Cultural history has the potential to bring together the apparently great and apparently small; Birthing the Nation makes visible the big political issues in the satirical, the ephemeral, the bizarre, and the minuscule. Lisa Forman Cody synthesizes two of the most powerful narratives in eighteenth-century British historiography (the development of nationalism and the emergence of distinct and modern gender roles) and seeks to demonstrate “how male science continually altered the meanings of sex and birth in ways that helped the British imagine specific aspects of individual and social identities at home and abroad” (ix).
The book is organized both “chronologically and episodically” (viii) in ten chapters. The introduction lays out the main argument, that through discussions of reproduction Britons carved out differences among themselves as individuals (e.g., on the basis of sex/gender) and, as a group, between their British selves and others (e.g., the Catholic French). Over time reproduction assumed an increasingly potent charge not just as metaphor but as explanatory model; it was, Cody claims, “increasingly used to demarcate difference and stabilize categories” (30). Yet while difference is key to this book, Cody emphasizes the extent to which men-midwives were seen to blend traits apparently belonging to opposite sexes. This complexity distinguishes this book from the many works that insist on the relentless construction of difference in various identities in eighteenth-century Britain.
Chapter 2 considers the seventeenth-century ideal that women alone possessed knowledge of reproduction, derived from (gendered) feeling and experience. This is not pathbreaking work (the lack of reference to Laura Gowing's recent work on the body is also puzzling), but it does serve as an important “before” picture to the “after” that Cody wants to explain. The two subsequent chapters (covering the “Warming-Pan Scandal” of 1688 and the early work of the Royal Society and related attempts to make sense of men's role in reproduction) foreground men and masculinity. A “crisis in paternity and patriarchy” (84), Cody argues, was met with attempts to reinstate men's patriarchal authority through scientific understandings of generation. The association of women with irrationality, and of female knowledge of the body with superstition, covered in chapter 5, is not new, but the finding that men-midwives presented themselves “as sensitive men of feeling” (144) is important. In posing new questions about masculinity and reproduction, Cody makes a key intervention in debates about the rise of new and opposite gender roles in this period: men and women were not entirely polarized, and the representations of men-midwives and paternity in reproductive discourse were part of an “increase in heterosociality” (304).
Indeed, from Cody's analysis of the first successful men-midwives in chapter 6, we learn that the most important ones were Scots: these men redefined the field as requiring “both scientific, objective insight and virtuous empathy, dual traits that the best-educated Scots excelled at, not only in medicine, but also in Enlightenment philosophy” (155). The rise of man-midwifery was a massive shift, and it came to represent “upheaval and change” more generally (197). Thus images of reproduction were rich metaphors for satires tackling the American and French Revolutions, as discussed in chapter 7.
Thus far the book narrates the working out of gender, religious, and national cultural identities; chapter 8 argues that from the later eighteenth century, these processes were crystallized, and reproduction began to serve a crucial role in the construction of scientifically endorsed differences. The final substantive chapter of this book explores the cementing of many of these developments in the state's assumption of control over reproduction. Legislation making abortion a capital crime (1803) and abolishing subsidies for single mothers (1834) rested not only on reproduction being a matter of public interest but also on “the man-midwife's being able to proclaim true insight into reproduction by dismissing the lived, felt, subjective experience of mothers and by foregrounding the observable, external, increasingly statistical, objective knowledge of medical science” (277). The attack on women as the source of overpopulation, poverty, and pauperism, enshrined in the New Poor Law, rested on cultural developments of the preceding 150 years.
Birthing the Nation is impressive in its coverage. While Cody succeeds in controlling this chronological and thematic range, the author has had to make choices about what to exclude. One result is an analysis that focuses largely on London and on the middling sort and above. Given the arguments, here, about identity and difference (particularly in terms of nation, but also class) one might wonder what happened in Wales, in Walsall, and in the poorer parts of Westminster. On a related issue, the general claims being made for the imperialism of male science could be challenged. Female midwives continued to practice, and women continued to give birth: how did these women give meaning to reproduction?
This book is also admirably wide-ranging in terms of sources. Individual prints, book illustrations, newspapers, printed books, pamphlets, and letters are just some of the types used. While Cody is often skilled at taking account of the different functions performed by types, more could be said about the contexts for and reception of some of this evidence. Answering such questions might help us understand further what these sources were doing, and therefore what they meant. This leads me on to what I see as the biggest omission: a book so broad in terms of sources and coverage must be held together by a methodological apparatus or theoretical approach. A cultural history such as this needs some such discussion, in order that the analysis of seemingly marginal texts is not briskly sidelined.
So much for what the book does not do. On the argument of the book, I felt that the argument about national identity was sometimes overdrawn. It is not entirely clear that the writings about Mary Toft were really about English identity, for example, and the Royal Society was as much a European institution as a British-English one. The argument would also have benefited from a comparative element. Where did the work of Anthony van Leeuwenhoeck fit into the making of British nationhood? Was his writing—which discussed sperm in language that was “a bit Dutch” (107)—part of a different nationalizing project? This book demonstrates that reproduction was a metaphor integral to the process of constructing a rhetoric of national difference, but the role of such metaphors in filling in the content of those differences is less certain. The suggestion that Britishness was shored up by men-midwives “simultaneously asserting their objective capabilities and their abilities to empathize” (311–13) is fresh, but further (comparative) analyses are needed.
Yet this book makes an important leap in work on the body and reproduction, on gender identity, and on masculinity. It offers a political and a national context for the rise of men-midwives, demonstrating just how much was at stake in this development. More generally, the book demonstrates that discussions of reproduction mediated concerns about gender, nation, class, ethnicity, race, and religion. In doing so it succeeds in placing reproduction at the heart of many of the key debates about change, modernity, and the eighteenth century.
