PRESENCE

Embodied lives.

Maglaque, a scholar at the University of Sheffield in Britain, makes an impressive book debut with a history of women’s bodies, using her own as a template. Drawing on abundant, diverse sources, including medical texts, physicians’ case histories, midwifery manuals, household guides, recipe books, botanical catalogues, legal documents, art, music, letters, and diaries, Maglaque investigates a trajectory of women’s experiences and self-images from 1500 to 1800. This was a period of profound change in every aspect of a woman’s life: from ideals of beauty to beliefs about conception; from views on abortion to the work of midwives; from breastfeeding to sexual desire. While in the 16th century, for example, female beauty represented “abundance, fertility, self-renewal,” and by the end of the 18th century, “a beautiful form was one of refinement and self-control.” Thinness was beautiful; the mind could, and must, “control the appetites of the flesh.” Male intrusion into female areas of expertise increased over this period: Midwifery, from being a largely female domain, became professionalized by men; where in the 16th century, female orgasm was believed to be necessary for conception, by the 18th century, medical writers argued that it didn’t exist. Women were merely vessels for the male seed, and by the end of that century, the fetus was considered “a separate entity from the maternal body, with terrible consequences for women’s autonomy.” Breastfeeding, once delegated to paid wet nurses who freed new mothers from the exigencies of daily care, was newly elevated into “an expression of maternal love.” As Maglaque examines pregnancy and miscarriage, abortion, labor and birth, caregiving, housework, and care of the dying, the voices of myriad women (herself included) amply fulfill her aim of making the past “present and immediate.”

A richly textured, revelatory history.