Redefining historical mothers

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Motherhood History

0:58Motherhood has long been considered as something expected rather than extraordinary. However, in this episode of the History Extra podcast, Eleanor Cleghorn explains to Lauren Good that there are many stories throughout history that demonstrate that this isn't the case, from pregnant women predicting their futures to midwives questioning the status quo. Hello, Eleanor. Thank you so much for joining me today. Hi, Lauren. Thank you so much for having me. We're talking today about your new book, A Woman's Work Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering.

1:32Can we start with a pretty sizable question? What was your main intention in writing this book? Well, this book, or the initial idea for this book, or impulse for this book, really came when I was writing and researching my first book, Unwell Women, which is a history of women's relationship with medicine over its long history, the way that women have been treated by doctors and by medical thinkers and authors over medicine's long history. And one of the reasons often touted by physicians and doctors throughout history

2:07about not only women's illnesses, but why women have to have certain kinds of lives is that they are destined to bear children, be mothers, raise children, exist in the home. So not only were women's illnesses often pivoted back to their reproductive organs or their assumed reproductive function, there was also this huge kind of overarching social narrative around women's place being in the home,

2:37women's social and biological role being motherhood, and the ways that those kind of predestined ideas sort of framed other kinds of thinking throughout history about, you know, who women are, what their bodies are for, what women should do in society and in the world. So I was really thinking about motherhood as it is, you know, one of the most defining roles in women's lives throughout history. And often motherhood, it struck me, was something that was so expected of women, seemingly so ordinary and commonplace.

3:10That's what women do. Women have babies, women raise children. But it really is the most extraordinary work that people do, bearing and raising children. There's nothing commonplace or ordinary about it. But I think we tend to think of motherhood in history as being something that's sort of confined to the sidelines. We understand that mothering is so vital and so crucial. You know, the perpetuation of our lives depends on it. There would be no history without mothers, literally.

3:43But yet it's often sidelined as not really the stuff of history because it's so expected. So I wanted to tell a history of women through the lens of experiences of mothering and wider, broader social culture and political ideas about motherhood and show how those two sort of elements have bumped up against each other and how, what it has meant, you know, over the centuries to be a mother. As you said, this is over centuries. You cover a huge span of history in the book.

Louise Bourgeois Story

4:15Was there any object or story that particularly touched you during your research? The book begins with a small handmade clay votive object that was discovered in an archaeological dig of a cave in a fishing village on the southern coast of Crete. And this object is a small handmade red clay boat. And when this particular cave was discovered and excavated in the 1970s, it was found alongside many other votive objects

4:48ranging from other handmade clay models to pieces of jewellery to household objects that had been assumed to be dedicated in this cave in ritual acts. And the boat, when it was discovered, was also found to have an accompanying tiny little clay model resembling a human fetus. And tiny little female sailors who were notable because they had their one arm raised and a breast bed,

5:20which is a sort of goddess motif, quite common. So the archaeologists put this votive object back together and were able to ascertain that the boat had been made with the little fetus passenger inside. And at one point in time, it had a small crew of women sailors on the gunnels of the boat. And it was dated to about the 9th century BCE. And the site of this cave in Crete was thought to be, or noted to once have been,

5:52a ritual site for the worship of a birth goddess called Aelothea, who appears in Greek mythology. She's honoured in the Olympic pantheon as a minor goddess during classical, in classical Greece, in classical Greek rituals. An important goddess for women who was honoured. And it's thought that she was honoured in this cave in Crete. And when I was reading the catalogue, the sort of excavation and exhibition catalogue pertaining to this particular dig,

6:22which was published by the Heraklion Museum in Crete, there were other votives that seemed to be allusions to birth as well. So birthing figures with caregivers, even tiny swaddled babies, women breastfeeding. But this particular object, the boat with the foetus, really struck me, firstly because it's so beautiful and so strange, but also because it linked back to an even earlier history when metaphors of sailing and rough seas

6:55and captained journeys were used often in birth imagery. So verses that might have been recited during labour to keep women safe. So the idea of a boat representing a pregnant woman who is carrying her precious cargo, her foetus across the rough waters of labour and birth, being captained or steered towards life by these tiny little caregiving sailors who were thought to represent midwives,

7:27possibly goddesses, possibly a combination of the two things, it's an object that was handmade that speaks to so many cultural references, but also to this unknown maker who existed so many centuries ago, who was petitioning for her own safety, perhaps, perhaps the safety of a loved one. We just can't tell. But vested in this tiny, beautiful object, there's so many stories and histories, both, you know, personal and sort of wider that it really fascinated me.

7:59And it really gave shape, actually, to how the book continued or to my thinking throughout the book. So the book opens with a story that I kind of ascribe to the boat. And there was just something about this beautiful, curious object and the unknowingness around its making, but also the way that it speaks to deeper histories of pregnancy, birth and mothering that I just adore it. It's a really beautiful and curious piece.

Maternal Grief Discussion

8:28I found that part of your book particularly touching as well. And it also shows, you argue in the book, that in this case, motherhood wasn't an expected thing. There was an appreciation that this was, you know, a huge thing to go through. We see the presence of ritual centuries later as well. You described the highly ritualistic nature of motherhood in the absence of health care in the Middle Ages and discussed something called delayed birth. What was this?

8:59So delayed birth was one of what are called the metrical charms, which were a set of, I guess, medical prayers is one way of describing them in the early Middle Ages, which could be recited to aid all sorts of things. So there was a metrical charm for protection on journeys. There was a metrical charm to get rid of a swarm of bees. There were several metrical charms about protecting one's cows or finding your cows if they were stolen, I think.

9:32But one of these charms is called For a Delayed Birth. And it's a beautiful set of birthing rituals, not just around birth, but also around the hope for a child. And they are supposed to be recited by a woman who has experienced trauma and tragedy in childbirth, so perhaps has lost a child, or by a woman who hopes to again become pregnant and give birth safely after experiencing such a loss.

10:02And they include some really beautiful instructions and really curious instructions, including to ensure that you become pregnant and have a healthy baby. You have to step over your husband while he's lying in bed asleep. So you have to do a sort of elaborate stepping sequence and make sure that your husband doesn't wake up while reciting, you know, your intentions to become pregnant again and have a healthy child. But there are some aspects of a delayed birth that are truly just very poignant.

10:34And one of the sequences involves a woman going to the grave of her dead child and taking some of the soil and wrapping the soil in some black wool. And then the ritual was completed if she gave this black wool containing the soil from her child's grave to a travelling merchant who would then take it away from the area where she lived to symbolise her grief and the threat of another loss

11:05being taken far away from her. So there was also a sort of a little collaborative element as well in this, that the merchant would then, you know, leave town, taking with him the grief and the danger. And we don't know, again, how these rituals were performed, by whom we know they exist and were written down. But to imagine how they were performed and to imagine these, were they written down, you know, were they remembered by rote, it speaks to so many possibilities

11:36that we can't know for sure. But what we can know is that there's the existence of this particular charm. So again, we can know that there was a real sense of a necessity to create practices around mothering and childbirth that could bring some safety, bring some degree of protection. It is so poignant. And these rituals also highlight the shock waves these experiences did create. I feel we assume sometimes that because, you know, young death was more usual

12:08during these periods, it wouldn't have been perhaps as shocking. But it was, of course, still felt hugely. It was felt so hugely. And when I think back at the book now, one of the things that is a really a recurring theme, sadly, is maternal grief. Because I think it was a popular assumption for a while that parents in history, especially in the Middle Ages, didn't really love their children in the way that we do today

12:38because lives were so precarious and short. But the evidence to the contrary, I mean, the practices of active grieving and mourning that have been documented, preserved, you know, transcribed, that we can access today, are very prevalent. One of my favourite people, favourite mothers in the book is an English noblewoman called Elizabeth Jocelyn. And she got married in the 17th century

13:08to a nobleman. They were living very happily together on the estate he inherited from his father. But they didn't get pregnant immediately. And Elizabeth was really longing for a child and her marriage was a happy one. And she became pregnant. And when she felt her baby quicken for the first time, which means the first felt movements of a fetus that could be felt by the mother, at the same time she felt her potential child quicken,

13:39she had this incredible sense of foreboding about her own life and had this ominous fear that she would die in childbirth or just after. So in order to perhaps process this or express this fear, Elizabeth wrote a legacy for her unborn child. Now, the idea of the mother's legacy became very popular during the early modern period as a form of conduct writing. And Elizabeth Jocelyn's legacy is both a set of instructions to her husband

14:10about how their child should be raised if she were to lose her life, but also a set of guidance or, you know, moral lessons for her child that come uniquely from Elizabeth as a mother. But it's incredibly beautiful because Elizabeth writes as if from the grave and she says, you know, it must be very strange for you, my child, to be reading these lines from, you know, a mother who has now departed.

14:40So it's very, it's really poignant. It's very evocative as if she's sort of haunting us in her life. I mean, her foreboding was so strong that she bought a winding sheet to wrap her own corpse in and hid it. She was so sure that she would lose her life and she did lose her life in childbirth and she gave birth to her daughter who was healthy and well, who was left with her, you know, her mother's legacy, which is these pages that she had, I think,

15:11hidden in her desk and ended up being published by a priest friend as a sort of form of, you know, maternal literature, maternal moral instruction. So it's an extraordinary story, but the idea again of Elizabeth Jocelyn feeling this much anticipated quickening of her much wanted baby only to be so struck by the sense of her immortality. I mean, it was almost sort of too much to write about, but the fact that she left this document of something

15:42that was at once so intimate but at the same time so demonstrative of maternal authority in the early modern period was just extraordinary to me. Her certainty is so shocking and extraordinary and we also don't have that much writing from mothers, do we? It wasn't common for mothers or women in that field to write about their experiences. That's so true. One of the questions that I'm asked when I've talked

16:12about this book is okay, so motherhood wasn't deemed a sort of major topic of traditional history telling and women, the ones doing the mothering, were so often denied the privilege of literacy and learning and if they were, it's not their writings that have been preserved and that have survived today. So we have Elizabeth's writings by luck really. She hid her legacy in her desk. She didn't intend it to be made public.

16:44It was found by a priest friend, published. So series of sort of happy accidents mean that we have it but buried within that legacy is just this glimmer that opens up for me as a sort of key to thinking about how other women might have written about their maternal experiences had they had that opportunity.

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Louise Bourgeois Midwifery

19:03who does write of her experiences and her work is Louise Bourgeois the midwife who just absolutely fascinated me. Could we talk about what sort of role she played in her life? So Louise Bourgeois was a French midwife of the 17th century who helped women of the French royal court give birth. She was one of the most esteemed and renowned midwives in France in the early modern period and she was also I think the first

19:34at least very high up there the first midwives to write her own medical discourse her own gynecological midwifery discourse. So she wrote a fantastic selection of writings called Diverse Observations which were about her experiences as a midwife but they were also sets of guidelines for other midwives to follow about how to help women deliver how to care for them during pregnancy how to look after them during the period of lying in

20:05which were the days about the 40 days or so after a baby had been born while women rested. And Louise Bourgeois was truly extraordinary as a writer not least because when she was writing her case studies she attended many different kinds of women. She was a court midwife but she didn't believe that her services should be reserved only for the aristocracy. She firmly believed that all women deserved thorough careful

20:36kind compassionate expert care when they were becoming mothers and this was something she really pushed for in her writings and I guess what we would call her today is a maternal health activist because what she really wanted to do was educate and empower other maternal caregivers of midwives and women themselves to understand the physiological nature of birth and to be strengthened in that knowledge you know and it's a knowledge is power situation

21:07as far as Louise Bourgeois was concerned. What also makes Louise Bourgeois so fascinating is that she was defending her profession the women-led profession of midwifery against the beginnings of the incursion of male physicians and surgeons into the space of childbirth and this happened a little bit earlier in France than it did in England so at the time that Louise Bourgeois was working some of the wealthier female patrons

21:38in Paris were being attended by male surgeons and Louise Bourgeois thought this was a real invasion not only of women's privacy and modesty so that's birthing women's privacy and modesty but also into the profession that really belonged knowledge-wise and practice-wise as far as she was concerned to women and so she spoke out in defence of her profession often and she did so in a way that really privileged

22:09what male physicians often denigrated women for which was having experiential you know body based knowledge rather than scientific and anatomical learning which was the province of male physicians often women were not permitted to study anatomy in the ways that men's were and certainly not permitted to wield surgical tools in the way that men were Louise Bourgeois was a real advocate for women's medical education she wanted women to be able to study the anatomy of the uterus she thought it was crucially important for

22:40saving the lives of birthing women and she left us with this just incredible legacy of writings and she was exceptionally influential on other midwives later in the early modern period who again were defending their profession against men like the Chamberlain family of male midwives so yeah she was a really really extraordinary figure and I can't recommend her writings enough for anyone interested in the history of birth and mothering a story I found particularly

23:11impressive about Louise was that she was so focused on keeping this space that she believed you know should be occupied by women that she managed to smuggle a male obstetrician in when he was needed without the birthing mother even realising this is such an amazing story so in the early modern period most often male surgeons were only called in in times of extreme emergency if a woman was say giving birth at home in her birthing chamber a different story if less privileged

23:42women were giving birth in the hospital setting but generally speaking birth was still at that time a woman's domain but there were situations where they might require the intervention of a surgeon and Louise tells this story of how she was delivering a friend of hers and they needed a surgical intervention they called a male surgeon but Louise was so worried that her friend would just be devastated to know that a man had been in the room while she was you

24:13know so exposed and vulnerable that Louise contrived to have this man sort of slip in and kind of go like under the covers and kind of do what he needed to do and slip out and her patient never knew this is how she tells it never even knew that he'd been there and afterwards you know was able to just she says you know give birth as nature intended so she was not sort of affronted or scared by the presence of a man in the room I mean you read stories as well about men doing

24:44their sort of surgeries on birthing women or surgical interventions with you know curtains up so that they're not even looking while they do I mean the maintenance of propriety between a birthing woman and a man is really quite extraordinary the choreographic lengths that we're going to to preserve this propriety there is very much this preserving of the female space and it also struck me when reading your book that whereas now we view birth as a very intimate perhaps closed off event

25:15when I was reading excerpts it feels like an event in a lot of cases of women gathering together it feels very much like a community it really was a social and communal event from ancient and classical Greece and Rome where you would have a midwife and possibly female relatives and then Saranus who was the imperial Roman gynecologist who left us with lots of instructions for

25:46female midwives he talks about how ideally a birthing woman would also be attended by three of her friends who would be there just to support her and would offer both emotional and physical support so they might gather around her and hold her so you've got a midwife probably an assistant three friends also probably relatives so yeah the busyness or the sort of collectivity and community around birth I think it is very different a closed off

26:17space in terms of a gendered space but definitely far more social both during births and during the lying in period as well and in the early modern period for at least for wealthy and more privileged women that period of lying in in which a woman was you know shedding the remains of her kind of blood and birthing fluid getting to the point where she was sort of physically cleansed of the remnants of giving birth but it was also a time of rest

26:48for her and a time of sociality and gathering and for more privileged women there might be gift giving and bedside feasts I mean it sounds actually quite exhausting I think the social responsibilities of giving birth in the early modern period sound it sounds like a lot to contend with but it was an important rite of passage and for women who could be celebrated in that way by their community of women a very yeah a

27:19very different culture indeed than the one we have today but at the same time you know more time to just exist in that space of new motherhood purely in that space of new motherhood if at least for wealthier and more privileged women this would mean not having to do the running of the household this would mean being separated from other kind of marital and domestic responsibilities which is something that we don't have now especially not in our culture your book also

27:49really made me reflect on the fact I know of course we've discussed a lot about the dangers involved in birth and the warranted fear that women did have surrounding the process of bringing a child into the world but there were of course many cases that were joyful and I don't think we really think about that when we consider this in history that's true and what's sad really about looking back over the history of motherhood is that it often is the grief and the loss and the

28:20danger that sort of rises to the top because we tend to get many of our source much of our source material about especially about pregnancy and birth from medical discourse from medical texts which always overemphasize the possible dangers and the possible risks and the ways that they can try and be mitigated but the joy the concept of you know giving birth and taking joy in one's children is so present throughout history

28:51and women's sort of fight for the right to do that has also been exceptionally important especially in the later centuries as you know as we move towards the present so yeah it's a sad fact that you know in when we dwell in the history of motherhood we are going to come up against tragedy but the joy of what it means to give birth and the joy of what it means to relate to one's child and to one's you know newfound identity as a mother as well I think is is really

29:22there we have to search but harder but it is there

Hildegard of Bingen

29:24now there are a few amazing women that you cover in the book that I would love to discuss the first is Hildegard of Bingen she's a hugely influential figure and you say that she countered the more misogynistic theories promoted by Catholic doctrines surrounding women's bodies and motherhood how does she write differently of Eve in their creation story for example so Hildegard of Bingen easily one of the most remarkable women in history this incredible polymath incredible thinker

29:55about both religion and spirituality and our human place in the world she's an incredible figure and amongst her very many achievements that she wrote to medical books one causes and cures which was about all the different ailments of the human body and one called physica which was about the properties healing properties of plants and earthly elements and animal substances and within those books I think it's in causes and

30:25cures Hildegard ruminates on the idea of Eve now of course Eve very present in in biblical stories as the reason for the unleashing of original sin in the world and Eve was really a motif very present in the cultural imagination around birth and motherhood because Eve's transgression her fervor to learn resulted in all women being punished by God to suffer in child

30:56birth and maternity that was one of the the ways mortal women had to repent for original sin so the motif of Eve or