If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

should spend nine days on her back before she ‘may sit up for half an hour’. Only after a fortnight might she ‘change the chamber for the sitting room’.
    There was, of course, a distasteful class aspect to all this resting up and seclusion. Another Victorian advice book claims that it is ‘utterly impossible for the wife of a labouring manto give up work … Nor is it necessary. The back is made for its burthen.’ For working women, or among the settlers in the New World, there was an unresolved tension between motherly and wifely duties. A mother-to-be was medically advised not to lift her arms above head height, yet reaching upwards was essential for the typical New England wife’s task of daubing an unfinished or leaking house with clay. When Margaret Prince of Gloucester, Massachusetts, appeared in court to accuse a neighbour of casting a harmful spell upon her stillborn child, the ‘daubing’ accusation was thrown back at her. Yes, she had done ‘wrong in carrying clay at such a time’, Margaret admitted, but ‘she had to, her husband would not, and her house lay open’. There was clearly a need, in rural societies, for pregnant women to carry on just as usual.
    The squeamish attitudes of the nineteenth century introduced a novel reluctance to talk about pregnancy. As early as 1791, a writer in The Gentleman’s Magazine noticed a growing trend for references to pregnancy to be seen as errors of taste. ‘Our mothers and grandmothers, used in course of time to become with child ,’ he wrote, but ‘no female, above the degree of chambermaid or laundress, has been with child these ten years past … nor is she ever brought to bed , or delivered ’. The genteel lady should merely inform ‘her friends that at a certain time she will be confined ’. The downside of all this tasteful gentility was that women began to think of pregnancy as an illness, and Victorian books about childbirth began to refer to it among ‘the diseases of women’. In the bedchamber, as in society at large, women began to be seen as fragile, vulnerable and incompetent at looking after themselves.
    This was a great change from the more robust attitudes of the Georgian period, which saw a cruder but in some ways more assertive attitude amongst women to matters of sex and reproduction. Queen Caroline, wife of George II, would openly discuss her sexual relationships with the prime minister, Sir RobertWalpole, and stated that she minded her husband’s infidelity ‘no more than his going to the close-stool’.
    One cannot imagine prissy Queen Victoria ever discussing such a matter with her prime ministers. She herself was horrified by the experience of giving birth to children – ‘the first two years of my married life [were] utterly spoilt by this occupation!’ – and she almost certainly suffered from post-natal depression. Secrecy about childbirth only heightened the fears of the uninformed, first-time, nineteenth-century mother, and a reticence about women’s bodies could be inconvenient if not downright dangerous. From the 1830s, for example, doctors knew that the mucosa of the vagina changed colour after conception, and this signal provided the earliest reliable indicator that a woman was pregnant. This would have been enormously useful for women to know. But the information was kept quiet because it implied that a doctor might actually examine a woman’s private parts. The doctor who finally broke ranks and published the news was struck off the medical register as a punishment.
    Alongside the idea that pregnancy was an illness, the lying-in hospital began to grow in popularity. Slowly childbirth was taken out of the bedroom, out of the home altogether, and into the public realm.
    A rather sinister account of childbirth written in 1937 describes what happened, in ideal circumstances, when the expectant mother arrived at the twentieth-century hospital. She was ‘immediately given the benefit of one of the modern