This book is about far more than childbirth. Instead, Wilson examines the gender relations of early modern England mainly through marriage, of which childbirth was a part. The structure of the book itself follows our understandings of early modern marriage as a “process”: courtship, and those who failed to marry with resulting bastard births (chapter 1), the marriage ceremony, the ‘patriarchal family’, and power within marriage (chapters 2 and 3), and, finally, the ceremony of childbirth and the meanings of gender relations in this context (chapter 4), taken further in the conclusion with an examination of difficult births. There is a great deal in here which is very familiar, but, in places, Wilson makes bold claims that seek to overturn the historiography. His approach is not cultural, however, and much of his evidence is “top-down” rather than “bottom up.”

Chapter 1 considers bastard births since, Wilson argues, illegitimacy was a violation of marriage and the gender order. He provides higher estimates of the level of seventeenth-century illegitimacy by focusing upon first births, “Highland” and “Lowland” regions, and under-registration. Wilson also examines the punishment of unmarried parents and argues that punishment rates were low; his evidence from the church courts is rather better than that from the secular authorities. Whether punishment affected illegitimacy rates is difficult to ascertain. What happened to unmarried mothers later in their lives is also explored and Wilson suggests that many women were supported by their parents. He considers, too briefly, the affiliation of putative fathers and he has to concede that “it is not clear how often this [enforcement of affiliation] occurred.” Yet there was an elaborate poor law affiliation system (from 1576) whereby fathers were expected to pay the costs of childbirth and maintenance for their illegitimate children. This would have been a fruitful arena in which to explore the tensions of gender relations. Wilson also discusses the “deviance” of having an illegitimate child, and yet, at the same time, argues that “this was a risk which all women ran at the beginning of their childbearing careers” (3). A great deal of the evidence in this chapter is based on legislative changes and the actions of lawmakers and enforcers.

The middle section of the book probes marriage as a legal entity as well as its meaning in terms of gender norms. It is in these chapters in particular that Wilson rehearses familiar material but also makes his strongest arguments. Wilson's main point here is that women had greater power than the historiography will allow. He begins with a description of the asymmetry of the marriage vows and contrasts it with the differing asymmetry of the legal marital union, including the sexual double standard. The chapter moves on to assess justifications of wifely obedience through three models based upon the Bible, Aristotle, political theorists, and religious writers, and finds that no “norm” actually existed, which he uses to argue that “notions of women's inferiority had rather less purchase in seventeenth-century England than historians have commonly assumed” (92). Wilson is also at pains to point out that wifely obedience had no judicial sanction, but, of course, other historians have shown that when it came to enforcement, domestic violence was widespread. The rest of chapter 2 is devoted to a lengthy theoretical questioning of our current (as well as the historical) concept of the early modern “patriarchal family,” which, he argues, has, ironically perhaps, lost its focus upon gender. He seeks to redress this in chapter 3, “Gender and Power,” where he asserts that “relations between the sexes were contested” (113, Wilson's italics) and that “early-modern relations of gender were neither fixed nor timeless” (121). Wilson hopes to offer new insight into these observations, through evidence from contemporary treatises and a review of the feminist literature, plus evaluations of “collusion,” “resistance,” “contests,” “collective interest versus individual interest,” and the “collective culture of women,” but this has been well-trodden ground in recent years.

Women's collective culture was in evidence par excellence in the ceremony of childbirth (chapter 4). In large part due to Wilson's previous research, but now supplemented by work by other historians, we know a great deal about the female-only mother-centered ritual, which was part of a process from delivery, to lying-in, to baptism and churching, with a prominent role for the midwife. Wilson argues that the male response to childbirth was passive acceptance but that churching was far more contested. Gender struggle is also in evidence in difficult births, something else Wilson knows a great deal about given his previous book on male midwifery, and he explores this further in the conclusion. Wilson also argues in the conclusion that the body in the “bodily-social relationship” (218) should be given greater weight than cultural historians have been willing to give it.

Indeed, this book is not a cultural history of gender relations. Instead, Wilson uses theory, models, and new estimates and draws upon legislation, the duties of officials, the marriage vows and legal status of husbands and wives, the writings of political theorists, and contemporary treatises to inform many of his arguments, rather than the words of ordinary people, available in court records, for instance, and used to good effect by recent cultural historians. This is a densely written book with many claims and complex arguments, but it revisits a wide range of issues within the history of early modern gender relations.