just so fragile and delicate, they can't possibly do it themselves. But, of course, that's also a kind of upper class ideology because if you're a working woman with, you know, no money and 15 children, you can't stay in bed for two weeks. You've got to get up and clean the house

and do the laundry and all of that stuff. So, I mean, things changed, but perhaps not as much as you might expect. There's really concerted campaigns for greater maternity rights from sort of the late 19th century onwards, particularly by an organisation called the Women's Cooperative Guild, who did some amazing work in the early 20th century and did improve maternity rights to some extent. But throughout the 19th century, by the time I'm finished writing it, I was glad I hadn't given birth in Victorian, let's put it that way. You just can't stop thinking when I'm reading your book about all the friends,

that I've got that had difficult births and that, you know, that the NHS was there to make sure that everything was okay. And I'm just like mentally playing it out in my head of like, well, what would have happened to them? What would have happened to their vaginas if this, like, without medical intervention? Like, just, oh my God, these poor, poor women. I know. I know. Also, what happened to their vaginas with medical intervention because there were some fairly horrific stories. The real sort of leg crossing moments were reading about some of the instrumental deliveries. Um, including a couple of cases where women had just been torn to pieces by these instruments. So, you know, they're left sort of permanently incontinent.

And there's cases of their husbands leaving them afterwards. Cheers, mate. Yeah, I know not very little in the way of, you know, no one recommending that you do your pelvic floor exercises afterwards. It was, yeah, pretty horrific. And then you think about it in terms of if you give birth 10 times, what that's going to do to your, to your retirement. Like, not just your vagina, but like your whole. body because birth, I think that's something as well. Even today is kind of glossed over, especially like, you know, with celebrity culture and we've got like celebs who are seen heavily pregnant. And then

the next day, it's all back and springy and exactly, we sort of forget the huge toll that it takes on people's bodies is this. And then let alone when you're popping out nine kids, these women are warriors. My God. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's quite sort of horrific to think about the sort of after effects. And, you know, it made me kind of understand this sort of emphasis on the kind of maiden figure and the matronly figure. Because the matronly figure in the Victorian novel is, obviously, it's the woman that's given birth 15 times. She's got no chance of maintaining that kind of maidenly form. But, yeah, there was little sort of support literally for the postnatal body in Victorian Britain. I mean, in the 90th century, women, I think that they were barred from

mentoring the medical profession. There was a couple of like sneaking in here and there. But presumably when they get in and sort of after the 19th century and they start producing their own research on bodies and birth, is that when we start to see things changing? I think it's, I mean, you're going into a slightly later period then, which is slightly outside my area of expertise. But I think it doesn't change really for a long time. If you think about it now, you know, if we think about some of the stuff that we still see today in the kind of statistics around postnatal mental health and actually around women's health more generally and the way that it's not always taken seriously by the medical profession. I mean, that's still a huge issue. You know, we've seen it recently in stories about around the menopause, for example, you know, and women pushing for HRT and really having to fight against the system, which is quite reluctant,

to cater to them or to really kind of identify these things as an actual problem, you know, rather than just, well, you're a woman and this is what you should be expected to go through and deal with. So I'm not sure we've come as far as we should have done in that respect. I'm worried that I've made it sound like your book is incredibly bleak. it's not. It's harrowing and there is so much important and it will leave you sat there just thinking about your friend's vaginas, maybe about your own vagina for a long time. But my final question to you is what positive stories did you come across with this subject to just look at it as just this endless horror show of birth and pain and death and awfulness? What positive stories did you find in your

research? Yes. I mean there was definitely a lot of darkness and when I was writing the book, I remember my agent saying to me, oh, you need to put some more happy stories in here. So I did try, so looking a bit bleak. There is, I think, moments of kind of joy in there. And the ones that I really liked with is sort of women who are kind of experiencing motherhood in a way that I think probably women today kind of identify with. So, you know, you see Emma Darwin, you know, wife of Charles marking off the weeks of her pregnancy and her diary and, you know, as we do now with the sort of smartphone apps and all of that, women writing to each other just really excited about the fact that they're pregnant and stuff like that.

And I mean, also, I mean, not entirely kind of happy, I suppose, but I mean, I did love some of the research I did into the advice literature because it was just so ridiculous some of it. But it just had me kind of laughing out loud. There was one where it talks about if you've got toothache, which can be a symptom of pregnancy, you should avoid having teeth removed whilst you're pregnant. That's sensible.

But in order to manage the pain, well, it's quite sensible. It then went on to recommend that you just take a bit of cocaine to help to manage the pain. And so people are mad. Yeah. So, I mean, those sort of things that have made me smile. Some of the recommendations around wet nursing and the type of women that you should hire and don't hire a redhead to breastfeed your baby. You know, that sort of things that have made me laugh. So there is, I think, some lighter moments.

But there was no getting away really from some of the grim, the grimmer side of it. Jessica, you have been incredible to talk. Horrifying, but incredible. If people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you? Yeah, I'm on Twitter at Jess J. Cox, so you can follow me on there. We'll find you. And give us the full title of the book again. Yes, the book is called Convindments, the Hidden Histories of Maternal Bodies in 19th Century Britain.

It's amazing. Thank you so much for joining me today. You've been an absolute treat. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you to Jessica for joining us. And if you enjoyed this episode, please do follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts.

And leave us a review, because we really do read them all. We've got episodes on Anlister, on Dickpicks and on breastreading, all coming your way. Any episode's suggestions are welcome to. Please email Betwixt at HistoryHit.com. This episode was produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie G. The editor was Shavon Dale. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.