From plague 'searchers' to strawberry birthmarks: a history of women's bodies

Plague searchers and early history

0:00Propel Fitness Water. With Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes.

0:19What was nidgeting? How did women know they were pregnant before modern tests? And what did people in the past believe a mother's imagination could do to her unborn child? In today's episode of the History Extra podcast, Lauren Good speaks to historian Erin McGlock about her new book, Presence, which explores the history of the female body and the long-standing beliefs that society has held about it. Just before we start today's conversation, you might also be interested in joining us for a live episode of the History Extra podcast.

0:50We're going to be recording next Thursday, the 22nd of October, to mark the upcoming home release of Pressure, the gripping untold story of the efforts to chart the weather on D-Day. We've teamed up with Studio Canal for a special event at the Royal Society of Arts in London, featuring David Haig, the writer of Pressure, in conversation with Catherine Ross, archive manager at the Met Office. Tickets are free and are available on a first-come, first-served basis. For full details and to book your place now, check out the episode description. But for now, it's on to today's conversation.

1:24Erin, thank you so much for joining me today to talk about your new book, Presence, A Hidden History of the Female Body. I'd love to start back to front, as it were, from your epilogue, actually, where you describe the searches. I had never heard of the work these women did before reading your book, and it felt like a good place to start to highlight these pockets of history containing women that we haven't really paid much attention to before. What was the role of the searchers?

1:55Well, thank you so much for having me. It's such a delight to be here. I'm so glad to be able to talk to you about the book. Yeah, so I kind of conclude the book with a little case study of these women who are called the searchers. And so they were older, usually poor women widows in London who were paid to go around the houses of the sick during the plague in the 16th century, during successive waves of plague, actually, in the 16th century. And they were paid by the parish

2:25to go around, identify the sick and the dying, and then to report back to kind of like central health authority on the numbers of people who were dying. So in a way, they were the first demographers, almost, of the city, counting up the dead. And then the numbers, the data that they collected, would then be used for decisions like, should we close the plague houses? Should we have a quarantine? So they were really almost like public health officials, but they were also the poorest, the most vulnerable women in their parishes. They were being paid to do this as a form of charity.

2:58So I really just loved these figures because they seemed to me to encapsulate some of the kind of tensions and problems of writing the history of women's bodies in particular, that on the one hand, you know, what women do, the work they perform for their communities is so important. And it's all about these boundaries of life and death, right? A lot of the searchers were also midwives, which I found fascinating. A lot of the women who took care of the sick and the dead in the parishes also took care of newborns and postpartum mothers, but they're also neglected,

3:29vulnerable, often kind of demonized in literature as like spreading the plague. And so it really got to some of these like tensions of writing the history of the body that I was really interested in. And I guess like the other thing I really loved about them is that I wanted to write a history of the body. I was trying to become a historian of the body, but they were really the first historians of the body because they were going to the sick and they were looking for signs of the plague. They were looking for symptoms. They were pressing the flesh to see what color it was, you know, looking at the texture of the skin. And so I kind of like, I love this idea of these women who had

4:03so much experience understanding the body with like a knowledge of the body. And they were like a great figure for me, a way to kind of close out the book and think about what I had been doing across the course of the book. Because as you said, these women were also midwives. You ask who knew the body more deeply than these women, which is one of the evocative images you paint in the book.

Childbirth practices and nidgeting

4:26Another image that really struck me was the practice of knocking around, which you say is called nidgeting in East Anglia in around the 17th century. Once a woman had gone into labor, what was this practice? Nidgeting is one of my favorite words in the book. So that was like a particular East Anglian dialect word for this process where usually a woman's husband partner would go around knocking on all the doors of her female friends, her neighbors, and her midwife to get them out of the house when she was going into labor. And they would call them to her bedside

5:02and kind of create this like quite female space. I think especially in like more rural areas before the practice of male midwifery took hold and grew, this is really like a female space. And so, yes, there's this like amazing process of nidgeting, getting people to come to the bedside. You know, this had all been prearranged beforehand and they would take care of her in labor. The midwife would deliver the baby. They would often bring food, candles. So it was like this really great practice, which is sort of forgotten one today, right? I don't think anyone knows. We don't use

5:33the word nidgeting anymore, unfortunately. I love the image as well that you paint of this midwife cloaked in red, carrying the birthing stool on her back, which has been used by countless women. Yeah. I mean, this was a beautiful image to me because it also helped me to think about the way that the practice of midwifery changed across the early modern period. So in the beginning of the period, that would have been a very common sight day or night to see a midwife carrying a birthing stool on her back, being called to a birth and this process of

6:06nidgeting, getting neighbors to come too. By the end of the early modern period, so into the second half of the 18th century, it was more fashionable and in some places, especially in cities, more common to actually hire a male midwife to come and deliver the baby. And he would not necessarily be bringing a birthing stool. He would be bringing, you know, instruments like things like forceps, which had been invented towards the end of the 17th, early 18th centuries. So for me, this figure of a female midwife carrying a stool on her back, one that had been used by generations

6:37of women, that sort of changed by the end of the 18th century. And it was a useful way for me to think about some of those transitions and transformations and how women would have given birth across the period. How else do we see the process of birth changing throughout this period? Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, I think there are a few different changes actually. So midwifery itself almost across Europe becomes more institutionalized. So there are more civic and religious authorities who want to professionalize the practice of midwifery. They want to certify

7:11midwives in the parish or in the city. So that's one shift. Midwifery starts and obstetrics start to be taught in medical schools. So again, like that's the gender shift as well, right away from female midwives towards male midwives who are university educated, which entails a whole other set of changes too, right? So this is not any longer midwifery practices being handed down necessarily in an apprenticeship system between women, but instead in a university lecture hall, which is a quite different way to learn. There's a kind of rise of midwifery textbooks and visual imagery related

7:44to birthing practices. So, you know, historians have really debated this. Like, so back in the kind of 1970s, like feminist historians said, this was a way of wresting control of birth away from female midwives and putting it in the hands of men. And that that tracked along the same time as like an increasing use of instruments and increasing kind of medical interventions into the process of birth. Later historians have critiqued that and said that actually, you know, this transition was not quite as

8:16clean as that, that there were male midwives earlier in the period and that female midwives continued to practice. And I think I'm most convinced by this idea that there was regular birth and emergency birth. So if you were having a regular birth, particularly if you were in a rural area, you would have seen a female midwife and she would have been in charge of it and it would have been much the same as it was across the period. But if you were having an emergency birth, especially with the invention of forceps, then it was much more likely that you might have a male midwife come

8:48and that that wouldn't necessarily result in the death of the infant, that actually some of those deliveries were successful. And that was kind of really one of the main transformations across the period was this sort of hardening divide between regular midwifery with a female midwife and emergency midwifery with a male midwife.

Motherhood and embodied history

9:06Your own experience of motherhood really shapes this book and offers such a personal touch, which I really enjoyed. Am I right in saying that you actually first thought to write this in hospital after giving birth to your son? Yes. Yeah, I was a couple of days on the postnatal ward and I started thinking about this forceps birth and, you know, the kind of long history of forceps. I knew that they had been invented in the late 17th, early 18th century and I knew that they had marked this real shift in the history of midwifery

9:42and the history of the way that women had given birth. And it made me start thinking about how I had written history in the past and how I would then go on to do it now. So I think, you know, as a graduate student and for my kind of early career, when I was interested in the history of gender, the history of the body, the way that I approached that was entirely through language, right? Like I sat in archives, I sat in libraries, I studied dead languages, like I did this standard training, I suppose, of a professional historian, but it was really all mediated through language.

10:17And I had started to get frustrated with this wall that I kept running up against, which is when we want to write about the history of the body, so often what we're actually writing about is people writing about the body is like language about the body and not the body itself. And when I had this experience giving birth and the use of forceps, I had this sense that like I was sort of in touching distance with this past, right? That this was actually like an object of the enlightenment and that I kind of knew the past differently in this more embodied way after having given birth in that way.

10:53And so I started to wonder if there was like a way to write a history of the body that actually kind of came from the flesh in a way, or that paid like a due respect almost to the kind of knowledge that we can gain through the flesh, not only through language. So the book is kind of like an experiment really in that kind of historical thinking through the body. You mention a fragment written by a domestic servant in Cornwall in 1795, you put in the book, where she says her child will not sleep without her and she excuses her handwriting as she's having

11:26to write with this child in her arms. And you say, like you've just said, about feeling that connection that you saw yourself in that woman. Were there any other particular points in your research where you were really struck by the similarity of experience between history and now? Yeah, I mean, so many. I really identified with her trying to write holding a baby. I think I got so much advice when my baby was little saying, oh, you could just, just write during his nap times. I just thought this is just impossible. There were so many, so many things. I mean, I think one of the things I

12:00found really moving is the way that early modern women were so, they sort of embraced a certain uncertainty about early pregnancy. So there was a sense that early pregnancy was sort of uncertain and fragile and unknowable in a way up until the point of the quickening, which is the moment when you feel the fetus moving for the first time. And that sort of maps on to early modern medical ideas about when the fetus is imbued with a soul, this like moment of ensoulment, which is around four or

12:34five months gestation and the moment of animation, which is like when it kind of moves and is human and you can feel it during the quickening again, which is sort of four or five months.

Methods of detecting pregnancy

12:44There is so much ambiguity that you discuss in the book. And you also mentioned that reliable home pregnancy tests were not available until the late 1970s, which really surprised me. I didn't realize it was that late. What sort of methods were women using to try and work out whether they were pregnant or not? I mean, so many, some of which seem wild to our scientific understanding of conception. So often like midwifery books, including those written by female midwives would list signs of

13:17a successful conception, you know, including things like we would recognize now, like swollen breasts and things like that. But I think one of the things I kind of love about these theories of the body in early modernity is so under the kind of way that they thought about the body, both men and women produce seed. And conception actually requires both of those seeds to meet. And the corollary to that is that women need to orgasm in order to conceive properly. So some of these kind of midwifery manuals

13:48or medical texts have like tips to make sure that women orgasm during sex to conceive properly. And so like in Jane Sharp's midwifery manual, which is a 17th century English one, when she describes the feeling of conception, you know, this sort of warm, tingly feeling, which she's actually describing as an orgasm, right? That's how you know that you've conceived if you've like successfully conceived. So it goes all the way from that through things like we would recognize now, more classic early pregnancy symptoms. But women also tracked their menstrual cycles, sometimes in their diaries,

14:22sometimes their husbands tracked their wives' menstrual cycles. Women consulted these figures who were sort of like astrologer physicians. So they would do things like put their urine in a jar and stop it up and see what happened to it. And there were various ways of seeing the urine in a flask to see if they were pregnant. But they would do that alongside casting an astrological chart. And what's so interesting in some of these casebooks is when these physicians say things like, well, she's not pregnant by her urine, but she is pregnant by her chart, by this astrological chart.

14:55So there's kind of contradictory evidence. So there's a whole host of ways. And I think most women might have used several of those and sort of patched together the knowledge themselves. Also, early modern physicians trusted women who had been pregnant before to know that they were pregnant again. And it was really first time mothers who had like the highest levels of uncertainty about whether they were pregnant. Propel fitness water with Gatorade electrolytes,

15:27zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. I'm quite surprised that husbands were also tracking their wives' menstrual cycles. I imagine early modern husbands to be very removed from that sort of thing. Yeah. I mean, I think it's probably most common amongst the more aristocratic classes, right, in which producing an heir is incredibly important. And, you know, noble women, I think I

16:04looked in the book at some letters by noble women in Rome, for example, in the 17th century, who were really concerned with whether or not they were pregnant right after marriage because of the pressure on them to produce children. And so one of them is like writing to their mother saying, like, I think I might be. I think I might be. Just because there was so much pressure. And, you know, the opposite is true too, that, like, for example, if you were a single domestic servant who had had sex before outside of marriage, then you might really deny the evidence, right? You might be

16:37quite certain that you're not pregnant because to be pregnant would be such a catastrophe. So I think so much of whether you know is whether you want to know, right? Also, that pressure continues once the woman is pregnant because they're hugely restricted as to what they not only can do but feel emotionally during this pregnancy because most things are thought to affect the baby. What sort of things were women prevented from doing during this period? There are all kinds of theories about how women should behave during pregnancy to protect the

17:12fetus. Some of them are sort of quite physical, like don't ride in carriages, you know, don't get jostled around, don't go dancing, things like that. But that there were also these theories that really had more to do with the maternal imagination. And I was so interested in these. So that's this idea that a mother's emotions, what she sees, what she thinks about, what she desires, all of that can impact the fetus. So if you were pregnant during the winter and you had a craving for strawberries

17:43and they were out of season, you might give birth to a child who has like a strawberry-shaped birth mark. And one of my favorite things about those, they're called desiring marks, is that in the 18th century when coffee becomes widely consumed, all of a sudden infants are being born with coffee-colored birth marks because women really wanted to drink coffee during their pregnancies. But it was also really important to control your emotions. So there was an idea in particular that anger could sort of flood the uterus with blood and drown the fetus. And so it was important to control your anger.

18:18So again, though, this is one of these kind of really ambivalent ideas, right? Because on the one hand, there's a sense that women's bodies were sort of open and porous to the world. It kind of takes a little bit of this sense that you can control every aspect of your pregnancy. You know, that's not really part of the logic in the same way that it is now, whether you get like these long lists of foods that you can and can't eat. There's a certain sense in which that's uncontrollable. But obviously also there's a sense that women maybe can't control their emotions as well,

18:51that they're more subject to their emotions than men are. And so there is a kind of foundational misogyny to some of those ideas too. I think one of the things I got really interested in is that actually controlling or sort of creating the right circumstances for women's pregnancy was seen as a collective responsibility. So in like some towns in Germany, for example, where there was a beggar with like really ugly hands who might scare a pregnant woman, the council actually makes it so that they can't be out in public during the day where they might run

19:25across a pregnant woman or that, you know, a pregnant woman who needs meat would be given meat or a pregnant woman would have rights to kind of collect acorns in the forest or something like that. So there are all of these kinds of ways which are really ambivalent, you know, really, where people actually collectively take responsibility for the woman's, this like sense of the openness of her body during pregnancy. That collectiveness is so interesting. And I think there are a lot of links to morality here.

Morality and labor pain

19:55Going back to the process of childbirth, it can feel, I think, you know, that this maternal period as a very supportive space. But there is a darker side to this history that made me feel quite uneasy where the pain of birth was used to coax information out of women, going back to that moral theme. How was this used? It is definitely, it's definitely the darker side of this. So I think there, you know, used to be this

20:27idea that like a female midwifery space, like this was all very kind of like cozy and collective. And that really was not what it was like, especially if you were a single woman bearing a child out of wedlock. So in England in the early modern period, I mean, actually really across early modern Europe, there was this idea that pain could be like an indicator or a condition which would produce truth, right? And that's the kind of theory behind torture as well. In England in the 17th century, if you were a single woman giving birth, the midwife would use your labor pains in order to

21:04extract information about who the father of the child was. So there's this kind of blurring between midwifery, right, which is supposed to be at least hypothetically about care for the mother and child and this inquisitorial role, right, where she's actually seeking out information about who the father is timed with the pain of labor. So yes, it is a darker history. I got really interested in that because I really wanted to know about how women experienced labor pain in the past. And it's very,

21:35very hard to know. It's like a really vanished history. And partly I think that's because there was so much meaning ascribed to the pain of labor, right? That it was women's burden for Eve's sin or that it was like a form of martyrdom, that it was an occasion for truth telling, right, in the case of these kind of inquisitorial midwives. But there's so little about what it actually meant to women themselves. So there's this one like scrap of evidence of a single woman in Yorkshire who says,

22:06I think she was being prosecuted for infanticide and she's sort of telling the story of the birth in court. And all she says is it was a night that would have killed a horse. And I just loved that as a phrase because it was just so brutal in its simplicity and its refusal to make meaning out of pain. It was another moment where I really identified with something from the past, you know, that there's no way to make meaning out of this. We just have to kind of recognize that it's almost beyond meaning in some ways. There is that real search of meaning. And as you said, that link to

22:38being cleansed of sin, which does sit within a wider context. I mean, you even mentioned a Puritan woman, Alice Thornton, who after a really difficult labor believed she had been cleansed. I mean, I think it's to the modern mind a little bit bizarre to wrap your head around. Yeah. I mean, I think like there is this idea that the pain of childbirth might be the closest that ordinary women can ever get to martyrdom, right? That it was this kind of ultimate spiritual cleansing. That's certainly how Alice Thornton thought about it. She wrote incredible diaries and

23:12had many children. So we know what she thought, I suppose, in a different way than we do for most women. I mean, also that a death in childbirth was like the closest you could get to death on a battlefield, right? That it was like this ultimate glorious way for a woman to die, which is obviously really troubling, really troubling. But I think there is also a lot of morality attached to how we give birth now, right? Like there is a glorification of natural birth in particular. I remember when I did an antenatal class, I was told that the only reason that women give birth on their backs is because

23:47King Louis XIV, when one of his mistresses was giving birth, wanted her to lie on her back so that he could have a better view, which is nonsense. It's just totally nonsense. But it's instructive in a way because it shows that I think particularly in communities where they're sort of interested in natural birth or a non-medicalized birth, this idea of an intervention could only come from this hyper misogynistic figure, right? And, you know, a figure in the past, which I obviously as a historian

24:19found really interesting that there is like this moment when we lost natural birth and it was Louis XIV, it was his fault. It's interesting, like the kind of stories we need to tell ourselves about birth, right? And about what's natural and what's an intervention. There are so many similarities as you draw on. And also just looking again at those similarities, I found it so interesting when you said in your chapter on the history of sleep that your anxieties as a new mum when nighttime came felt historic. How would you describe that feeling of

24:51connection? Yeah, I think there was something about, I remember being in the nursery with my son and kind of like watching the sun go down and feeling this like dread about having to stay up all night. You know, I think especially in like the early weeks postpartum when you're so much in the physical recovery from birth, it feels just like astonishingly hard that you have to do that. And I think, you know, there's also something about sleeplessness that makes you perhaps a bit irrational. I think I was sort of

25:22more prone to that sort of thinking and those kind of fears. So when I was reading ballads, there's some incredible accounts of women's postpartum dreams that come from spiritual communities in London, or they're sort of collecting their testimonies. Also from doctors' casebooks, where women tried to get treated for insomnia postpartum. And they have these like really terrifying nightmares about women, about like disputes with their neighbors, about their husbands being able to eat and them not being able to eat. There are accounts of women kind of waking up with a knife

25:55in their hand, you know, things that like to us, like we would say, oh, well, that's postpartum depression or something like that. But I think that's actually way too simplistic as an explanation, like what they are experiencing, you know, is this like terror and there are like real themes in what they say that you can identify with about vulnerability, a kind of loneliness, right? Some of the violence done to the body in birth that gets alchemized into these other images postpartum. You know,

26:27I really, I really identified with those. And I think they're just incredible testimonies. Like, I can't believe in a way that we have them because there is, I just would never have thought we would have the nightmares of postpartum mothers in the 17th century, but there they are. And they're really astonishing. And also, we don't get too many of these first-hand accounts. And there hasn't been that much analysis to this point of these first-hand accounts of women. So as you said, it's incredible that we have them.

26:57What is it like to sometimes only be allowed to access fragments of the history when you just like to access more?

Working with historical fragments

27:06I've talked about this a lot with like editors and readers and things that, you know, it's both an incredible opportunity in the material and a real frustration. Like there's no single woman in the book really, I mean, with a couple of exceptions, maybe, who we really know enough about to kind of write a much more substantial case study or a book or anything like that. Alice Thornton actually may be one of the exceptions because of her diaries. But most of the women that I write about, we know from like sort of scraps here or there where they appear in court, a will, you know, a prayer book,

27:42a midwifery manual that they own. Perhaps there's, you know, even Jane Sharp, right, who writes one of these incredibly popular midwifery manuals in the 17th century. We don't actually really know who she is. You know, we know very little about her as a person. And so what I wanted to do in the book is like instead of writing longer case studies or biographies, because that was just not possible, especially looking at ordinary women, right, non-aristocratic women, I thought, well, we'll use the fragments and I'll make it into like a chorus, right, to kind of have this cacophonous

28:15like set of voices that don't always agree, right, that like take different views of pregnancy, different views of breastfeeding. And that's fine. Like I wanted there to be a range of feeling in the book and to put my own voice in amongst them, right, to have this chorus. And I suppose sometimes it's a frustration. Obviously, I would love to know what happened to some of these women. But I suppose what you gain is like a real sense of variety, disagreement, ambiguity, uncertainty. And

28:48those are things I'm really interested in. So I leaned into that as a method. I love that description of this chorus that your book creates, which is just beautiful. There is so much that we haven't got time to discuss today, unfortunately, from chapters on eating to desire to drudgery. Listeners will have to read your book, Erin, to learn about those things. Finally, how would you like this book to change people's perceptions of the history of the female body? That's such a great question. I mean, I think partly it's introducing these ways of

29:24thinking about the female body that have like largely been forgotten, you know, things like ambiguity in early pregnancy, or that men were really involved in abortion stories, right? Or that there is this longer history of midwifery that's been obscured by medicalization and professionalization. You know, that breastfeeding, right, used to be considered work. It didn't used to be considered natural facet of maternal love, but was actually paid labor, right? When it was done by wet nurses,

29:55and everyone recognized the value of that labor. So I think there are all these forgotten stories, forgotten images, forgotten ways of thinking about the female body that actually have like real radical potential for the way we think about our bodies now, and kind of really speak to a feminist politics now, which I think is increasingly important in our current political atmosphere. So I suppose that's part of it. But also, like, I really, I wanted to write the book that I wanted to read when I was on the postnatal ward, you know, I wanted to write a book that made sense of this

30:29experience for me that put my own experience into like a much longer flow of time. Like there's something I think incredibly important about seeing your own experience reflected in history, like to know that, yes, there are very different ways of imagining the body. And there are also these incredible continuities, like to place our bodies in the flow of time, I think is so important, so grounding, and can be like really politically radical, you know, as a feminist politics. I just wanted to write the book that I wanted to read with a newborn, really.

31:03That was Erin McLaughlin speaking to Lauren Good. Erin is a writer and historian and now lectures at Durham University. Her book is Presence, a hidden history of the female body.